Interesting Links and News: 7-July-2025
AI companionship, digital employeees, ChatGPT for exam prep, and Gen AI tops IIT JEE, and more
This post is a collection of links that are all interesting but didn’t warrant an entire post.
Gen AI Tops JEE?
Gen AI is now smarter than JEE Advanced first rank student?
This is not a fluke. There are lots of examples of Gen AI tools topping competitive exams around the world. AI was at Math Olympiad silver-medal level an year ago, and an year is a very long time in Gen AI.
Gen AI for Emotional Support and Companionship?
About 2.9% of Claude’s users use it for emotional “Support, Advice, and Companionship”:
People seek Claude's help for practical, emotional, and existential concerns. Topics and concerns discussed with Claude range from career development and navigating relationships to managing persistent loneliness and exploring existence, consciousness, and meaning.
I think it is safe to assume that a similar percent of ChatGPT and Grok users are doing the same. In addition, there are specialized services like Replika (“The AI companion who cares. Always here to listen and talk. Always on your side”) and Character.ai (“Chat, call, text, and create with AI Characters that respond intelligently, remember past conversations, and adapt to your style. Every AI chat feels natural, engaging, and unique to you”), and I get an estimate that 50 million to 100 million people are already using Gen AI for companionship (estimate via ChatGPT o3)
Gender Divide in Gen AI Usage
Fascinating gender divide: 70% of users of Character.ai companions are women.
By contrast, you can see that a majority of users of Gen AI apps in general (not for companionship) are men.
“Digital Employees” are here?
Banks now have “digital employees” claims Wall Street Journal? These are “Gen AI” based agents which are:
Similar to human employees, these digital workers have direct managers they report to and work autonomously in areas like coding and payment instruction validation, said Chief Information Officer Leigh-Ann Russell. Soon they’ll have access to their own email accounts and may even be able to communicate with colleagues in other ways like through Microsoft Teams, she said.
[…]
BNY said it took three months for its AI Hub to spin up two digital employee personas: one designed to clean up vulnerabilities in code and one designed to validate payment instructions. Each persona can exist in a few dozen instances, and each instance is assigned to work narrowly within a particular team, Russell said. […]
Because they have their own logins, and can directly access the same apps as human employees, they can work autonomously, said Russell. For example, a digital engineer can log into company systems and see there’s a vulnerability that needs to be patched, write the new code to patch it, and then pass it on to a human manager for approval in the system.
I did say earlier that you are now a manager of a team of AI employees, but I didn’t mean that literally. But if this piece is to be believed, this is becoming literally true
The Language Barrier is gone.
These are the language-related things I’ve recently done with LLMs:
Generate audio podcasts in Hindi and in Marathi
Upload a photo of a Marathi newspaper article and ask it to give me a translation in English
Upload a photo of a visa in a foreign language and ask the LLM questions about the meanings of some of the terms I did not understand
ChatGPT for Exam Preparation: Research Shows “Significant Improvement”
ChatGPT based “retreival practice” for students just before exams significantly improves their performance in the exams. These are the recommendations:
Practitioners should consider using AI tools like ChatGPT to support retrieval practice by helping students generate questions and receive immediate feedback, particularly in large classes. AI feedback should be complemented with human input to address complex questions and provide deeper understanding. Providing students with guidance on using AI tools effectively can maximize their benefits while balancing group activities with individual tasks ensures both collaboration and personalized engagement. Regularly gathering student feedback and tracking performance can help refine the integration of AI tools to better meet learning goals.