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To the question of what sense it makes to compete with Google, OpenAI or Anthropic in AI, Mistral has an answer: small and local models

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French startup Mistral AI Mistral 3 has been launcheda family of 10 open source artificial intelligence models that represent its most ambitious commitment to date. The Parisian company, which is often considered the main European hope in the development of AI, seeks to differentiate itself from the large American technology companies by betting on flexibility and deployment in all types of devices instead of raw power. Under these lines we tell you all the news. What Mistral has presented. The Mistral 3 family includes a flagship model called Mistral Large 3, with 675 billion parameters, and nine compact models grouped under the name Ministral 3 (in three sizes: 14,000, 8,000 and 3 billion parameters). All models are released under Apache 2.0 license, allowing unrestricted commercial use. The large model also has multimodal capacity, being able to process text and images. It is also multilingual, with a special emphasis on European languages. On the other hand, small models can run on devices with just 4 GB of memory, making them perfect for modest laptops, mobile phones and embedded systems without the need for an internet connection. Why strategy matters. While OpenAI, Google and Anthropic focus on increasingly powerful and closed systems with agentic capabilitiesMistral has focused on the breadth and scope of its models, efficiency and what its co-founder Guillaume Lample calls “distributed intelligence.” According to declared told VentureBeat, the company believes the future of AI is defined not by scale, but by ubiquity: models small enough to run in drones, vehicles, robots and consumer devices. The economic and practical argument. Lample explained It means that in more than 90% of cases, a small, specifically tuned model can get the job done, especially if it is trained with synthetic data for specific tasks. According to Lample, this is not only cheaper and faster, but it eliminates concerns about privacy, latency and reliability. The company also has teams that work directly with customers to analyze specific problems and fine-tune small models that perform specific tasks. This, above all, can attract companies that become frustrated when choosing the best possible model for a specific task and, if it does not perform adequately, they end up giving up. Europe is lagging behind. If we talk about innovation and technology around AI, we do not hesitate to say that Europe is leagues away of what companies in the United States and China are offering. This is why Mistral AI advocates a different approach in which it prioritizes massive deployment in devices and the flexibility of its smaller models. The capacity offered by open models can be a great asset to continue betting on these technologies. In China, for example, the open models of DeepSeek, Alibaba or Kimi are emerging widelyabove in certain tasks even competitors as large as ChatGPT. Lample explained that most leading Chinese models are exclusively text-based, with separate image processing systems. For this reason, they also want to opt for a multimodal approach. A complete ecosystem. Mistral no longer only offers language models. The company has built an entire ecosystem that includes Mistral Agents APIwith connectors for code execution, web search and image generation; Masterlyyour reasoning model; Mistral Code for programming assistance; and AI Studioan application deployment platform that also has analytical and logging capabilities. Furthermore, his assistant Le Chat It has incorporated a deep research mode, voice capabilities and a list of more than 20 enterprise integrations. Thus, in addition to its model offering, the company can provide other companies with a whole layer of personalized products and services, with the aim of being their main source of financing. Digital sovereignty. Although Mistral is often characterized as Europe’s answer to OpenAI, the company prefers to consider itself as ‘a transatlantic collaboration’. Its CEO, in fact, is in the United States, has teams on both continents and trains these models in collaboration with American teams and infrastructure. However, its positioning as a defender of European digital sovereignty has earned it strategic partnerships with the French army, the country’s employment agency, the Luxembourg government and various European public organizations. The European Commission presented in October a strategy to promote European AI tools that provide security and resilience while boosting the continent’s industrial competitiveness. Offline capabilities for democratization. The use cases that Mistral has designed for its small models include, above all, local applications, such as factory robots that use sensor data in real time and without relying on the cloud, drones in natural disasters or rescues that operate offline, and smart cars with functional AI assistants in remote areas. Lample stood out that there are billions of people without internet access but with laptops or cell phones capable of running these small models, which he considers potentially revolutionary. Additionally, by running on the device, these apps preserve the privacy of user data. Real “open source” debate. Not everyone celebrates Mistral’s approach. Some critics question his decision to opt for models’open weight‘, that is, free to access but providing less information about their code than truly “open source” models, which provide the code and training data necessary to train a model from scratch. Andreas Liesenfeld, assistant professor at Radboud University and co-founder of the European Open Source AI Index, declared to the Financial Times that data at scale is the missing key in the European AI innovation ecosystem and that Mistral does not contribute to that at all. The long-term strategic bet. Lample recognize that their models are “a little behind” the most advanced closed systems, but argued that the important thing is that “they are catching up quickly.” Time will tell if Mistral’s approach to low-cost, versatile models with local applications ends up working for them to end up positioning themselves as one of the great European bets on AI. Cover image | Mistral AI In Xataka | China already has an army of 5.8 million engineers. His new plan involves accelerating doctorates

If the question is whether they can geolocate you during your work day and use it to fire you, justice leaves no doubt: yes

