AI in Business Newsletter

By John P. Desmond, Editor, AI in Business Wishing everyone a safe, peaceful and happy new year! Circa 1900 greeting card from a set illustrated by Kate Greenaway, from the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Literature. (Credit: Wikimedia)caption... The community of professionals that read the AI in Business newsletter sent in a range of predictions on the impact AI will have in 2026. We publish a selection here.

By John P. Desmond, Editor, AI in Business Among its many efforts in AI, China is not only pursuing artificial general intelligence (AGI), but is also interested in artificial superintelligence (ASI), suggests one observer with experience on the AI scene. Helen Toner, former OpenAI board member among those who voted to oust Sam Altman as CEO, challenges the notion that China is not so concerned with reaching for AGI and beyond.

By John P. Desmond, Editor, AI in Business Efforts to address bias in AI systems are proving to be extremely challenging, a review of the status of AI bias removal efforts shows. AI systems tend to take on human biases and amplify them, causing people who use that AI to become more biased themselves, researchers found in a recent study at .

By John P. Desmond, Editor, AI in Business Children are building small language models, perhaps portending a trend as they learn about AI and try it out. “This new AI technology—it’s very interesting to learn how it works and understand it more,” stated 10-year-old Luca, a 10-year-old AI model maker, in a recent account in MIT Technology Review. He is trying out Little Language Models, a new application from Manuj and Shruti Dhariwal, two PhD researchers at MIT's Media Lab.

By John P. Desmond, Editor, AI in Business The UN-issued 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) are seen as one of the best representations of the goals and challenges facing humanity. Adopted in 2015, the SDGs provided a roadmap of ambitious goals to achieve by 2030, including the eradication of poverty, a reduction of inequality and more protection from climate change.

By John P. Desmond, Editor, AI in Business The community of professionals that read the AI in Business newsletter sent in a range of predictions on the impact AI will have in 2025. We publish a selection here.

By John P. Desmond, Editor, AI in Business Is it ever illegal not to use AI? For compliance reasons in certain industries, it is illegal not to know enough about how AI is being used and the business practice surrounding it. This started out being an account of when it might be illegal not to use AI, a look at what was coming around AI compliance.

By John P. Desmond, Editor, AI in Business LLM price wars in China are providing insight into LLM pricing in the US. On December 31, Alibaba Cloud unveiled an 85 percent price reduction for its Qwen-VL-Max model, down to $0.00041 per thousand input tokens. This was according to an account from CTOL Digital Solutions, published days after the Alibaba discounts were announced.

By John P. Desmond, Editor, AI in Business Moving steadily away from its “do no evil” slogan coined by founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google, now Alphabet, recently modified its guidelines on how it will use AI, dropping a previous section that ruled out applications that were “likely to cause harm” Groups including Human Rights Watch criticized the decision.

By John P. Desmond, Editor, AI in Business A review of the prognostications for what AI will be like in the second Trump Administration shows a consensus that the march toward government regulation will be slowed, and big tech’s bromance with the government will be enhanced. Elon Musk, however, is a big X factor. He’s inclined to ping to all sides of an issue, making it difficult to discern his overall direction.