A young Ruhollah Khomeini, who would become an Ayatollah & eventually the Supreme Leader of Iran, as a young student at the seminary in Qom around 1920s… In Qom, Khomeini studied Islamic jurisprudence, philosophy, ethics and Islamic mysticism.He eventually became a prominent teacher and religious scholar there.
Decades later, he emerged as a leading opponent of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and was exiled from Iran in 1964.
After the Iranian Revolution forced the Shah from power, Khomeini returned from exile on February 1, 1979. Following the establishment of the Islamic Republic, he became Iran’s first Supreme Leader and remained in that position until his death in 1989.
While living in exile in Paris in 1978, Khomeini used cassette tapes to spread his speeches throughout Iran. Recordings were duplicated repeatedly, smuggled into the country and circulated through mosques and bazaars, allowing his messages to reach millions despite government censorship. The cassette became one of the Iranian Revolution’s most important communication tools. #archaeohistories
When Peter Buffett was 19, his father, Warren Buffett, gave him Berkshire Hathaway stock worth about $90,000. Peter later recalled that it was essentially the only inheritance he could expect for his own personal use. Instead of holding onto the shares, he sold them and used the money to pursue his interests, including building a career in music. That decision became far more striking as Berkshire Hathaway grew enormously over the following decades. Peter has said that if he had simply kept the stock, it would eventually have been worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet he has consistently said he does not regret selling it, explaining that the money gave him something valuable at the time: the freedom to establish his own path rather than build his life around his father’s fortune. Peter went on to become a musician, composer, author, and philanthropist. He has spoken positively about his father’s approach to wealth, which encouraged his children to pursue their own lives instead of depending on a huge inheritance. For Peter, the shares he sold were not just an investment he missed out on. They helped finance the life and career he actually wanted.
Can America establish effective AI regulation without stifling the very innovation that keeps us ahead of global competitors? Richard Clarke, the nation’s first cyber czar, and Jennifer Huddleston of the Cato Institute debate whether and how to regulate AI. The conversation centers on the severe risks posed by this technology, examining how domestic companies like OpenAI and Anthropic might be uniquely vulnerable to exploitation by state actors.
Clarke and Huddleston weigh the economic fallout of these breaches against the necessity of maintaining America’s technological leadership in a volatile global market. Beyond the security threats, the discussion contrasts the structured, often cautious approach to domestic AI policy against the unpredictable tactics employed by foreign adversaries.
Understanding these regulatory hurdles, as well as the downsides of leaving AI to its own devices, is vital for anyone concerned with how the United States can protect its future growth while fostering a safe, competitive environment for new digital tools. “Can We Agree?” is the program that asks whether two brilliant minds from opposite corners of an argument can find any common ground on the questions that matter most to Americans today. Subscribe to the Smerconish YouTube channel to never miss an episode: / @michaelsmerconish Chapters: 0:00 The Stakes of the AI Revolution 2:40 Artificial Intelligence: Amazed or Afraid? 6:30: AI: The next great invention or the last great invention? 8:08 The Role of State Laboratories 13:36 AI Companies Calling for Regulation 20:42 Mechanistic Interpretability and Standards 39:09 Geopolitics and Global AI Standards 59:36 Addressing Foreign Adversaries 01:08:20 Can We Agree?
The more you have, the less you have to give.David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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This week, the Gates Foundation announced a $1 billion commitment to build and deliver equitable AI tools to schools, frontline health care workers, farmers, and more. Of that commitment, 40% will go toward education, including AI tutoring to individualize learning in classrooms both in the U.S. and abroad.
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That’s a whopping $400 million infusion into schools for a tool that’s only been around (at least commercially) for a handful of years. The AI push is part of a broader U.S. education strategy the foundation laid out in July, which aims to help up to 10 million more Americans earn “credentials of value” by 2045, the year the foundation plans to close.
And it comes at a time when the value of classroom technology is being questioned.
Test scores have dropped among some students over the same time period since computer assessments were widely implemented.Meanwhile, research shows that ever since the U.S. spent $30 billion to swap textbooks for laptops, Gen Z has shown to be less cognitively capable than previous generations, according to written testimonyby neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath presented to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce earlier this year.
