The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) has voiced strong support for the reintroduction of the Main Street Tax Certainty Act, legislation designed to make the 20% Small Business Deduction permanent. The measure, reintroduced by Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) and Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-PA), aims to prevent a substantial tax increase on over 30 million small businesses scheduled to take effect at the end of this year.
“If Congress fails to act, more than 30 million small businesses will face a massive tax hike at the end of this year,” said Brad Close, NFIB President. “The 20% Small Business Deduction allows nine out of 10 Main Street job creators to compete, grow their business, hire new employees, raise wages, and give back to their communities. NFIB is grateful for Sen. Daines and Rep. Smucker for their consistent leadership to stop the small business tax hike and urges Congress to pass the Main Street Tax Certainty Act to make the Small Business Deduction permanent.”
Created as part of the 2017 tax law, the 20% Small Business Deduction was introduced to provide tax relief to small businesses, leveling the playing field with larger corporations. Without congressional action, the deduction will expire at the end of 2025, significantly increasing the tax burden on small business owners nationwide.
An economic impact analysis conducted by Ernst & Young (EY) highlights the potential benefits of making the deduction permanent. The report estimates that extending the deduction would:
Create 1.2 million new jobs annually during the first decade, and 2.4 million jobs annually in subsequent years.
Boost the small business sector’s contribution to GDP by $750 billion over the first ten years and by $150 billion annually thereafter.
NFIB’s endorsement of the Main Street Tax Certainty Act underscores the critical importance of the legislation for small businesses. The organization is urging Congress to act swiftly to pass the bill and secure permanent tax relief for millions of Main Street entrepreneurs.
The proposed legislation represents a significant opportunity to ensure continued economic growth and stability in the small business sector, which serves as a backbone of the American economy.
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DeepSeek R1’s Monday release has sent shockwaves through the AI community, disrupting assumptions about what’s required to achieve cutting-edge AI performance. Matching OpenAI’s o1 at just 3%-5% of the cost, this open-source model has not only captivated developers but also challenges enterprises to rethink their AI strategies.
The model has rocketed to the top-trending model being downloaded on HuggingFace (109,000, as of this writing) – as developers rush to try it out and seek to understand what it means for their AI development. Users are commenting that DeepSeek’s accompanying search feature (which you can find at DeepSeek’s site) is now superior to competitors like OpenAI and Perplexity, and is only rivaled by Google’s Gemini Deep Research.
The implications for enterprise AI strategies are profound: With reduced costs and open access, enterprises now have an alternative to costly proprietary models like OpenAI’s. DeepSeek’s release could democratize access to cutting-edge AI capabilities, enabling smaller organizations to compete effectively in the AI arms race.
This story focuses on exactly how DeepSeek managed this feat, and what it means for the vast number of users of AI models. For enterprises developing AI-driven solutions, DeepSeek’s breakthrough challenges assumptions of OpenAI’s dominance — and offers a blueprint for cost-efficient innovation. It’s the “how” DeepSeek did what it did that should be the most educational here.
DeepSeek’s breakthrough: Moving to pure reinforcement learning
In November, DeepSeek made headlines with its announcement that it had achieved performance surpassing OpenAI’s o1, but at the time it only offered a limited R1-lite-preview model. With Monday’s full release of R1 and the accompanying technical paper, the company revealed a surprising innovation: a deliberate departure from the conventional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) process widely used in training large language models (LLMs).
SFT, a standard step in AI development, involves training models on curated datasets to teach step-by-step reasoning, often referred to as chain-of-thought (CoT). It is considered essential for improving reasoning capabilities. However, DeepSeek challenged this assumption by skipping SFT entirely, opting instead to rely on reinforcement learning (RL) to train the model.
This bold move forced DeepSeek-R1 to develop independent reasoning abilities, avoiding the brittleness often introduced by prescriptive datasets. While some flaws emerge – leading the team to reintroduce a limited amount of SFT during the final stages of building the model – the results confirmed the fundamental breakthrough: reinforcement learning alone could drive substantial performance gains.
The company got much of the way using open source – a conventional and unsurprising way
First, some background on how DeepSeek got to where it did. DeepSeek, a 2023 spin-off from Chinese hedge-fund High-Flyer Quant, began by developing AI models for its proprietary chatbot before releasing them for public use. Little is known about the company’s exact approach, but it quickly open sourced its models, and it’s extremely likely that the company built upon the open projects produced by Meta, for example the Llama model, and ML library Pytorch.