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Know that your company knows where are you every minute of your workday can generate discomfort and even doubts about its legality. However, the courts have been clarifying this area for some time. A recent ruling by the Superior Court of Justice of Asturias does so with unusual forcefulness. The case involves an elevator maintenance technician and an application time control which recorded, in addition to his schedule, the exact point from which he clocked in. What seemed like a routine tool ended up becoming the key to a disciplinary dismissal which today is fully validated by justice. Schedule control with advanced features. As detailed in the sentence issued by the Social Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of Asturias, a maintenance employee of an elevator company used a time control application installed on the corporate mobile. His function was simple: mark the beginning and end of his day and do it from the place where he attended to each incident. The company distributed the routes on a daily basis and registration had to be done at the customer’s location, not from another point. However, the employee’s workday began to show strange patterns. In one month, the company detected up to 11 outbound signings made from the employee’s home and coinciding with work hours. The record indicated that, instead of closing his last intervention from the customer’s location, the technician finished his day on time, but already at home. Notices, warnings… and a disciplinary dismissal. The company did not act immediately. Before the dismissal, he issued several internal warnings to the worker and reminded him of the operation of the application, pointing out the irregularities detected and reminding him the obligation to sign from each real location. Even so, the signings from home continued, so the company interpreted that the agreed working day was being breached. Finally, he proceeded to the disciplinary dismissal, considering it proven that the technician ended his day prematurely and from a place outside the workplace. The Social Chamber of the TSJA confirmed the decision of disciplinary dismissal and validated the use of geolocation as evidence. What the law says. The TSJA ruling is based on the article 20.3 of the Workers’ Statutewhich specifies “the employer may adopt the surveillance and control measures he deems most appropriate to verify compliance by the worker with his or her work obligations and duties.” Therefore, and given the mobility nature of the position, the time control system with geolocation was justified. In addition, Organic Law 3/2018 on Data Protection (LOPDGDD) specifically regulates geolocation systems. Your article 90 requires clear information about the existence of these systems, their purpose, the scope of the processing and data protection rights. In this case, the app was corporate, the device belonged to the company, the worker knew how it worked, and the application only recorded the location when the application was opened. Taking all these regulations into account, the TSJA considered that the company acted within the law and used a proportional tool, linked to strictly labor purposes and correctly communicated to the employee. Time nuances. He Workers Statute It also precisely delimits when the day begins and ends. Article 34.5 establishes that “working time will be calculated so that both at the beginning and at the end of the daily shift the worker is at his or her workplace.” This is where we have to differentiate workplace and job position. It is not a minor nuance: effective working time begins when one is operationally available to perform the assigned functions. This does not mean that the employee must arrive at the workplace at the agreed time, but rather that he must be at his workplace at that time. If there are 10 minutes from the company entrance to your position and you arrive at the work center at your agreed time, you would be arriving 10 minutes late. The same applies at departure time. That employee must remain at his position until the agreed time, and then collect his things and leave the company. If you are leaving the company premises at the agreed time at the end of the day, you would be leaving 10 minutes early. The only exception to the rule: there is no job to go to. The Supreme Court has recognized a relevant exception: When the company does not have offices, premises or any physical space where workers can start their day, the employee’s home can be considered a valid starting point for the day. This doctrine applies especially to completely decentralized companies whose workers only move from client to client. In these situations (well accredited and exceptional), the travel time from home to the first client can be counted as workbecause the home assumes the function of the only available operating point. But as long as there is a work center or a clearly defined place where the activity can begin, this exception does not apply. Clocking in from home, as in the case of the Asturias elevator technician, is not justified and is a non-compliance with working hours. In Xataka | Breakfast and the first 15 minutes of entry are work: the Supreme Court sets the limits of time control Image | Unsplash (Kevin Grieve)

If the question is why we continue to be drunk on airplanes, the answer is simple: because it is a business.