“Evidence indicates that indiscriminate digital expansion has weakened learning environments rather than strengthened them,” he wrote.
The skepticism is already shaping policy. On Sept. 2, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels announced what the city called the nation’s broadest moratorium on student-facing generative AI. It’s a one-year pause for students in 2-K through 8th grade, affecting nearly 600,000 students, or roughly two-thirds of the system.
“The tech industry wants us to believe that AI-powered early education is not only inevitable, but necessary,” Mamdani said in a statement. “We do not see it that way.” He added the city would spend the year studying the technology’s impacts.
Yet, major philanthropic organizations like the Gates Foundation continue to pour money into introducing more technology in schools. While the Gates Foundation’s stated intention is to close gaps in access to AI, not everyone is convinced of how effective it will be or how necessary it is for student success.
However, a Gates Foundation spokesperson told Fortune its approach is built around those very concerns. The spokesperson said the tools will be tested in schools serving high shares of low-income students, paired with teacher training, and evaluated by independent researchers before being scaled. Plus, the foundation’s own strategy warns “too many tools have been adopted without evidence they work” and insists teachers “remain central.”
Teachers’ concerns with widespread AI implementation
Siobhan Casey, who has worked in education for 21 years both as a teacher and in leadership roles, said that while AI has been useful as a starting point for lesson planning and administrative work, it’s not an end-all, be-all for learning outcomes.
“I still need to check its accuracy, decide whether it supports the learning objective, and make sure it provides the right level of challenge for my students,” Casey, principal of Crimson Global Academy’s Greenwich Campus, told Fortune. “AI can support teacher expertise, but it cannot replace it.”
The Gates Foundation spokesperson said a goal of the commitment is to help see accelerated learning and to help students catch up, one example being using the tool to give students more repetition and practice.
“Handing a school an AI tool doesn’t mean teachers suddenly have the time, training or support to use it well,” Amy McBride, a teacher at Pepin Academies, a special education school in Pasco County, Fla., told Fortune.
McBride said she also worried about unintentionally widening access and use gaps that investments like this are intended to close.
“The students who need the most help may also need the most adult guidance in learning how to use AI effectively,” she said. “Technology can be a powerful equalizer, but only if we don’t mistake access to the technology for access to a great education.”
The Gates Foundation, however, argues its investment is fixing a “basic market failure,” that people with the most need for technology have the least power to shape where investment goes.
“Left to the market alone, the most capable tools will be built first for the people and institutions most able to pay for them—not necessarily for those who could benefit most,” Bill Gates, Microsoft cofounder and chair of the Gates Foundation, wrote in a statement.
But others in the edtech industry worry whether lower-resourced schools can actually absorb the gift. While more funding for better AI education is welcome, Dora Palfi, CEO and cofounder of edtech platform Imagi, told Fortune, it fails at addressing what schools may need first.
“The schools this money is meant to reach are some of the least able to absorb it for its desired purpose,” she argued. “They often tell me they have to fix literacy and numeracy first, and they’re not necessarily wrong, but it does mean that the districts moving fastest are best placed to use the money.”
“The danger here is that the exact funding made to close a divide could end up widening it,” she added.
And even where schools can absorb the technology, some teachers question whether it delivers the learning it promises. Salena Davis, a history teacher at online Laurel Springs School, said the gains may not be what they appear.
“The improved outcomes may only be short-term in nature and are not genuinely demonstrating mastery-based learning,” she told Fortune.
Plus, students the funding is meant to help may be the least equipped to use AI well. Those without “a strong foundational knowledge are not as well positioned to recognize when AI is inaccurate or incomplete, making them more willing to accept responses at face value,” she said.
A Gates Foundation spokesperson, however, said the pilots will be evaluated by outside researchers, including a Johns Hopkins study examining one such tool. They will test whether early results hold across different schools. Success will be measured by whether students who have fallen behind actually catch up, not by raising scores overall, the spokesperson said.