To train its models, High-Flyer Quant secured over 10,000 Nvidia GPUs before U.S. export restrictions, and reportedly expanded to 50,000 GPUs through alternative supply routes, despite trade barriers. This pales compared to leading AI labs like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, which operate with more than 500,000 GPUs each.
Despite speculation, DeepSeek’s full budget is unknown
DeepSeek reportedly trained its base model — called V3 — on a $5.58 million budget over two months, according to Nvidia engineer Jim Fan. While the company hasn’t divulged the exact training data it used (side note: critics say this means DeepSeek isn’t truly open-source), modern techniques make training on web and open datasets increasingly accessible. Estimating the total cost of training DeepSeek-R1 is challenging. While running 50,000 GPUs suggests significant expenditures (potentially hundreds of millions of dollars), precise figures remain speculative.
The journey to DeepSeek-R1’s final iteration began with an intermediate model, DeepSeek-R1-Zero, which was trained using pure reinforcement learning. By relying solely on RL, DeepSeek incentivized this model to think independently, rewarding both correct answers and the logical processes used to arrive at them.
This approach led to an unexpected phenomenon: The model began allocating additional processing time to more complex problems, demonstrating an ability to prioritize tasks based on their difficulty. DeepSeek’s researchers described this as an “aha moment,” where the model itself identified and articulated novel solutions to challenging problems (see screenshot below). This milestone underscored the power of reinforcement learning to unlock advanced reasoning capabilities without relying on traditional training methods like SFT.
Source: DeepSeek-R1 paper. Don’t let this graphic intimidate you. The key takeaway is the red line, where the model literally used the phrase “aha moment.” Researchers latched onto this as a striking example of the model’s ability to rethink problems in an anthropomorphic tone. For the researchers, they said it was their own “aha moment.”
The researchers conclude: “It underscores the power and beauty of reinforcement learning: rather than explicitly teaching the model on how to solve a problem, we simply provide it with the right incentives, and it autonomously develops advanced problem-solving strategies.”
More than RL
However, it’s true that the model needed more than just RL. The paper goes on to talk about how despite the RL creating unexpected and powerful reasoning behaviors, this intermediate model DeepSeek-R1-Zero did face some challenges, including poor readability, and language mixing (starting in Chinese and switching over to English, for example). So only then did the team decide to create a new model, which would become the final DeepSeek-R1 model. This model, again based on the V3 base model, was first injected with limited SFT – focused on a “small amount of long CoT data” or what was called cold-start data, to fix some of the challenges. After that, it was put through the same reinforcement learning process of R1-Zero. The paper then talks about how R1 went through some final rounds of fine-tuning.
Meta’s open-weights model Llama 3, for example, exploded in popularity last year, as it was fine-tuned by developers wanting their own custom models. Similarly, now DeepSeek-R1 is already being used to distill its reasoning into an array of other, much smaller models – the difference being that DeepSeek offers industry-leading performance. This includes running tiny versions of the model on mobile phones, for example.
DeepSeek-R1 not only performs better than the leading open source alternative, Llama 3. It shows its entire chain of thought of its answers transparently. Meta’s Llama hasn’t been instructed to do this as a default; it takes aggressive prompting of Llama to do this.
The transparency has also provided a PR black-eye to OpenAI, which has so far hidden its chains of thought from users, citing competitive reasons and not to confuse users when a model gets something wrong. Transparency allows developers to pinpoint and address errors in a model’s reasoning, streamlining customizations to meet enterprise requirements more effectively.
For enterprise decision-makers, DeepSeek’s success underscores a broader shift in the AI landscape: leaner, more efficient development practices are increasingly viable. Organizations may need to reevaluate their partnerships with proprietary AI providers, considering whether the high costs associated with these services are justified when open-source alternatives can deliver comparable, if not superior, results.
To be sure, no massive lead
While DeepSeek’s innovation is groundbreaking, by no means has it established a commanding market lead. Because it published its research, other model companies will learn from it, and adapt. Meta and Mistral, the French open source model company, may be a beat behind, but it will probably only be a few months before they catch up. As Meta’s lead researcher Yann Lecun put it: “The idea is that everyone profits from everyone else’s ideas. No one ‘outpaces’ anyone and no country ‘loses’ to another. No one has a monopoly on good ideas. Everyone’s learning from everyone else.” So it’s execution that matters.
