Are you anxious about AI? Nvidia’s co-founder and CEO has some tips for how to find your feet in this new landscape.

If, during the past few years, you’ve felt like the future is barreling towards you like an oncoming train, you are not alone. The shock (and stock market dip) that accompanied last week’s announcement of a cheaper AI model from Chinese company DeepSeek shows that even experts can be blindsided by how fast tech innovation is happening. No one can take away that feeling of whiplash completely. Change is happening too fast for that. But if you’re looking for a good guide to help you get a handle on our AI-filled future, entrepreneur Jensen Huang should probably be at the top of your list. Huang is the CEO of Nvidia, maker of the chips driving the current AI boom. He built Nvidia into a $3-billion juggernaut by spotting the imminent rise of AI before just about anyone else and betting his company on it. Other tech CEOs fawn over his vision. What does Huang see for the future? Perhaps more importantly for entrepreneurs, how does he recommend you prepare? Huang: AI is like the interstate highway system That was the topic of conversation when Huang appeared on Cleo Abram’s Huge Conversations podcast recently. It’s an hour-long discussion, and if you’re fascinated by AI, then the whole thing is worth a watch. (I’ve embedded the complete interview at the end of this column.) Perhaps the most immediately actionable insight was Huang’s advice for everyday people wondering how best to prepare themselves for the coming AI revolution. On the podcast, Huang likens the change to the shift that arrived when the U.S. built the interstate highway system. Fast roads were the essential new technology at the heart of this change, but a whole ecosystem of other possibilities quickly developed around it. “Suburbs start to be created and distribution of goods from east to west is no longer a concern. All of a sudden, gas stations are cropping up on highways. Fast food restaurants show up. Motels show up, because people are traveling across the state,” Huang says. AI will be similar. Machines that can do many tasks better and faster than humans will create ripple effects that change many aspects of how we do our jobs and live our lives. How can you try to peek around the corner and get a glimpse of what that might look like? Huang suggests you ask yourself two key questions. If the drudgery it takes to do my job disappears, what changes? Some people worry that AI might take away jobs, making many workers superfluous. Huang doesn’t share this fear. He believes human insight and creativity will still be important, but what we spend our time on will be different. AI will kill rote donkey work. “Suppose that your job continues to be important, but the effort by which you do it went from a week long to almost instantaneous, that the effort and drudgery basically goes to zero. What are the implications of that?” Huang asks. Imagine you have an AI software programmer in your pocket that can write any software program you dream up. Or consider how it would impact your work if you could describe a rough idea and an AI could quickly produce a prototype for you to interact with. Innovations like these, Huang insists, shouldn’t make us feel threatened. They should make us feel empowered and excited about all the higher-level thinking and problem solving we’ll be freed to do. “I think it’s going to be incredibly fun,” he says. How can I use AI to do my job better now? If Huang’s first question is designed to get you thinking about what your work might look like 10 years from now, his second nudges you to consider what you can do now to prepare for that future. Huang tells Abrams that he has an AI tutor with him at all times. It’s a practice he recommends to just about everyone. “The knowledge of almost any particular field, the barriers to that understanding have been reduced,” he says. “If there’s one thing I would encourage everybody to do, it’s go get an AI tutor right away.” But don’t stop there. Huang’s more general point is that the more you experiment with AI now, the better prepared you’ll be to use it to your advantage as it develops. “If I were a student today, the first thing I would do is learn AI,” he declares a bit later in the podcast. He doesn’t mean learn technical details of the math behind the machines—though if you’re into that, certainly have at it. He means playing around with current tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to get comfortable with how to prompt them effectively. “Learning to interact with AI is not unlike being someone who is really good at asking questions,” he claims. “Promoting AI is very similar.” It’s a skill that requires honing. The end goal for everyone should be to begin thinking though how AI can best assist you with your work. “If I were a student today,” Huang continues, “doesn’t matter what field of science I am going to go into or what profession I am, I am going to ask myself, how am I going to use AI to do my job better?” Other AI experts agree with Huang Huang’s two questions are a great place to begin if you want to start to get a handle on how AI is going to affect you. But he’s hardly the only expert weighing in. There is no shortage of books on AI you can read to try and wrap your head around the technology. Other CEOs, like OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Bill Gates, have also weighed in on what our AI-future may look like and how to prepare. Even experts are still trying to figure out the future of AI, so don’t feel bad if you’re overwhelmed too. But while technologists are still building the future, they all agree we shouldn’t let anxiety or uncertainty get in the way of experimentation. The time for all of us to start thinking about the future of AI and playing with these tools is now. EXPERT OPINION BY JESSICA STILLMAN @ENTRYLEVELREBEL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ARBJQn6QkM

