Happy Monday!

In todays scoop 🍨 

• 🧑‍💻 ️Should You Learn to Code in 2025?… (It's Complicated)

• 🎅 12 Days of Open AI: Day 2

• 🧑‍🏫️ Is AI Changing Education as We Know It?

• 🔧 3 Trending AI Tools

🧑‍💻 ️Should You Learn to Code in 2025?… (It's Complicated)

Thinking about a career change or just picking up a new skill in 2025? Pure coding skills are becoming the flip phone of tech careers. The real move? Learning to be an AI-savvy tech Swiss Army knife.

Remember when learning to code was basically printing money? Those were the days. You'd crush a few JavaScript tutorials, maybe drop $10K on a bootcamp, and boom – a big tech company would be sliding into your DMs with six-figure offers.

AI Has Entered The Chat 📱

The numbers are getting ugly, folks:

• 📉 Entry-level coding jobs? Down 67% (oof)

• 👻 Bootcamp grads getting ghosted by recruiters? You bet!

• 🤯 Even Google's letting AI handle 25% of its code now (wild)

But before you close that Codecademy tab forever and pivot to becoming a professional TikToker, here's the deal...

The Big But 🍑 Learning to code isn't dead – it's just... different. Think of it like learning Excel in the '90s. Sure, you didn't need to be a spreadsheet wizard, but understanding how the whole thing worked made you dangerous.

2025's Power Move: Don't just learn Python – learn to be tech-fluent. The real winners in tomorrow's tech world will be the folks who can:

• 💬 Speak both AI and human

• 🧑‍🍳️ Understand when to code and when to let AI cook

• 🧑‍💻️ Actually explain tech stuff to the C-suite without making their eyes glaze over

Hot Take 🔥 

💰️ If you're only in it for the bag, save yourself the carpal tunnel and learn to work with AI instead. But if you genuinely geek out over building things? There's literally never been a cheaper or easier time to learn. Between YouTube, free courses, and having ChatGPT as your 24/7 coding mentor, the barriers to entry are lower than your crypto portfolio in 2022.

Bottom Line: The coding party isn't over – it's just gotten more exclusive. The bouncers aren't just checking if you can code anymore; they're checking if you can think.

What's your take on the future of coding? Reply to this email and let us know if you're team "learn to code" or team "learn to prompt." 🤔

🎅 12 Days of Open AI: Day 2 - Reinforcement Fine-Tuning

OpenAI dropped some major news on Day 2 of their holiday announcements: Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) is coming to their O1 model series. Think of it as sending your AI to grad school for a very specific major.

Lets break it down:

• 🍳 What's cooking? OpenAI is letting users customize their models using reinforcement learning - the same secret sauce they use internally to level up their own models.

• 🧬 First real-world test? Helping identify rare genetic diseases. They partnered with Berkeley Lab to turn O1 into a medical detective, and the results are pretty impressive.

• 📈 The proof is in the numbers: Their fine-tuned O1 Mini (the smaller, faster model) actually outperformed its bigger sibling, jumping from 17.7% to 31% accuracy in identifying correct genes.

Why Does This Matter?

Rare genetic diseases affect about 300 million people globally (that's nearly the entire US population!). Currently, patients often face a years-long "diagnostic odyssey" before getting answers. This tech could help speed that up dramatically.

The cool part? You don't need to be an AI wizard to use it. Just bring your data and evaluation criteria, and OpenAI's platform handles the heavy lifting. It's like having a personal AI tutor that you can train to become an expert in your field.

🗓️ When can you get your hands on it? It's in alpha now for select partners (universities, researchers, and enterprises can apply), with a public launch planned for early 2025.

They're already seeing promising results in legal, finance, and AI safety applications.

Overall an interesting showcase and yes, there was a Christmas-themed dad joke to close out about Santa's self-driving sleigh not working because "he didn't Pine-tune his models." 🎅 (OpenAI engineers, everyone! 😄)

Next up? Day 3 of 12 Days of announcements later today which we will breakdown in tomorrows newsletter. Stay tuned – this holiday season is getting seriously techy! 🎄

🧑‍🏫️ Is AI Changing Education as We Know It?

🗒️Remember when passing notes was the biggest technological disruption in classrooms? Those days are looking increasingly old school as artificial intelligence makes its way to the head of the class.

⭐️ Two major developments are showing us just how quickly AI is becoming education's star pupil:

• Khan Academy's Khanmigo, an AI teaching assistant that's currently being tested in 266 US school districts. This digital tutor, developed with OpenAI, is like having a personal teacher's aide for every student. At $15 per student annually, it helps teachers create lesson plans in minutes instead of days, monitors student progress in real-time, and even catches when kids try to sweet-talk it into giving them answers (nice try, kids) 👌

• UCLA is taking things up a notch with what might be the most meta education story of 2025: They're launching a comparative literature course that was literally developed by AI. The platform, called Kudu, created everything from the textbook to homework assignments. It only took the professor 20 hours of input to develop what traditionally takes months.

But before you start worrying about AI replacing Mr. Feeny, these innovations are actually freeing up teachers to do more... teaching. As Sal Khan puts it, "The hope here is that we can use artificial intelligence to amplify what a teacher can do so they can spend more time standing next to a student."

🚀 While AI might be acing its way through education, it's not gunning for the teacher's job quite yet – it's more like a really smart teaching assistant. And unlike that kid, who's still ruining Friday afternoons somewhere with his perfectly-timed “wait, don't we have homework?” (there is always one)🤦, these AI assistants seem to be actually making students and teachers lives easier.

🔧3 Trending AI Tools

• 🗓 Martin - Manages your calendar, inbox, to-do lists, and Slack. Can send texts, make calls, set reminders, and search the web for you.

• 📑 NotionFlashcard - Transforms your notes into interactive flashcards, enhancing your study sessions with spaced repetition and active recall techniques.

• 🎼 ACE Studio - Professional AI Singing Voice Generator for Your Songs.

That’s it for today!

If today’s newsletter brought you some joy or sparked an idea, hit reply and let us know—we’d love to hear from you.

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Until tomorrow—stay curious! 👋