Ultimately, it’s the consumers, startups and other users who will win the most, because DeepSeek’s offerings will continue to drive the price of using these models near zero (again aside from cost of running models at inference). This rapid commoditization could pose challenges – indeed, massive pain – for leading AI providers that have invested heavily in proprietary infrastructure. As many commentators have put it, including Chamath Palihapitiya, an investor and former executive at Meta, this could mean that years of OpEx and CapEx by OpenAI and others will be wasted.
There is substantial commentary about whether it is ethical to use the DeepSeek-R1 model because of the biases instilled in it by Chinese laws, for example that it shouldn’t answer questions about the Chinese government’s brutal crackdown at Tiananmen Square. Despite ethical concerns around biases, many developers view these biases as infrequent edge cases in real-world applications – and they can be mitigated through fine-tuning. Moreover, they point to different, but analogous biases that are held by models from OpenAI and other companies. Meta’s Llama has emerged as a popular open model despite its data sets not being made public, and despite hidden biases, and lawsuits being filed against it as a result.
Questions abound around the ROI of big investments by OpenAI
This all raises big questions about the investment plans pursued by OpenAI, Microsoft and others. OpenAI’s $500 billion Stargate project reflects its commitment to building massive data centers to power its advanced models. Backed by partners like Oracle and Softbank, this strategy is premised on the belief that achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) requires unprecedented compute resources. However, DeepSeek’s demonstration of a high-performing model at a fraction of the cost challenges the sustainability of this approach, raising doubts about OpenAI’s ability to deliver returns on such a monumental investment.
Entrepreneur and commentator Arnaud Bertrand captured this dynamic, contrasting China’s frugal, decentralized innovation with the U.S. reliance on centralized, resource-intensive infrastructure: “It’s about the world realizing that China has caught up — and in some areas overtaken — the U.S. in tech and innovation, despite efforts to prevent just that.” Indeed, yesterday another Chinese company, ByteDance announced Doubao-1.5-pro, which Includes a “Deep Thinking” mode that surpasses OpenAI’s o1 on the AIME benchmark.
Want to dive deeper into how DeepSeek-R1 is reshaping AI development? Check out our in-depth discussion on YouTube, where I explore this breakthrough with ML developer Sam Witteveen. Together, we break down the technical details, implications for enterprises, and what this means for the future of AI:
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If you want to impress your boss, VB Daily has you covered. We give you the inside scoop on what companies are doing with generative AI, from regulatory shifts to practical deployments, so you can share insights for maximum ROI.
Wondering how to file taxes effectively? If so, you’re likely considering the best approach to tackle the process. Just like the saying goes, “The longest journey starts with a single step.” So, let’s take the first step with this essential guide for how to file taxes.
The First Step: Gather Filing Information from the Previous Year
Whether you’re going to file your own taxes 0r use tax preparation services, your first step before you prepare and file a tax return is to make life easier and gather all the pertinent filing information from the past year. That may include:
A W2 form
A 1099, or multiple 1099s, and documentation of expenses. A basic thing to know as a side business taxes guide is that you’ll get a 1099 from all who paid you $600 or more during the year.
For self-employed people (who run a business and don’t receive 1099s), you’ll need documents about your revenue and expenses.
When Can You Start Filing Taxes for the Year?
It’s tax season again. If you were filing online, you may have already begun. You can kick off your tax preparation required by the IRS by entering all the necessary information. If you’ve changed your address or filing status, updating that information is a quick and efficient first step to streamline the process.
Do you anticipate a refund? The quicker you file, the sooner that refund will arrive.
Decide How to File Your Federal Income Tax Return
Filing IRS federal taxes can be simple or complicated. You may be able to file for free online. Which type is your tax return?
That’s the first step in the decision process. If you only have a w2, for example, you should be able to prepare and file taxes on your own.
Even if you have more than one job and multiple W2s, federal and state taxes have already been deducted. Local taxes may also have been deducted, or you may have to file them separately. You’ll use the standard deduction, which is $14,600 if your filing status is single. You can learn how to file taxes using IRS free file. Or you can use basic tax preparation software to electronically prepare your federal income tax return.
