For better or worse, AI tools have steadily become a reality of the academic landscape since ChatGPT launched in late 2022. Anthropic is studying what that looks like in real time. On Tuesday, shortly after launching Claude for Education, the company released data on which tasks university students use its AI chatbot Claude for and which majors use it the most. Using Clio, the company's data analysis tool, to maintain user privacy, Anthropic analyzed 574,740 anonymized conversations between Claude and users at the Free and Pro tiers with higher education email addresses. All conversations appeared to relate to coursework.

In this series of articles, we're publishing summaries with some of the key takeaways from a few of workshops held at the 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2025). The first ever workshop on "Open Source AI for Mainstream Use" was held on March 4, 2025 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia. The goal of this workshop was to bring the researchers and practitioners into a single forum to discuss topics at the intersection of AI and open source and demonstrate relevant technology. Overall, the participants appreciated the interdisciplinary nature of this workshop and are looking forward to repeating it next year. This first edition of the FLUID workshop focused on the emerging challenges and opportunities in federated learning and intelligent decentralization, bringing together a growing international community of researchers working across optimization, privacy, scalability, and practical deployment of decentralized learning systems.

I know you've heard of gamification, but have you ever heard of festification? That's what Microsoft will be doing in April and May, with the Microsoft AI Skills Fest. It's a little odd, but it also looks like it might be a heck of a lot of fun. Microsoft's AI Skills Fest offers courses that are open for all skill levels. You can learn early stages of the lessons if you're new to AI, or work on deeper topics if you're more familiar with AI concepts.

I know you've heard of gamification, but have you ever heard of festification? That's what Microsoft will be doing in April and May, with the Microsoft AI Skills Fest. It's a little odd, but it also looks like it might be a heck of a lot of fun. I've written a lot about Microsoft over the years. I've mocked its product naming.

I know you've heard of gamification, but have you ever heard of festification? That's what Microsoft will be doing in April and May, with the Microsoft AI Skills Fest. It's a little odd, but it also looks like it might be a heck of a lot of fun. I've written a lot about Microsoft over the years. I've mocked its product naming.

There is great interest in agentic LLMs, large language models that act as agents. We review the growing body of work in this area and provide a research agenda. Agentic LLMs are LLMs that (1) reason, (2) act, and (3) interact. We organize the literature according to these three categories. The research in the first category focuses on reasoning, reflection, and retrieval, aiming to improve decision making; the second category focuses on action models, robots, and tools, aiming for agents that act as useful assistants; the third category focuses on multi-agent systems, aiming for collaborative task solving and simulating interaction to study emergent social behavior. We find that works mutually benefit from results in other categories: retrieval enables tool use, reflection improves multi-agent collaboration, and reasoning benefits all categories. We discuss applications of agentic LLMs and provide an agenda for further research. Important applications are in medical diagnosis, logistics and financial market analysis. Meanwhile, self-reflective agents playing roles and interacting with one another augment the process of scientific research itself. Further, agentic LLMs may provide a solution for the problem of LLMs running out of training data: inference-time behavior generates new training states, such that LLMs can keep learning without needing ever larger datasets. We note that there is risk associated with LLM assistants taking action in the real world, while agentic LLMs are also likely to benefit society.

In this interview series, we're meeting some of the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants to find out more about their research. The Doctoral Consortium provides an opportunity for a group of PhD students to discuss and explore their research interests and career objectives in an interdisciplinary workshop together with a panel of established researchers. In the latest interview, we hear from Joseph Marvin Imperial, who is focussed on aligning generative AI with technical standards for regulatory and operational compliance. Standards are documents created by industry and/or academic experts that have been recognized to ensure the quality, accuracy, and interoperability of systems and processes (aka "the best way of doing things"). You'll see standards in almost all sectors and domains, including the sciences, healthcare, education, finance, journalism, law, and engineering.

The appearance of the Blue Screen of Death in Windows is never a good thing. But Microsoft is aiming to at least make the screen look better when it does appear. Also: Microsoft's free AI skills training'Fest' starts next week - anyone can sign up In a change currently rolling out to Windows 11 insiders, BSODs (or unexpected restarts, as Microsoft calls them) will appear simpler and more streamlined. The screens may display the same technical information as always, but with a refreshed design. "We're previewing a new, more streamlined UI for unexpected restarts, which better aligns with Windows 11 design principles and supports our goal of getting users back into productivity as quickly as possible," Microsoft said in an announcement about the latest Windows 11 insider build.

I know you've heard of gamification, but have you ever heard of festification? That's what Microsoft will be doing in April and May, with the Microsoft AI Skills Fest. It's a little odd, but it also looks like it might be a heck of a lot of fun. I've written a lot about Microsoft over the years. I've mocked its product naming.

AI should be saving you time, boosting your productivity, and even helping you think more creatively. But if you're stuck rewriting prompts, dealing with bad responses, or wondering why it feels so basic, here's a hard truth: it's not ChatGPT … it's you. But getting your skills up to snuff is simple if you enroll in our best-selling e-degree program. It doesn't matter if you're a complete beginner, an aspiring master, or somewhere in between, you'll learn how to use ChatGPT like an expert for just 19.97 (reg. Don't worry about fitting time into your schedule--these courses are completely self-paced.