Here’s How OpenAI’s New Deep Research Tool Could Change Your Workplace

OpenAI continues to champion the rise of AI agents, and now may be pushing that promotion to another level. Agents are next-generation AI tools, capable of acting on their own in a digital environment, and they’re potentially much more useful than the question-and-response AI chatbot systems we’re all getting used to. Demonstrating exactly how transformative agents could be, OpenAI has just released a new tool for ChatGPT called Deep Research that seems like it can speedily tackle a critical business task that could normally eat up days or even weeks of a worker’s time: gathering data and synthesizing it into a report. In an FAQ page explaining what the tool can do, OpenAI explains it’s “perfect for people who do intense knowledge work in areas like finance, science, and law,” or “researchers and discerning shoppers who need thorough, precise, and reliable research.” It’s particularly good at “finding niche, non-intuitive information that would involve multiple steps across numerous websites,” OpenAI says. It works like this: You ask the tool to look for information on a particular topic, adding images, files, or extra data like PDFs or spreadsheets to add context and help explain your query, which could be useful in, say, a question about financial information. OpenAI says it will sometimes pop up a form to ask for specific information before it starts gathering data so it can create a “more focused and relevant” answer. The final report is “fully documented with clear citations to sources,” so you can make sure that the information it found is both relevant and correct—streamlining the important step of checking whether the AI has hallucinated the info or if it’s real. Speaking at an event in Washington D.C. to show off the new tool, OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil made some bold claims about the tech, the New York Times reported. It’ll be able to do “complex research tasks that might take a person anywhere from 30 minutes to 30 days,” Weil said, adding that the tool will complete these tasks in maybe five to 30 minutes. It’s also able to search recursively, meaning it can do a single search, then, when that leads to other data sources, it can look for those too. If this sounds a lot like the kind of data-gathering task you might set for an intern or a junior employee when you begin a new program at work or when you encounter a novel problem that’s holding up a big project, then you’re likely thinking along the right lines. These seem to be exactly the sort of use cases that OpenAI has in mind. Users on Reddit who have used the tool are singing its praises. One highlighted the “time differential between the time it takes to complete its work compared to a human,” noting that “by some OpenAI employee estimates, it seems to be roughly 15x at the moment,” meaning it can complete a research task about 15 times faster than a human. That raises the question of when Deep Research could become cheaper and more effective to use than tasking an expensive worker to tackle these workplace chores. The Redditor projects how this might play out: If we imagine more advanced AI models that “can perform all the tasks of a lower-skill office job, but complete 3 weeks of work in a single working day,” then it’s quite simple to imagine “the cost of labour rapidly approaching zero as certain job sectors become automated.” Another user summed it up even more clearly: “Pro user here, just tried out my first Deep Research prompt and holy moly was it good. The insights it provided frankly I think would have taken a person, not just a person, but an absolute expert at least an entire day of straight work and research to put together, probably more.” This new tool may reignite the “will AI steal my job?” debate, but it also has great potential to transform many office tasks. Since it can speedily perform research, your staff may have more work hours available to actually respond to the data delivered from the research task, versus spending time trawling for info. BY KIT EATON @KITEATON