If you are self-employed and wondering how to file self-employment taxes, tax filing gets a bit more complicated. You can still file taxes on your own, but you’ll appreciate the guidance of either a professional preparer or the best tax software as you prepare your federal return.
Here are a few tips from ClearValue Tax about how to safely and easily maximize your tax refund:
The Best Options for Filing Tax Returns
Solo? Software? Tax preparer? Free file? Here is more detailed information about the best options for filing tax returns:
Tax Software
Tax preparation software can make it easier to file your federal tax return. Additionally, the information you gather for your federal return can also be utilized for filing your state and local tax returns.
As you use tax return software to do your own tax return, you’ll be prompted to add information that may garner tax breaks. You may find tax deductions that you didn’t know you had (see below).
Hire a Tax Preparer
Hiring a tax professional is an excellent choice, particularly if you are new to handling your own taxes due to a recent business venture. A tax expert provides assistance with tax preparation and can offer advice on strategies to help you save money in the future.
IRS Forms Online
All the forms required for federal tax filing can be accessed through the IRS. For state and local taxes, you will need different forms. You can download and print these forms to use as worksheets before utilizing IRS Free File, or you can fill them out directly using the IRS fillable forms.
Free File
You can file an IRS-free file federal tax return. Well, the IRS free file option part is free – of course, you may still need to pay what you owe on your tax return! You can pay what you owe using a credit card, linking to your bank account or setting up a payment plan (if you can’t immediately pay all you owe.) You can receive a refund by linking to your bank account.
Here’s a table that lists the best options for filing your tax returns, along with their pros and cons.
Option
Description
Pros
Cons
Solo
Filing taxes on your own without assistance.
– Complete control over your filing process.
– May miss out on potential tax breaks or deductions.
Tax Software
Utilizing tax preparation software to file federal taxes, with potential options for state and local taxes.
– Streamlined process with prompts for tax breaks.
– Some software may have associated costs.
Tax Preparer
Hiring a tax professional for guided tax preparation and potential future money-saving suggestions.
– Expert guidance and assistance.
– Can be more expensive compared to other options.
IRS Forms Online
Accessing all necessary federal tax forms directly from the IRS for manual filling or as worksheets.
– Free option for those comfortable with manual filling.
– Requires more effort and calculations compared to software.
Free File
Using the IRS free file option for filing federal taxes; may need to pay owed taxes or set up payment plans.
– Free option for federal tax filing.
– Additional costs if you owe taxes or opt for refund options that involve linked accounts.
Each option has its advantages and disadvantages, so choosing the best approach depends on your comfort level with tax filing, the complexity of your tax situation, and budget considerations. Consider the features and benefits of each option to find the one that suits your needs and ensures a smooth and accurate tax filing experience.
Determine What Tax Bracket You Fall Into
There are 7 tax brackets that determine your tax rate. The tax rate ranges from 10% to 37%.
Your taxable income is calculated using the total of your earned and investment income and then adjusting that figure based on deductions. Read more about deductions below.
Get Your Tax Documents Together
Trust us – it’s important to gather all your tax documents before you begin. You might already have everything you require, such as your QuickBooks files or similar software. Alternatively, your documents may be stored in a less formal place, like the Big Drawer. Either way, let’s get started:
Tax Deductions
The total amount of your tax deductions will influence your choice between itemizing on your income tax return and opting for the standard deduction. The standard deduction varies by filing status, so you’ll need to calculate your total deductions to determine which option you qualify for.
Let’s take a look at the following possible tax deductions you may be eligible for:
State and Local Income Taxes: The money you’ve paid on your state and local income tax burden can be deducted from your federal income tax return.
Real Estate and Personal Property Taxes: The money you’ve paid for these taxes can also be deducted as you file your federal taxes.
Home Mortgage Interest: Depending on your mortgage rate, the amount of interest you pay may be significant.
Gifts to Charity: Charitable donations can also be deducted. You’ll need receipts, plus documentation that proves the entity that receives your gift is a charitable organization.
Medical and Dental Expenses: This includes the cost of premiums you’ve paid. If you’re on the Healthcare.gov insurance (and receive a discounted policy), this doesn’t include the total premium amount for the policy, but it does include the portion of the premium that you pay. Other medical and dental expenses may be covered, but only if the cost exceeds 7.5% of your Adjusted Gross Income.
