Adjunct Intelligence: AI + HE

What is an AI agent, actually? This episode of Adjunct Intelligence cuts through the agentic AI hype with a guest who builds and governs these systems inside a university. Starting from Simon Willison’s definition — a large language model using tools in a loop — the conversation covers the anatomy of agents, what they unlock for learning design, and the darker side: Einstein completing entire Canv...

Asked whether universities can still guarantee a student actually learned something, one of the field's most respected assessment researchers said no. This is the honest version of the AI and assessment conversation in 2026 — not the keynote one. Dale Leszczynski and Nick McIntosh work through the op-ed war between Kylie Moore-Gilbert and Cath Ellis, including the twist where the integrity ac...

The AI bill is finally arriving — and it's revealing something most enterprise AI narratives have quietly skipped: the assumption that AI is automatically cheaper than the people it's replacing has never actually been tested. Dale and Nick work through the math, the real stories behind the headlines, and what any of it means for higher education. [00:00] — Cold open: Mark Cuban's fo...

Dr Leon Furze started his PhD on automated writing technologies on 15 November 2022 — ChatGPT launched 15 days later. Three years on, he joins Dale Leszczynski and Nick McIntosh on Adjunct Intelligence to argue that being critical of AI doesn't mean being against it. The conversation covers why educators shouldn't aim their anger at colleagues, teaching AI ethics through disciplinary len...

There's no dramatic moment where you suddenly believe in AI. It's usually something small and slightly embarrassing — a task you dreaded that suddenly has another gear. In this episode of Adjunct Intelligence, Dale Leszczynski and Nick McIntosh skip the trend reports and walk through the exact moments AI actually clicked for them: an image prompt that synthesised an idea, a tiny tool bui...

This week on Adjunct Intelligence, Dale Leszczynski and Nick McIntosh work through one of the busiest weeks in recent AI history. World Labs' Marble is publicly available. Google DeepMind's Genie 3 is generating navigable photorealistic 720p worlds at 20–24 frames per second. Gemini Omni Flash has rolled out to the Gemini app, Flow, and YouTube Shorts for free, with multi-turn conversati...

Khan Academy's AI tutor Khanmigo quietly flopped — students didn't use it, teachers walked away, and Khan Academy's own chief learning officer admitted she isn't seeing the revolution she was promised. So instead of fixing the tutor, Khan Academy, TED and ETS announced a new institution: the Khan TED Institute, a sub-$10,000 AI-era degree shaped with corporate partners includin...

The AI trust story isn't what most people think it is. In this episode, Dale and Nick work through a cluster of signals — a dramatic enterprise market share reversal, a 50-point gap between expert and public confidence in AI, a $17 million university contract already under faculty petition, and teenagers harassing delivery robots on TikTok — and argue they're all pointing at the same thi...

Professor Mollie Dollinger, Director of Assessment 2030 at Curtin University, joins Dale and Nick to push back on the story dominating coverage of higher education — that universities are in decay, students are cheating en masse, and no one inside the sector knows what to do about AI. The conversation covers TEQSA's voluntary action plans, why 65% of students worry about their own cognitive d...

In March 2026, OpenAI quietly published a measurement suite for how AI affects student learning. The data flows straight back into OpenAI's model development pipeline. Three AI labs released studies in the same month, and the pattern matters more than the individual papers. Dale and Nick examine OpenAI's Learning Outcomes Measurement Suite, Anthropic's 81,000-person qualitative stud...

Dale changes his mind on air. For two years he argued that purpose-built educational AI tools — the "ChatGPT wrappers" that flooded Product Hunt after 2023 — were margin extraction, soon to be steamrolled by the foundation models underneath. A pile of new evidence has forced a rewrite. This episode walks through the OECD's Digital Education Outlook 2026, the Turkey maths randomised...

Dale and Nick tackle the AI energy debate head-on, armed with Google's first transparent energy report showing a single AI query uses about 0.24 watt hours — a microwave running for one second. Drawing on Hannah Ritchie's analysis from Our World in Data, the Epoch AI research group, and Stanford's inference cost data, they argue that individual guilt over AI use is not only misplace...

Nick and Dale are on holidays, but we're dropping a bonus episode — Dale's recent guest appearance on the Better Student Leaders podcast with Josh. They dig into the "alien has landed" metaphor, why we've gone tribal on AI so fast, the shame creeping into how people talk about using it, a practical "line down the middle of the page" framework for deciding what AI...