OpenAI Just Released o3-mini, Its Most Cost-Efficient Model Yet

OpenAI just released o3-mini, a miniature version of its upcoming flagship AI model. The new model is the company’s first “small reasoning model,” capable of using a train-of-thought process to complete tasks more accurately. The model’s launch, now available both on ChatGPT and through OpenAI’s API, caps off a week that also saw the company strengthen its ties with the United States government in the form of announcements about ChatGPT Gov and a partnership with the U.S. National Laboratories. In a blog post today, OpenAI shared that it anticipates o3-mini will be particularly useful for tasks involving science, math, and coding. The company’s testing indicates that o3-mini outperforms its predecessor, o1-mini, across several math and coding benchmarks, and in some aspects even outperforms the full o1 model. Like o1, users will be able to determine how much effort o3-mini puts into its reasoning, which could help developers save money when building applications that don’t require full effort. Subscribers at ChatGPT’s $200 per month Pro tier will get unlimited access to o3-mini, while those who pay $20 for ChatGPT’s Plus tier will be allowed 150 messages to o3-mini per day. Free users will also get a chance to try the model, but it’s unclear for how long. Developers who want to use OpenAI’s API to create new applications with o3-mini will pay $1.10 per one million input tokens and $4.40 per million outputs tokens. (Tokens are grammar elements that have been converted into data that can be processed by an AI model.) The model’s launch comes just as OpenAI is wrapping up a big week. On Tuesday, the AI market leader announced ChatGPT Gov, a version of the LLM that’s been tailored “to provide U.S. government agencies with an additional way to access OpenAI’s frontier models.” In a blog post announcing ChatGPT Gov, OpenAI wrote that government agencies will be able to deploy the system in their own Microsoft Azure cloud environment. “Self-hosting ChatGPT Gov,” according to OpenAI, “enables agencies to more easily manage their own security, privacy, and compliance requirements, such as stringent cybersecurity frameworks.” The company added that it anticipates this new service will make it easier for government agencies to approve the analysis of “non-public sensitive data” by ChatGPT. ChatGPT Gov has a similar operating system to ChatGPT Enterprise, OpenAI’s business-focused product. OpenAI also shared that since 2024, “more than 90,000 users across more than 3,500 US federal, state, and local government agencies have sent over 18 million messages on ChatGPT to support their day-to-day work.” The Air Force Research Laboratory uses the tool for basic administrative support, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is taking part in a pilot program with ChatGPT that OpenAI claims has reduced the time spent on routine tasks by “approximately 105 minutes per day on the days they used it.” ChatGPT has also been used for some time to enhance research at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. But a major new deal means OpenAI will soon have an even larger presence there. The company announced on Thursday that it has agreed to deploy current and future flagship AI models on Venado, a supercomputer in Los Alamos built in collaboration with Nvidia. According to OpenAI’s blog post announcing the deal, the computer was designed to “drive scientific breakthroughs in materials science, renewable energy, astrophysics, and more,” and it will be a shared resource for researchers at Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Labs. As for how the models will be used, OpenAI says researchers will probe the technology for its potential to identify new approaches for treating and preventing diseases, improve detection of national security threats, and unlock “the full potential of natural resources.” The models will also be used to support Los Alamos’ nuclear security program, but use cases will be carefully decided on an individual basis in consultation with government officials and OpenAI researchers with security clearances. In a post on Linkedin, OpenAI national security policy and partnerships lead Katrina Mulligan said that she joined OpenAI “because I believed that some of the most consequential national security decisions of the decade would be made at companies like this and I wanted a seat at that table. Today’s announcement of our partnership with the National Labs to advance the future of science is exactly the kind of game-changing decision I wanted to have a role in making.” BY BEN SHERRY @BENLUCASSHERRY

Doubling Lifespans and Superintelligence: AI CEOs Are Saying Some Wild Stuff. Is Any of It True?

The AI revolution has been awash in hype for years, but it’s now truly on the cusp of sparking global transformation—if you take recent CEO and investor statements as gospel. The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, has offered a platform for leaders of AI’s biggest startups to wax lyrical about the industry’s bright prospects. Anthropic CEO Dario Amoedi jumped at the chance to laud AI’s power far beyond chatbots, saying that AI could allow humans to double their lifespans within the next decade. “If you think about what we might expect humans to accomplish in an area like biology in 100 years, I think a doubling of the human lifespan is not at all crazy. And then if AI is able to accelerate that, we may be able to get that in five to 10 years,” he said at a panel last week called Technology in the World. Amoedi also told reporters that superintelligence, or artificial general intelligence (AGI), is a feasible prospect by 2027. For many AI evangelists, the idea of building AI that possesses more knowledge than the collective sum of humanity is a pet topic and holy grail. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in September that such a milestone is within the industry’s grasp: “It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days,” Altman claimed. The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, has offered a platform for leaders of AI’s biggest startups to wax lyrical about the industry’s bright prospects. Anthropic CEO Dario Amoedi jumped at the chance to laud AI’s power far beyond chatbots, saying that AI could allow humans to double their lifespans within the next decade. “If you think about what we might expect humans to accomplish in an area like biology in 100 years, I think a doubling of the human lifespan is not at all crazy. And then if AI is able to accelerate that, we may be able to get that in five to 10 years,” he said at a panel last week called Technology in the World. Amoedi also told reporters that superintelligence, or artificial general intelligence (AGI), is a feasible prospect by 2027. For many AI evangelists, the idea of building AI that possesses more knowledge than the collective sum of humanity is a pet topic and holy grail. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in September that such a milestone is within the industry’s grasp: “It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days,” Altman claimed. BY SAM BLUM @SAMMBLUM