Student Loan Interest: The amount of interest you’ve paid on a student loan may also be deducted, even if you’re no longer a full-time student.
How to Pay Your Taxes
Now that you know how to file taxes online, you can also ensure that your taxes are paid on time. The best way to do that is to pay as you file – you’ll be hit with interest charges for past-due amounts on your account.
Bank Account
When you file a tax return, you can pay from a checking or savings account.
Card
You can pay with a personal or business credit card.
Payment Plan
Taxpayers can set up scheduled payments. You can set up the process for free online, using the IRS free file website.
Tax Filing Extensions for the Upcoming Tax Filing Season
If you require additional time, you can file for an extension at no cost. It is important to submit your extension request by the tax due date. Filing for an extension only requires minimal information. You will need to provide estimates and utilize IRS Form 4868, which is available for free download and use.
How to File an Amended Tax Return
Taxpayers can make mistakes when they file taxes. You may have left out a deduction, for example. Or if you’re self-employed, you may get a 1099 late and want to add that to your return.
You’ll need to file an Amended Tax Return using IRS form 1040X.
How to File Back Taxes
If you find yourself in a situation where you owe back taxes, it’s essential to take the appropriate steps to address the issue. If you don’t, you can be looking at lots of accrued interest or even penalties.
The best course of action is to work directly with the IRS to resolve the outstanding tax debt. To begin the process, you’ll need to set up an account using irs.gov, which allows you to access the necessary tools and resources for managing your back taxes.
Setting up an account with the IRS is a straightforward process, typically done online through their official website. Once you have your account established, you can explore the available payment options to determine the best plan for your financial situation. The IRS offers various payment plans, allowing you to spread out the payments over a period that suits your budget.
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As AI pervades every sphere of modern life, the central challenge facing business leaders, policymakers and innovators is no longer whether to adopt intelligent systems but how. In a world marked by escalating polarization, resource depletion, eroding trust in institutions and volatile information landscapes, the critical imperative is to engineer AI so that it contributes meaningfully and sustainably to human and planetary well-being.
Prosocial AI — a framework of design, deployment and governance principles that ensure AI is thoughtfully tailored, trained, tested and targeted to uplift people and the planet — is more than a moral stance or PR veneer. It is a strategic approach to positioning AI within a broader ecology of intelligence that values collective flourishing over narrow optimization.
The ABCD of AI’s potential: From gloom to glory
The rationale for prosocial AI emerges from four intertwined realms — agency, bonding, climate and division (ABCD). Each domain highlights the dual character of AI: It can either intensify existing dysfunctions or act as a catalyst for regenerative, inclusive solutions.
Agency: Too often, AI-driven platforms rely on addictive loops and opaque recommender systems that erode user autonomy. Prosocial AI, by contrast, can activate agency by revealing the provenance of its suggestions, offering meaningful user controls and respecting the multifaceted nature of human decision-making. It is not merely about “consent” or “transparency” as abstract buzzwords; it is about designing AI interactions that acknowledge human complexity — the interplay of cognition, emotion, bodily experience and social context — and enabling individuals to navigate their digital environments without succumbing to manipulation or distraction.
Bonding: Digital technologies can either fracture societies into echo chambers or serve as bridges that connect diverse people and ideas. Prosocial AI applies nuanced linguistic and cultural models to identify shared interests, highlight constructive contributions and foster empathy across boundaries. Instead of fueling outrage for attention, it helps participants discover complementary perspectives, strengthening communal bonds and reinforcing the delicate social fabrics that hold societies together.
Climate: AI’s relationship with the environment is fraught with tension. AI can optimize supply chains, enhance climate modeling and support environmental stewardship. However, the computational intensity of training large models often entails a considerable carbon footprint. A prosocial lens demands designs that balance these gains against ecological costs — adopting energy-efficient architectures, transparent lifecycle assessments and ecologically sensitive data practices. Rather than treat the planet as an afterthought, prosocial AI anchors climate considerations as a cardinal priority: AI must not only advise on sustainability but must be sustainable.
