Serendipity35

Nate Silver is an American statistician, author, and professional poker player who transformed the landscape of political and sports analysis through probabilistic modeling. Silver first gained prominence in the early 2000s by developing PECOTA, a system for forecasting Major League Baseball player performance. He soon applied these "sabermetric" techniques to politics, founding the influential site FiveThirtyEight in 2008. He famously cemented his reputation by correctly predicting the presidential winner in 49 states that year. Following his departure from ABC News in 2023, Silver returned to his independent roots by launching the Silver Bulletin on Substack. As of 2026, he remains a central figure in election forecasting, providing real-time data modeling for the current midterm cycle. His work has shifted toward a broader exploration of risk; his 2024 book, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, examines the high-stakes world of professional gambling, crypto, and venture capital.

Here is a recent post of his about social media, focusing on the evolution (devolution) of Twitter to X.

The content that gets “engagement” on Twitter is mostly complete crap

And yet, while Facebook is now almost completely irrelevant to the political discourse, that isn’t quite true for Twitter. Google search traffic in the U.S. for the precise term “twitter” is down quite a lot, but that’s not fair to X because the platform now has a new name. Broader traffic for search topics related to Twitter/X is also down, by more than half relative to the peak in late 2012. But the recent decline has been more gradual: about 20 percent as compared to two years ago. That seems to track with other third-party data showing a slow-but-steady decline in Twitter engagement, though nobody can be quite sure since X is no longer a public company.

It’s not hard to notice that Twitter has become extremely right-leaning. But I’d argue there’s an equally important trend: the top accounts are of incredibly low quality. Elon, with the algorithmic boost he built in for himself, is at the eye of the storm, of course. But “Catturd” literally gets far more engagement than the New York Times, for instance.

Here's the graphic Silver made using Claude AI to show what's hot on X this year.

New AI seems to appear every month. I decided to dig into the history of hem in order to crate a brief chronology that focuses on publicly accessible chatbots (not internal research models or early limited-access releases. Many other AI assistants (e.g., Ernie Bot in China, Perplexity AI, Amazon Alexa+ web chatbot) have also become available in various regions and forms, especially by 2024–2026, but specific launch dates vary by market and rollout strategy.

Some chatbots have evolved over time (e.g., Bard became Google Gemini), so “release” reflects the first broad availability to general users.
Here’s a brief chronology of major AI chatbots that became available to the public, listed in order of their public release or general availability (primarily focused on the modern generative AI era):

Replika – Launched in November 2017, one of the earliest modern AI chatbots designed as a conversational companion.

ChatGPT – Released by OpenAI on November 30, 2022, and widely recognized as the breakthrough generative AI chatbot that sparked mainstream interest in conversational AI.

Character.ai – First beta made public on September 16, 2022, letting users chat with or create character-based bots; significant growth followed into 2023.

Anthropic’s Claude (public) – First broadly available version of the Claude AI chatbot launched in July 2023, after initial private releases earlier that year.

Google Bard – Announced and publicly launched in March 2023 as Google’s first consumer AI chatbot; later rebranded under the Gemini name.

Microsoft Copilot - Public Release: March 7, 2023 - Microsoft Copilot was launched as a generative AI chatbot and assistant, integrated across things like Microsoft 365 (Word, Excel, Outlook), Windows, and Bing/Edge. In the broader AI chatbot timeline, Copilot was one of the first major assistants launched by a major tech company after ChatGPT’s debut in late 2022.

Kimi – The first version became publicly available on November 16, 2023, offering ultra-long-context interactions.

Meta AI – Launched in September 2023 within Meta platforms (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) as an AI assistant; expanded afterward.

Google Gemini (rebrand/evolution) – In February 2024, Google rebranded Bard as Gemini and deepened its rollout as the successor to Bard with broader capabilities.

Lumo (Proton) – Launched on July 23, 2025 as a privacy-focused AI chatbot emphasizing encrypted interactions and no data training logging.

Manus Public Launch: March 6, 2025 — The autonomous AI agent Manus was officially released to the public by Meta as a general-purpose AI agent capable of planning and executing tasks independently.

 

Google recently introduced a new feature to their Workplace suite that they call "Help Me Write." This generative AI will first appear in Gmail and Google Docs. At the moment, it's available to a select audience of invited testers.

Like other generative AI, you will be able to enter a prompt and have a first draft created. for you.,An example Google shared is not having it write a paper for your English class, though it will probably be able to do that. They show the example of having it create a job description for a regional sales representative/

It's another AI tool that might frighten teachers because it seems to help students unfairly but I think this may be a misperception. As with other AI tools, such as the much-discussed chat GPT, I think the best thing educators can do is to introduce this to students and guide them in the ways that it can be best used and best used legitimately.

The evolution of digital literacy in classrooms will never end. Yes, these kinds of AI- assisted-writing tools present boyj opportunities and challenges for educators. But ignoring them or trying to ban them from student use is certainly not the solution. This tool and others like it are an opportunity to improve student writing skills and critical thinking. 

Google Announcements
https://blog.google/technology/ai/ai-developers-google-cloud-workspace/
https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/generative-ai

Have you heard the term "metaversity"? What Is a Metaversity? Should You Create One on Your Campus?

Metaversities are campuses created in the metaverse and, in some ways, they represent the next evolution beyond the immersive learning opportunities that currently exist for students at many colleges and universities. The metaversity has gone from a theory to a concept to an actual realm at schools such as Morehouse, and more are likely on the way.

Advances in virtual and augmented reality have made it possible to create digital twins of universities.

What should you consider before building one?  some suggestions