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NEW: The Iranian political officials who will reportedly negotiate with the United States in Islamabad, Pakistan, on April 21 neither have the authority to independently determine Iran’s negotiating positions nor are driving decision-making in Tehran. Other Key Takeaways: US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner will attend the talks. Iran’s negotiating delegation is expected to include Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. The upcoming talks appear focused on extending the ceasefire, which is set to expire on April 22. Iranian sources familiar with the negotiations stated that Iran expects that the ceasefire will be extended and that additional talks will occur if the negotiations on April 21 go well. The Iranian negotiating team does not have the authority to independently determine Iran’s negotiating positions, however. IRGC Commander Major General Ahmad Vahidi and other senior members of the IRGC have consolidated control and wielded significant influence over the negotiations process thus far. Iran is attempting to establish a protection racket in the Strait of Hormuz, likely to consolidate the IRGC’s control over the strait and gain leverage over the United States in negotiations. Iran has reportedly decided to give vessels that pay a “security” fee and adhere to Iranian protocols priority to transit through the strait. The IRGC has continued to prevent traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. The IRGC Navy reportedly forced two oil tankers attempting to transit through the strait to change course. Many vessels that intended to transit through the strait have turned around.

Introducing Claude Managed Agents: everything you need to build and deploy agents at scale. It pairs an agent harness tuned for performance with production infrastructure, so you can go from prototype to launch in days. Now in public beta on the Claude Platform.

Wharton researchers gave nearly 1,000 high school math students access to ChatGPT during practice problems Result: chatGPT is the perfect trap. Look at the red bars. Students with ChatGPT crushed their practice sessions. The basic ChatGPT group solved more problems and those on the "tutor" version did even more. Now look at the gray bars. That's the exam. No AI allowed. The ChatGPT group scored 17% worse than kids who practiced with zero technology. And the fancy tutor version? No better than working alone. The researchers called AI a "crutch." When they analyzed what students actually typed into ChatGPT, most of them just wrote - “What’s the answer?” The kicker: students who used ChatGPT believed it hadn't hurt their learning. They were confidently wrong. This is the AI trap in education. Outsourcing your thinking. Of course, lots of half-baked AI literacy curricula being rolled out in schools now Let’s of course ignore that basic literacy (the ability to read) is possible for <50% of 8th graders Source: Bastani et al. (2025), "Generative AI Can Harm Learning," PNAS

Karpathy's AutoResearch is changing how campaigns get optimized and most marketers haven´t heard of it yet. Ole Lehmann tested it on landing page copy, 56% → 92% pass rate overnight. here´s how it works for marketing / skills 🧵

Friend got laid off last month. $180K salary. 8 years experience. Great reviews. 'Nobody's hiring at my level. All the jobs are junior roles at half the pay.' That's the AI squeeze. Senior roles shrink. Junior roles disappear. The middle gets crushed.

Software development is undergoing a renaissance in front of our eyes. If you haven't used the tools recently, you likely are underestimating what you're missing. Since December, there's been a step function improvement in what tools like Codex can do. Some great engineers at OpenAI yesterday told me that their job has fundamentally changed since December. Prior to then, they could use Codex for unit tests; now it writes essentially all the code and does a great deal of their operations and debugging. Not everyone has yet made that leap, but it's usually because of factors besides the capability of the model. Every company faces the same opportunity now, and navigating it well — just like with cloud computing or the Internet — requires careful thought. This post shares how OpenAI is currently approaching retooling our teams towards agentic software development. We're still learning and iterating, but here's how we're thinking about it right now: As a first step, by March 31st, we're aiming that: (1) For any technical task, the tool of first resort for humans is interacting with an agent rather than using an editor or terminal. (2) The default way humans utilize agents is explicitly evaluated as safe, but also productive enough that most workflows do not need additional permissions. In order to get there, here's what we recommended to the team a few weeks ago: 1. Take the time to try out the tools. The tools do sell themselves — many people have had amazing experiences with 5.2 in Codex, after having churned from codex web a few months ago. But many people are also so busy they haven't had a chance to try Codex yet or got stuck thinking "is there any way it could do X" rather than just trying. - Designate an "agents captain" for your team — the primary person responsible for thinking about how agents can be brought into the teams' workflow. - Share experiences or questions in a few designated internal channels - Take a day for a company-wide Codex hackathon 2. Create skills and AGENTS[.md]. - Create and maintain an AGENTS[.md] for any project you work on; update the AGENTS[.md] whenever the agent does something wrong or struggles with a task. - Write skills for anything that you get Codex to do, and commit it to the skills directory in a shared repository 3. Inventory and make accessible any internal tools. - Maintain a list of tools that your team relies on, and make sure someone takes point on making it agent-accessible (such as via a CLI or MCP server). 4. Structure codebases to be agent-first. With the models changing so fast, this is still somewhat untrodden ground, and will require some exploration. - Write tests which are quick to run, and create high-quality interfaces between components. 5. Say no to slop. Managing AI generated code at scale is an emerging problem, and will require new processes and conventions to keep code quality high - Ensure that some human is accountable for any code that gets merged. As a code reviewer, maintain at least the same bar as you would for human-written code, and make sure the author understands what they're submitting. 6. Work on basic infra. There's a lot of room for everyone to build basic infrastructure, which can be guided by internal user feedback. The core tools are getting a lot better and more usable, but there's a lot of infrastructure that currently go around the tools, such as observability, tracking not just the committed code but the agent trajectories that led to them, and central management of the tools that agents are able to use. Overall, adopting tools like Codex is not just a technical but also a deep cultural change, with a lot of downstream implications to figure out. We encourage every manager to drive this with their team, and to think through other action items — for example, per item 5 above, what else can prevent a lot of "functionally-correct but poorly-maintainable code" from creeping into codebases.

OpenAI is asking prospective advertisers for at least $200,000 in upfront commitments for its initial ChatGPT ads beta. Promoted posts would appear at the bottom of responses, be clearly labeled, and are described as not influencing answers. Some reports earlier indicated that ChatGPT referral traffic delivers stronger conversion rates, meaning it’s smart to keep your brand visible in those kinds of searches. --- socialmediatoday. com/news/openai-asks-chatgpt-advertisers-for-20k-in-committments/811062/

Insane. US is the absolute king of total available AI compute at 74.4%. China at 14.1% and the European Union is at 4.8% So US has 5.3x the capacity of China, and 15.5x of EU.