Division: The misinformation cascades and ideological rifts that define our era are not an inevitable byproduct of technology, but a result of design choices that privilege virality over veracity. Prosocial AI counters this by embedding cultural and historical literacy into its processes, respecting contextual differences and providing fact-checking mechanisms that enhance trust. Rather than homogenizing knowledge or imposing top-down narratives, it nurtures informed pluralism, making digital spaces more navigable, credible and inclusive.
Double literacy: Integrating AI and NI
Realizing this vision depends on cultivating what we might call “double literacy.” On one side is AI literacy: mastering the technical intricacies of algorithms, understanding how biases emerge from data and establishing rigorous accountability and oversight mechanisms. On the other side is natural intelligence (NI) literacy: A comprehensive, embodied understanding of human cognition and emotion (brain and body), personal identity (self) and cultural embeddedness (society).
This NI literacy is not a soft skill set perched on the margins of innovation; it is fundamental. Human intelligence is shaped by neurobiology, physiology, interoception, cultural narratives and community ethics — an intricate tapestry that transcends reductive notions of “rational actors.” By bringing NI literacy into dialogue with AI literacy, developers, decision-makers and regulators can ensure that digital architectures honor our multidimensional human reality. This holistic approach fosters systems that are ethically sound, context-sensitive and capable of complementing rather than constraining human capacities.
AI and NI in synergy: Prosocial AI goes beyond zero-sum thinking
The popular imagination often pits machines against humans in a zero-sum contest. Prosocial AI challenges this dichotomy. Consider the beauty of complementarity in healthcare: AI excels at pattern recognition, sifting through vast troves of medical images to detect anomalies that might elude human specialists. Physicians, in turn, draw on their embodied cognition and moral instincts to interpret results, communicate complex information and consider each patient’s broader life context. The outcome is not simply more efficient diagnostics; it is more humane, patient-centered care. Similar paradigms can transform law, finance, governance and education decision-making.
By integrating the precision of AI with the nuanced judgment of human experts, we might transition from hierarchical command-and-control models to collaborative intelligence ecosystems. Here, machines handle complexity at scale and humans provide the moral vision and cultural fluency necessary to ensure that these systems serve authentic public interests.
Building a prosocial infrastructure
To embed prosocial AI at the core of our future, we need a concerted effort across all sectors:
Industry and tech companies: Innovators can prioritize “human-in-the-loop” designs and explicitly reward metrics tied to well-being rather than engagement at any cost. Instead of designing AI to hook users, they can build systems that inform, empower and uplift — measured by improvements in health outcomes, educational attainment, environmental sustainability or social cohesion.
Example: The Partnership on AI provides frameworks for prosocial innovation, helping guide developers toward responsible practices.
Civil society and NGOs: Community groups and advocacy organizations can guide the development and deployment of AI, testing new tools in real-world contexts. They can bring ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse perspectives to the design table, ensuring that the resulting AI systems serve a broad range of human experiences and needs.
Educational Institutions: Schools and universities should integrate double literacy into their curricula while reinforcing critical thinking, ethics and cultural studies. By nurturing AI and NI literacy, educational bodies can help ensure that future generations are skilled in machine learning (ML) and deeply grounded in human values.
Example: The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI exemplify transdisciplinary approaches that unite technical rigor with human inquiry.
Governments and policymakers: Legislation and regulatory frameworks can incentivize prosocial innovation, making it economically viable for companies to produce AI systems that are transparent, accountable and aligned with social goals. Citizen assemblies and public consultations can inform these policies, ensuring that the direction of AI reflects society’s diverse voices.
Beyond boxes to a holistic hybrid future
As AI integrates deeply into the global socio-economic fabric, we must resist the impulse to treat technology as a black box optimized for specific metrics. Instead, we can envision a hybrid future where human and machine intelligences co-evolve, guided by shared principles and grounded in a holistic understanding of ourselves and our environments. Prosocial AI moves beyond a simplistic choice between innovation and responsibility. It offers a richer tapestry of possibilities, where AI empowers rather than addicts, connects rather than fragments and regenerates rather than depletes.
The future of AI will not be determined solely by computational prowess or algorithmic cunning. How we organically weave these capabilities into the human sphere will define it, acknowledging the interplay of brain and body, self and society, local nuance and planetary imperatives. In doing so, we create a more expansive standard of success: One measured not only by profit or efficiency but by the flourishing of people and the planet’s resilience.