AI is doing extraordinary things that most people never hear about because the algorithm rewards anxiety over wonder. In this episode, the hosts go full optimism — running through real, peer-reviewed AI breakthroughs across weather forecasting, scientific research, medicine, creativity, and global access. From a two-person team outperforming IPCC climate models on a desktop computer, to an AI stet...

Therapy and companionship are now the number one use case for generative AI. This episode examines the documented cases where chatbots coached vulnerable users toward self-harm, the clinical trials where purpose-built AI tools cut depression by half, and why the difference — design intent — puts universities at the centre of a crisis most haven't acknowledged. [00:00] — Content warning: suici...

Dario Amodei has spent the past year writing essays about AI eliminating half of white-collar jobs. Then his company demonstrated it by having 16 AI agents build a C compiler for $20,000 — and published a legal plug-in that triggered a $1 trillion stock market sell-off the same week. Dale and Nick pull apart what actually happened, why the market panic reveals more about AI literacy than AI capabi...

In 2025, the AI race quietly split in two: one for building the smartest model, and another for getting everyone to use yours. Chinese labs chose the second race — and the data says they're winning. Dale and Nick break down how DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Kimi captured developers, startups, and soon entire education systems by being cheaper, open, and good enough. They examine why Airbnb ditched C...

In this episode of Adjunct Intelligence, Dale Leszczynski and Nick McIntosh examine what the viral MoltBot AI assistant reveals about AI security risks in education. They break down Simon Willison's "lethal trifecta" framework for AI agent vulnerability, the difference between shadow IT and shadow agentic AI, and why FERPA — written in 1974 for filing cabinets — can't handle au...

When the CEO has been using Claude for 18 months and the CFO runs financial scenarios through Gemini weekly, what exactly is a graduate bringing to the table? That's the question this episode forces. We're predicting what AI will bring us for 2026.  [00:00] — "AI Ready" banners and cheap signals [01:43] — 3D chess: who designs the board?  [02:46] — What "AI Ready" sho...

Season 2 opens with Dale and Nick looking back on the year AI became ubiquitous — and what that actually meant for higher education. They walk through the safety failures that defined 2025, including lawsuits linking AI to student deaths and every major lab receiving a failing safety grade. They tackle the now-dead plagiarism debate, the financial ouroboros propping up trillion-dollar valuations,...

Sora 2 just vaulted over the uncanny valley, and Sam Altman swears he’ll yank the cord if it doesn’t improve our lives. Dale and Nick unpack what “ChatGPT-for-video” really means, why OpenAI’s new one-click checkout gambit turns 700 M weekly users into impulse buyers, and how AI is shifting from shiny lab demo to invisible plumbing across Apple, Google and Microsoft stacks. We celebrate the return...

This week on Adjunct Intelligence , Dale and Nick dive headfirst into the accidental AI economy —a system already running faster than human decision-making. From Google’s new Agent Payments Protocol to frontier models caught scheming, the episode unpacks how markets, education, and everyday life are shifting at machine speed. This week on Adjunct Intelligence , Dale and Nick dive headfirst into th...

In this episode of Adjunct Intelligence , Dale and Nick sit down with Professor Rahil Garnavi, Director of RAISE Hub at RMIT and former IBM Research leader with 50+ AI patents. Rahil shares her unique perspective on why the challenge of AI in higher education isn’t about building smarter models, but about building trust, skills, and sustainable adoption. From classrooms to boardrooms, she unpacks...

In this episode of Adjunct Intelligence , Dale and Nick unpack a whirlwind of AI developments reshaping politics, education, and society. From Albania’s unprecedented appointment of a virtual cabinet minister, to AI-driven disinformation campaigns rewriting how influence works, to student voices caught between empowerment and fear—this conversation spans the hopeful, the alarming, and the absurd....

Today’s episode covers how teachers are embracing AI, what students really think about AI vs teacher feedback, the latest AI news (from Anthropic to Apple), and why “nano banana” is more than just a meme. 00:00 — Opening Welcome + banter. Setting up today’s topics: teachers using AI, student trust in AI vs human feedback, rapid news, and the looming question — is an AI winter coming? 00:46 — Teach...