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What’s Appening: ChatGPT MIT Study, X Trading, AI Ads, Biggest Data Breach
Newsletter
June 24, 2025
MIT STUDY HAS BAD NEWS FOR CHATGPT USERS
👀 TLDR
In this week’s What’s Appening, we cover the question of what AI is doing to our brains. An MIT study - the first of its kind - warns that repeated use of AI bots for studying has an impact on our cognitive behaviors. Should we be worried? We also have news on the big changes coming to Elon Musk’s X, the AI ad that turned heads during the NBA Finals, the big salaries Meta is offering to poach AI talent, plus our regular App and Stat of the Week!
🎬 Our Top Take
📱📵 ChatGPT – MIT Study Provides Warning of Cognitive Issues
Every now and again, we get one of those studies that explains how a piece of new technology is rotting our brains. The PC, the web, video games, social media, smartphones – all have had their time in the spotlight. Now, it’s AI’s turn. An MIT study, which tracked the brain activity of three groups of students over several months, had some startling findings. The groups were created to complete SAT-level assignments. One was allowed to use ChatGPT, another Google Search, and one nothing (except textbooks, presumably). The upshot was that the ChatGPT group saw changes in brain engagement and consistently underperformed at “neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Over time, the ChatGPT students got lazier, too, resorting to copy and paste more often. Look, this is just one study – so the alarm bells shouldn’t ring just yet – but you don’t need to be a scientist to understand that asking a bot to do the thinking for you is going to impact your understanding of a subject and, quite possibly, your cognitive abilities. For now, it’s not the brain but the value of education that’s being questioned in response to this study. Colleges have a huge issue with students “cheating” their way to a degree with the help of AI. A few media outlets have been sounding the alarm on the scale of the problem, but it feels like nobody is truly paying attention. #CheatGPT Read more here.
🗣️ Poll: Should Colleges Do More to Combat AI 'Cheating'? |
📲 App of the Week: Corner
Corner is an interesting addition to the plethora of discovery apps out there. It acts as a kind of hybrid lifestyle app and personalized recommendation tool, building out a profile of your likes and dislikes to provide details of the best spots to eat, hang out, grab a beer, and so on. Its USP seems to be real reviews from locals, as well as the fact that it can learn about you over time. There are some drawbacks – it doesn’t have reviews of every place, so there are limits to its ability to recommend – but we could see Corner evolve into a go-to travel app that allows you to explore any city like a local. It’s not yet on Android, but the iPhone app can be downloaded here.
🧐 Stat of the Week: 106 Kids
📈📉 Telegram – Founder Promises Fortune for His Many, Many Children
Not your usual Stat of the Week this time around. Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, has been discussing who will inherit his multi-billion-dollar fortune when he shuffles off his mortal coil. And the lucky beneficiaries are his kids – all 106 of them. 100 were conceived by sperm donation, whereas the other six are ‘official’ (his words, not ours). What is it about these tech founders and mass procreation? Elon Musk (14 kids and counting) has work to do. #106Kids Read more here.
🗞️ Other Stories
🔐 Change Your Password. 16 billion accounts covering Apple, Meta, Google, and more were exposed in a data breach last week, potentially the biggest in history. Read about it here. 💸 Poaching. We reported last week on Meta’s push for Superintelligence, and it has been aggressively trying to poach the best minds from rivals with $100 million salary offers. Story here. | 🦸 Super App. X is reportedly very close to integrating trading and investment services on the platform, making it closer to the Everything App status Elon always dreamed about. More here. |
📍 Meanwhile at 3Advance
We’ve had a lot of exciting launches lately, and each one reminds us why we love what we do. This week, we want to share news about Teambuildr Practice. We’ve worked with Teambuildr for years now, from developing their original mobile apps to helping them scale their infrastructure as they’ve grown (and grown they have!). Now, we’ve teamed up again to launch something new: Practice is a tool built specifically for individual teams and coaches. It brings the same pro-level polish to practice planning, making it easier for club and youth sports teams to build, organize, and share structured plans. This is an incredible new product that we hope will be hugely successful for Hewitt, James, and the team. We’re proud of being a part of this next adventure, and will not stop cheering for their success!
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