Prosocial AI can serve along that path. The future starts now, with a new ABCD: Aspire to an inclusive society; Believe that you are part in making it happen; Choose which side of history you want to be on; and Do what you feel is right.
Following two decades with UNICEF and the publication of various books, Dr. Cornelia C. Walther is presently a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania working on ProSocial AI.
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Our Small Biz Breakdown crew returns this week and they’re talking about technology, specifically AI, and its impact on small business owners in America.
The discussion was prompted by the presence of several tech billionaires at the inauguration of President Donald Trump this past week, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. After discussing what influence these three and others will have on the 47th President, our expert panel gets into a lengthy discussion on AI, the future of it, its accessibility, and how small businesses can and should be utilizing it.
Through that discussion, however, a central theme stands out. AI really doesn’t matter if your business doesn’t have customers and AI can’t really solve that persistent struggle that any small business faces, whether they utilize AI or not.
Check out this great discussion and feel free to join in by leaving some comments after you watch the latest episode of Small Biz Breakdown:
Small Business News Roundup – Jan. 25, 2025
Here are the headlines that should grab the attention of small business owners from the past week, including some big announcements from companies providing important services and products to entrepreneurs:
Marketing and creative professionals are under growing pressure to demonstrate their value to business outcomes, according to Smartsheet’s 2025 Pulse of Marketing Report.
Wix has announced a new integration with YouTube Shopping, allowing merchants to sell products directly through the platform. The move expands Wix’s social shopping capabilities and enables merchants to reach wider audiences by leveraging YouTube’s extensive user base. Through this integration, Wix merchants can seamlessly display products in a store format on their YouTube profiles.
Adobe has introduced significant updates to its flagship tools—Premiere Pro (beta), After Effects (beta), and Frame.io—designed to streamline workflows and reduce time-consuming tasks for video professionals. The updates come just before the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, aiming to support filmmakers and motion designers with new AI-powered tools and enhanced performance features.
Samsung has unveiled its highly anticipated Galaxy S25 series, positioning the Galaxy S25 Ultra, Galaxy S25+, and Galaxy S25 as cutting-edge devices that integrate advanced artificial intelligence to create a personalized and intuitive mobile experience. Pre-orders begin today, with general availability set for February 7.
Upwork Inc. (Nasdaq: UPWK), a global platform connecting businesses with independent talent, has released its 2025 In-Demand Skills report, revealing rapid growth in advanced AI capabilities and a rising need for human-centric expertise. The findings reflect the evolving priorities of businesses adapting to technological disruption and global workforce changes.
Zoom has unveiled updates to its Team Chat platform, featuring a redesigned sidebar and new AI-powered capabilities to enhance productivity and streamline collaboration. The updates, now available to Zoom Workplace users, aim to provide a more customizable and efficient workspace for managing communication and tasks.
A new survey conducted by WSFS Bank highlights growing optimism among small business owners for the year ahead, with 60% of respondents anticipating a slight or significant increase in revenue for 2025. Despite economic hurdles over the past two years, many small business owners plan to pursue financing to invest in growth and operational improvements.
The national average price for a gallon of gas has risen by four cents to $3.10 over the past week, fueled by oil prices hovering around $80 per barrel. This increase comes despite low domestic gasoline demand, which dropped to 8.32 million barrels per day (b/d) last week, according to AAA.
Salesforce has unveiled two new AI-powered innovations, Agentforce for Retail and Retail Cloud with Modern POS, aimed at boosting productivity and delivering personalized shopping experiences across both physical and digital channels.
The second term of President Donald Trump has begun. There are a lot of questions about what will happen, what will differ and stay the same from Trump’s first term as President.
TikTok has gone dark. On Jan. 19, access to the site was blocked. Trying to access the mobile app returned a black screen with a white dialogue box that reads: “A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can’t use TikTok for now.
Gateway Funnel Pros has introduced a comprehensive payment gateway and merchant account service tailored specifically for WooCommerce entrepreneurs selling health and wellness products. The service addresses challenges faced by businesses in this niche, ensuring secure and efficient credit card processing within the WooCommerce ecosystem.
A recent study by ScoutLogic reveals a significant shift in what employees value most in job perks. The analysis of Google search data highlights a growing preference for lifestyle-oriented benefits such as travel opportunities, flexibility, and personal development over traditional perks like retirement plans and stock options.
