Dive in — Pope Leo XIV identifies AI as a key challenge || Figma’s CEO says design & craft key in the age of AI || LegoGPT turns text into Lego designs || How Adobe assesses AI risk || ++more
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Pope Leo XIV identifies AI as a main challenge for humanity
Pope Leo XIV laid out the vision of his papacy Saturday, identifying artificial intelligence as one of the most critical matters facing humanity and vowing to continue in some of the core priorities of Pope Francis.
In his first formal audience, Leo repeatedly cited Francis and the Argentine pope’s own 2013 mission statement, making clear a commitment to making the Catholic Church more inclusive, attentive to the faithful and a church that looks out for the “least and rejected.”
Leo, the first American pope, told the cardinals who elected him that he was fully committed to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, the 1960s meetings that modernized the church. He identified AI as one of the main issues facing humanity, saying it poses challenges to defending human dignity, justice and labor.
Leo referred to AI in explaining the choice of his name: His namesake, Pope Leo XIII, was pope from 1878 to 1903 and laid the foundation for modern Catholic social thought. He did so most famously with his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which addressed workers’ rights and capitalism at the dawn of the industrial age. The late pope criticized both laissez-faire capitalism and state-centric socialism, giving shape to a distinctly Catholic vein of economic teaching.
Read more | AP
“I really believe that design and craft are the differentiator that makes a product and a brand stand out.” — Figma’s CEO
Can you vibe code or hack your way towards something that makes money? Absolutely.
But is it going to be an enduring product? For that, if you have any level of competition, you need to have really good design, a point of view, a great user experience, and a great brand.
If you think about all the context that humans have that a LLM does not, I don’t see it being the case that models will get you there all the way.”
Read more | THE VERGE
AI's trillion-dollar opportunity: Sequoia AI Ascent 2025 Keynote
Sequoia Capital partners outline why AI represents a market opportunity at least 10x larger than cloud computing, where startups should focus to win, and how the rise of AI agents will create an entirely new economic paradigm.
Founders need to adopt a “stochastic mindset” and “go at maximum velocity. All of the time.”
Watch | SEQUOIA CAPITAL
How AI coding agents will change your job
YC's Tom Blomfield and David Lieb discuss how AI coding tools are transforming software development, why small, high-agency teams will be able to do what once took armies of engineers, and why there's never been a better time to start something new.
They explore the bigger picture too: a future where there's more abundance, knowledge work becomes more accessible, and founders have more leverage than ever before.
Watch | Y COMBINATOR
LegoGPT to turn your text inputs into Lego designs
Ever wanted to take your Lego building game to the next level? A team of computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University built LegoGPT, the first AI model that takes text inputs and turns them into physically stable Lego designs.
According to the team's research, which can be found on GitHub, the AI model was trained on a dataset of over 47,000 Lego structures with 28,000 unique 3D objects. The designs generated with LegoGPT were physically stable 98% of the time, the team said.
Read more | CNET
Inside Adobe’s approach to assessing AI risk
In the AI race, pushing out products quickly has often taken priority over ensuring reliability and accuracy and mitigating harms. A flashy AI demo may seem impressive, but without rigorous testing, it can lack real-world effectiveness and even cause real-world harm. Innovation should never compromise on quality or perspective—bringing a range of perspectives into early AI development and continuously testing the technology can help ensure it’s used as intended in real-world contexts.
There’s a reason companies invest in beta testing: Internal testing alone can’t predict every way users will engage with AI. Real-world feedback is essential for identifying unintended behaviors and improving reliability. If you’re a global company or aspire for your technology to become global, you must expand the pool of people testing and using your technology to account for broad scenarios and cultural use cases.
Read more | HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
Klarna changes its AI tune and again recruits humans for customer service
“While Klarna pioneered the use of AI in customer service with groundbreaking results, this strategy will now evolve to the next level,” Nordstrom said in an email. “AI gives us speed. Talent gives us empathy. Together, we can deliver service that’s fast when it should be, and emphatic and personal when it needs to be.”
“The key takeaway is that AI should augment human agents — not replace them,” Julie Geller said. “Automate the routine to drive efficiency, but always ensure customers have a clear, easy path to a human, especially when emotions or complexity come into play.”
Read more | Yahoo Finance
AI firms warned to calculate threat of super intelligence or risk it escaping human control
Artificial intelligence companies have been urged to replicate the safety calculations that underpinned Robert Oppenheimer’s first nuclear test before they release all-powerful systems.
Max Tegmark, a leading voice in AI safety, said he had carried out calculations akin to those of the US physicist Arthur Compton before the Trinity test and had found a 90% probability that a highly advanced AI would pose an existential threat.
Read more | THE GUARDIAN
Can a photograph reveal your biological age?
Face-based aging tools have “extraordinary potential” to help doctors quickly and inexpensively estimate how healthy their patients are, compared with existing tests, which use blood or saliva to measure chemical and molecular changes associated with aging, said William Mair, a professor of molecular metabolism at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who was not involved in the study.
While doctors usually visually estimate how healthy their patients are for their age, a tool like this could draw in much more data to make a better estimate, he added.
Read more | NY TIMES
Why this artist isn’t afraid of AI’s role in the future of art
Miami-based Panamanian photographer Dahlia Dreszer stands out as an optimist and believer in AI’s powers. She likens AI’s use in art to the act of painting or drawing—simply another medium that can unlock creative potential and an artistic vision that may have never been realized without it.
Using generative AI models like Stable Diffusion, 3.5, Midjourney, Adobe, Firefly, and Nova, Dreszer trained an AI image generator on her style for over a year, instructing it to produce artwork with her sensibilities, with one piece in her current exhibition produced entirely by AI.
Entitled “Bringing the Outside In,” Dreszer calls the show a “living organism.” (It is on display until May 17, 2025 at Green Space Miami.) Her vivid, maximalist still lifes depict layered familial heirlooms, Judaica, flowers, and textiles made by Panamanian indigenous women.
Attendees can interact with an AI image generator in the exhibition to produce their own artworks in Dreszer’s style, telling the machine in a sentence or two what they want it to produce, and in seconds, an artwork is created. Also as part of the show, Dreszer programmed an AI-generated clone of herself, which looks and speaks like her, to guide visitors via video chat through the space.
Read more | TIME
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