AI implementation in classrooms has had a positive impact for some. McBride said the tech allowed her students another way to ask questions, get an explanation differently, or work through something at their own pace. For her, as a teacher, it saved time creating materials and adapting lessons.
“The biggest change wasn’t that AI started doing the teaching,” she said. “It gave me more time to teach.”
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TRUMP SAYS HE IS FORMING AN “AI FORCE” AND WILL NAME AN AI CZAR The U.S. should not “hinder or stifle” the growth of artificial intelligence and argues existing criminal and civil law can handle bad actors without choking the industry. His new proposal is an “AI Force,” which he compares to Space Force, plus a forthcoming AI czar. He also says AI could eventually account for as much as 25% of U.S. GDP. That is a very different regulatory philosophy from treating frontier AI primarily as a risk to contain. Washington’s AI fight is becoming all about whether government acts as referee or accelerator. Source:
Across the country, vacant shopping centres are being turned into housing schemes. In some plans the food courts become shared dining rooms. Millions of square feet of retail floor space have sat unused since chains such as Sears and Target shrank. Developers in Canada are recasting those sites as places to live.Malls already hold what a new neighbourhood requires: roads, parking, transit, utilities and large indoor volumes. Schemes in Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa are studying or building new uses for underused mall land, among them housing for older people and rental flats.
Canada has a shortage of homes while ordinary malls carry empty units. Developers are treating those millions of square feet of shops as a different kind of stock.
Oxford researchers just published a paper arguing LLMs cannot invent anything. Mathematically impossible. The reason is simple and brutal. A model trained to predict the next word can never believe something the existing data says is wrong. And every real breakthrough in history started with exactly that belief. In 1903 every prediction machine on Earth would have told the Wright Brothers that human flight was one to ten million years away. Nine weeks later they flew. Not because they had better data. Because they had a theory the data hadn’t caught up to yet. That is the gap between AI and human thinking. LLMs mirror the past. Humans reason into a future that doesn’t exist yet. Oxford just proved mathematically that those are two different things. I use these models every day. This matches what I see. The new stuff always comes from the human at the keyboard who decides the data is wrong. LLMs don’t think. You do.
AI’s existential threat to humanity is dominating headlines across the globe. But with so much attention on the fear of a future AI apocalypse, is the media ignoring the damage AI is already causing? And as AI CEOs join forces to call for regulations, is their motivation about public safety or to secure their grip on the technology’s future?
Contributors: Leo Schwartz – Reporter, The Information Sarah Myers West – Co-executive director, AI Now Aaron Mak – Technology reporter, Politico Cori Crider – Executive director, Future of Tech Institute Presenter: Richard Gizbert Producers: Nicholas Muirhead, Monazza Farooqi and Gulmehar Jilani Editor: Haim Litani
On our radar NAZA, a documentary that lifts the lid on Israel’s calculated killing of Palestinians, has sparked outrage in Israel and accusations of treason against its Israeli filmmakers. They’ve faced threats from senior government and military officials, as well as journalists and online activists.
Producer / Reporter: Elettra Scrivo Editor: Sidney Sonnerberg Who gets to publish Africa? Cassava Republic Press and the politics of storytelling Literature can shape how people see themselves – and how they’re seen by the rest of the world. But before a story reaches a reader, someone – an editor – has to decide if it is worth publishing. For decades, much of African literature was published outside the continent. Twenty years ago, Cassava Republic Press set out to change that, by building a publishing house rooted in Africa. Tariq Nafi examines how the publisher has helped reshape the industry and whether control over African stories has really come home. Featuring: Bibi Bakare-Yusuf – Co-founder and publishing director, Cassava Republic Press Chika Unigwe – Author and professor of creative writing Tinashe Mushakavanhu – Assistant professor, Harvard University Reporter: Tariq Nafi Producer: Hanna Adan Editor: Haim Litani / ajlisteningpost / ajlisteningpost https://bsky.app/profile/ajlisteningp…https://x.com/ajlisteningposthttps://www.threads.net/@ajlisteningpost#aljazeeraenglish#ainews#politics#breakingnews
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