For this week's Open Questions column, Cal Newport is filling in for Joshua Rothman. In the spring of 1940, Isaac Asimov, who had just turned twenty, published a short story titled "Strange Playfellow." It was about an artificially intelligent machine named Robbie that acts as a companion for Gloria, a young girl. Asimov was not the first to explore such technology. In Karel Čapek's play "R.U.R.," which débuted in 1921 and introduced the term "robot," artificial men overthrow humanity, and in Edmond Hamilton's 1926 short story "The Metal Giants" machines heartlessly smash buildings to rubble.

Data warehousing giant Snowflake is holding its annual user and partner conference, Snowflake Summit 2025, this week. As with most infrastructure software vendors, the company emphasized the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) across its platform. Given Snowflake's focus on the enterprise, with almost 12,000 customers, the pitch of all the announcements had a singular message: Business analysts, the individuals who primarily work with the Snowflake database to get work done, can be the driving force behind both developing AI models and making predictions with those models. Also: Snowflake's new AI agents make it easier for businesses to make sense of their data Among the new features, ZDNET's Sabrina Ortiz relates that the chat mode lets one speak with the data, if you will, using natural language prompts. It is powered by OpenAI and Anthropic LLMs, along with Snowflake's own Cortex models.

This week, I'm wondering what my first jobs in journalism would have been like had generative AI been around. In other news: Elon Musk leaves a trail of chaos, and influencers are selling the text they fed to AI to make art. Generative artificial intelligence may eliminate the job you got with your diploma still in hand, say executives who offered grim assessments of the entry-level job market last week in multiple forums. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, which makes the multifunctional AI model Claude, told Axios last week that he believes that AI could cut half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and send overall unemployment rocketing to 20% within the next five years. One explanation why an AI company CEO might make such a dire prediction is to hype the capabilities of his product.

Snowflake kicked off its annual user conference, Snowflake Summit 2025, on Tuesday. The cloud-based data-storage company launched a slew of new features. The biggest highlight was agentic AI solutions that help organizations better make sense of their data: Snowflake Intelligence and Data Science Agent. With the rise of agentic AI, Snowflake is the latest company to embrace the burgeoning technology to optimize how companies sort, analyze, and understand their data. AI chatbots have risen in popularity because they make it easy to find what you are looking for using a simple, conversational text prompt.

NICE, a leading provider of contact center as a service (CCaaS) solutions, today announced its new branding. The company has rebranded to NiCE, and one of the many factors driving this rebranding is emphasizing'intelligence' (a hallmark of AI) in customer conversations, with'i' marked in lower caps to stand out. During an exclusive analyst meeting, the company's leadership team also announced that the new brand will emphasize the human touch. Also: OpenAI wants ChatGPT to be your'super assistant' - what that means The emphasis on human touch is noteworthy because the company wants to reposition itself from being a leading CCaaS provider to an AI company under the leadership of new CEO, Scott Russell. Given that shift, the reference and emphasis on human touch are particularly important.

In this interview series, we're meeting some of the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants to find out more about their research. In this latest interview, we hear from Debalina Padariya and hear about her work on Privacy-Preserving Generative Models, why this is such an interesting area for study, the different projects she's been involved in so far during her PhD, and her experience at the Doctoral Consortium at AAAI 2025. I am currently pursuing a PhD at De Montfort University, UK, supported by the prestigious Alan Turing Institute and Accenture Strategic Partnership Program. My research primarily focuses on Privacy-Preserving Generative Models, while designing a framework to quantify the privacy/utility trade-offs in generative model-driven synthetic datasets. Although Synthetic Data Generation (SDG) is one of the emerging use cases of generative AI, potential privacy attacks associated with generative models emerge as critical issues.

People may not be willing to pay for AI, but they're certainly willing to use it. How they use AI, though, seems to be changing. A new study from consultancy Accenture reveals some insights into how consumers perceive and use AI, and it's seen as a lot more than just a tool for work. Instead, AI is becoming a personal influencer that users want to have a relationship with. Also: OpenAI wants ChatGPT to be your'super assistant' - what that means The numbers from this study show that as AI improves, people are rapidly trusting it with their personal lives.

Around midnight on April 16, 2025, after Chen Zimo learned that the Department of Homeland Security had threatened to revoke Harvard University's certification to enroll international students, he began communicating with a trusted source about possible legal scenarios. Chen, a Chinese citizen, still needed a number of courses before he could complete his degree in computer science at Harvard, and he felt panicked about the possibility of having his visa revoked. For him, the Harvard experience had been transformative. Chen--not his real name--had grown up in provincial China, where his family had modest resources and sent him to public schools. He could never have afforded Harvard without the university's generous financial support, and he had also received funding for summer language study.

It was, of course, not so simple. After speaking with dozens of researchers, we realized that the common understanding of AI's energy appetite is full of holes. I encourage you to read the full story, which has some incredible graphics to help you understand everything from the energy used in a single query right up to what AI will require just three years from now (enough electricity to power 22% of US households, it turns out). But here are three takeaways I have after the project. We focused on measuring the energy requirements that go into using a chatbot, generating an image, and creating a video with AI.

The novelist Ewan Morrison was alarmed, though amused, to discover he had written a book called Nine Inches Pleases a Lady. Intrigued by the limits of generative artificial intelligence (AI), he had asked ChatGPT to give him the names of the 12 novels he had written. "I've only written nine," he says. "Always eager to please, it decided to invent three." The "nine inches" from the fake title it hallucinated was stolen from a filthy Robert Burns poem.