Nobody Can Tell Who Did the Work Anymore -- AI Brief August 26

Good day, %%first_name%%. Today is about the gap between finished and done. MIT told its own faculty that AI can already pass most undergraduate assignments, and that it has no good way to grade around that. Apple shipped a desktop built to run agents while you sleep. A five-year study found the companies firing people over AI are getting less productivity out of the survivors, not more. Parag Agrawal thinks the ad-funded web has about eighteen months left. And three ex-DeepMind researchers started a nonprofit on the theory that AI should not be the only thing grading AI.

Before we start: Artificially Intimidating is now #62 Rising in Technology on Substack. That ranking is made entirely of readers and listeners -- every open, every forward, every episode played on somebody's commute. Thank you. We will keep earning it.

MIT Says AI Can Already Pass Your Degree

MIT Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning and Assessment

What happened: MIT's ad hoc committee on AI in teaching and learning told campus on Tuesday that generative AI can now “credibly complete most undergraduate assignments.” President Sally Kornbluth, sharing the report, called the moment “a watershed for MIT -- and for all of higher education.” The committee, co-chaired by professors Eric Klopfer and Samuel Madden, says most classes should be reviewed and many will need substantial changes.

Why it matters: Every take-home problem set, essay and lab report is a measurement instrument, and this is MIT saying the instrument no longer measures the student. The committee's answer is to drag assessment back into the room: oral exams, portfolios, in-person conversations about work done outside class. It also warns against the lazy fix of just weighting in-class exams higher, which it says risks narrowing what an MIT degree even signifies. If the school with the hardest problem sets in America cannot grade homework, nobody's can.

What everyone's saying: The Washington Post, which first reported the committee's findings, framed it as the moment the elite tier admitted what high school teachers have been saying for two years. A Pew Research study from February found 64% of teens have used AI chatbots, more than half for schoolwork, and 59% say AI cheating happens regularly at their school. Some teachers have already given up and gone back to pencil and paper.

My read between the lines: The committee's co-chair already ran the experiment. Eric Klopfer split an MIT class three ways on a programming task in Fortran, a language none of them knew: one group with ChatGPT, one with Code Llama, one with nothing but Google. The ChatGPT group finished fastest. When they were tested from memory afterwards, as Klopfer told Communications of the ACM, they “remembered nothing, and they all failed.” Every student in the Google group passed. MIT is not discovering that AI can do the homework. It is conceding, in public, that it already knew what that costs.

📖 Further reading: AI Is a Trust Problem, Not a Tech Problem — MIT's crisis is not that the models got good, it is that a finished assignment stopped proving anything about the person who handed it in

MIT's problem is that it cannot tell who did the work. Yours is the opposite -- you know exactly who did it, because it was you, at eleven at night, again. Viktor is an AI agent that lives in your Slack and connects to 3,000+ tools. Hand it the weekly report, a live dashboard, a campaign build, and it goes and does the job. Not a chatbot you interrogate. A coworker you delegate to. New readers get $50 off their first month. Hire Viktor →

Apple Built a Desktop for Agents That Never Sleep

Apple Newsroom

What happened: Apple announced a new Mac mini on the M6 and M5 Pro chips, and a new Mac Studio on the M5 Max and M5 Ultra. Apple's own copy calls the mini “the leading desktop for always-on agentic computing.” The mini starts at $899 and the M5 Pro version at $1,699; Mac Studio runs $2,499 to $5,499 and configures up to 512GB of unified memory. Preorders opened Tuesday, machines arrive September 22.

Why it matters: Unified memory is the number that decides which models run on your desk instead of somebody else's servers, and these are not hobby numbers -- 512GB on the top Studio, 307GB/s of memory bandwidth on the M5 Pro mini, Neural Accelerators now built into every GPU core. Apple is not selling a faster computer to sit in front of. It is selling a box you leave running in a closet while agents work overnight, which is a different product category wearing the same aluminum.

What everyone's saying: The chips impressed and the receipt did not. <a target="_blank" href="https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/08/25/m6-mac-mini-arrives-in-ram-and-