1. Time flies! It seems only yesterday I mentioned a Macmillan online teacher festival (but it was November). Their 5th annual Global Teachers’ Festival has rather crept up on me: it started yesterday (it was all recorded, don’t worry!) and continues until Friday 21st February. More details and registration here https://www.macmillanenglish.com/global-teachers-festival-2025 and PDF of programme below.
[file x 1]
2. I had very nearly finished that piece on The Future of TESOL that I mentioned last Thursday when this popped up in my inbox yesterday, a post by Sam Altman on his eponymous blog, innocently entitled Three Observations https://blog.samaltman.com/three-observations
In a decade, perhaps everyone on earth will be capable of accomplishing more than the most impactful person can today. We continue to see rapid progress with AI development. Here are three observations about the economics of AI:
1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it. These resources are chiefly training compute, data, and inference compute. It appears that you can spend arbitrary amounts of money and get continuous and predictable gains; the scaling laws that predict this are accurate over many orders of magnitude.
2. The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger.
3. The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future.
If these three observations continue to hold true, the impacts on society will be significant.
3. Another excellent Talking ELT video from Ben Knight of Oxford University Press and his guests, this time Sarah Mercer and Charlotte Rance, Compassion, critical thinking and the human connection https://youtu.be/O0lHU1SZ_Dc
Compassion isn’t just about being kind to people! In this episode of Talking ELT, we look at how compassion requires both criticality and courage to understand other people’s experiences of the world. We also discuss the impacts of AI and technology on compassion-based approaches in ELT.
I wonder whether Ben and his guests’ discussion of AI might have been just a little different if they’d had chance to read Sam Altman’s blog post? Maybe not!
4. That Letby bee in my bonnet continues to hum: here’s two recent podcasts questioning her conviction – the latest issue of The Story podcast, Is there ‘new evidence’ in the Lucy Letby case? https://shows.acast.com/storiesofourtimes/episodes/letby-ep and the latest issue of The Guardian’s Today in Focus podcast, Lucy Letby and the medical experts who believe she is innocent https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/lucy-letby-and-the-medical-experts-who-believe-she/id1440133626?i=1000690990007
5. And, finally, the Natural History Museum’s 2024 Wildlife Photographer of the Year People’s Choice Award https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5ypn8jz9q7o I love the Michael Forsberg photo of a disguised biologist approaching a whooping crane!
Roy Cross's Blog 