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We may all be more sensitive to flying from 9/11 attacksbut so is the feeling that every time there are more altercations inside airplanes with a common denominator: the alcohol. Scenes of drunk passengers causing delays, fights, vomiting or even attempts to open doors in mid-flight they are already part of the collective imagination of air travel. The question is almost obligatory: is there really no solution? An increasingly visible phenomenon. They remembered on CNN the recent case of the man who, completely intoxicated, forced to evict a plane in Chicago after vomiting during filming is just one example among hundreds of incidents documented year after year. In the United States alone, a review of more than 1,600 reports from the federal system revealed an incontestable pattern: alcohol in almost all levels of bad behavior, from arguments and disobedience to physical and sexual attacks. And although public perception confirms the problem (more than half of passengers in the United Kingdom claims to have dealt with with drunk travelers), there is still no consensus on how to stop it. Safety in the air. Plus: cabin crews operate in a space that is, by definition, a metal tube thousands of meters above the ground. They are the ones who must manage both the emotional tension of passengers and the consequences of alcohol mixed with fear of flying, long delays or increasingly narrow cabins. Without the ability to expel anyone mid-flight and with companies that do not always support their decisions, the attendants become in the first and last containment line. Although they receive de-escalation training, they face a type of passenger that did not exist a decade ago: the traveler who mixes alcohol with medications, stimulants or recreational substances, generating episodes of aggressiveness that are difficult to predict and control. Distribution of blame. And here comes the crux, because no one wants to assume the root of the problem. Airlines blame airports for allow consumption unlimited in bars and restaurants prior to boarding, pointing that they hardly sell alcohol on board, especially on short flights. The airports, in turn, point out that their role is commercial, not disciplinary, and that responsibility falls on the air operators. And within the flights themselves, the auxiliaries They blame gate agents for not blocking access to obviously intoxicated passengers, while pilots denounce that insufficient disciplinary measures are taken against repeat offenders. The fragmentation between ground and air causes each party to offload the problem on another, creating an operational vacuum that allows the situation to repeat itself flight after flight. The economic dimension. Behind the debate lies a factor that possibly outweighs any security protocol: alcohol, whether we like it or not, is one of the most lucrative businesses of the aeronautical industry. In airports it generates large margins for shops and restaurants, while in the cabin it is used as an incentive in higher categories. Precisely for this reason, rarely clear data is provided on income derived from its sale, and any attempt to limit consumption before boarding is met with resistance from both airport operators and airlines. The result is a permanent contradiction: The industry recognizes that alcohol causes problems, but depends on it financially. In other words, alcohol (and as a consequence, drunks) “interest(s)”, but with a small mouth. Public pressure. The number of passengers support restrictive measures It grows as incidents go viral and attract media attention. Some proposals already have a favorable majority: drinking limits at airports, breathalyzer controls before boarding or even total restrictions on certain routes. Meanwhile, regulators are toughening penalties: the FAA imposed its largest fine in history (more than $80,000) to an extremely violent passenger, and the airlines are expanding their ban lists to repeat travelers. However, the approach remains reactive, not preventive, and each solution encounters resistance in the chain of interests that sustains global air tourism. Between I want and I don’t want. Thus, the problem of the drunk passenger does not arise only from alcohol, but from a fragmented system where no one wants to bear the cost of controlling it. Airports that maximize profits, airlines that fear losing revenue, overloaded crews, regulators who act after the fact and frustrated passengers who see a drink as the instant answer to discomfort. Everyone agrees that there is a problem, but no one wants to be who imposes the solution. The result is a sky increasingly tensewhere safety depends on the professionalism of the crews and a kind of unstable balance that is broken too easily. Image | Instagram, X In Xataka | “This is the last time I pay 10 euros for a gin and tonic”: the anger of British tourists at the price of alcohol in Spain In Xataka | The “tourist cages” arrive in Valencia: holiday gentrification in Spain goes up a gear

In Barajas there is an isolated baroque hermitage in the middle of a roundabout. The question is how the hell did it get there?

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Sometimes the story leaves us with hints of such fine irony that they seem like the work of the best of screenwriters. It happens in Barajas. It has stood there for more than three centuries a baroque hermitage dedicated to Our Lady of Solitude, the landlady of the district. The passage of time and the development of the area, marked by the proximity of the Madrid airport, has made the temple a true tribute to that very thing: loneliness. After all, it stands isolated in the middle of a roundabout. The question is… How the hell did it get there? A nod to history. In a way the hermitage Nuestra Señora de la Soledad is more than just a small baroque temple. It is also a reminder of a style and philosophy of religious architecture that shined in its day and faded with the passage of time. This is what the Official College of Architects of Madrid says, which remember on your website that the building was part of “the network of chapels, hermitages and humiliations that dotted the roads of Castile” centuries ago. “This dense network of small pieces has been progressively disappearing, depending on the growth of neighboring populations and the decline of the program they proposed,” COAM explains. “However, some of these pieces have been saved from the process, almost always for rather random reasons, such as their location in points of little speculative interest or their relationship with the memory of the place. Both occur in the case of Nuestra Señora de la Soledad.” But what is the temple like? A baroque hermitage from the mid-17th century made up of four aligned structures: an access portico, the nave of the faithful, the sanctuary and a semi-detached house at the head. “All of this composed with attention to a truly exquisite scale, whose containment in plan reinforces the ascending character of the complex,” explains the school, which refers to the building as “a true treatise on wise popular architecture.” Inside stands out a baroque altarpiece with busts of the Virgin, Jesus and Saint Rita. The most curious thing about the hermitage, however, is not its structure, its interior architecture or the pieces of sacred art that it preserves. Not even its importance as an example of the region’s religious heritage. If there is something that attracts attention, it is its location, something that can be appreciated with a simple glance to Google Maps. Instead of being located at the top of a mountain, a meadow, a square or a town, the hermitage is located inside a gazebo, surrounded by a ring of asphalt. It was actually there before the land became a roundabout. Trapped between cars. Your case is so peculiar that years ago Madrilanea treated him and more recently dedicated a report The Confidential. Both explain that to understand the location of the hermitage we have to go back decades, when the high traffic on the road from Vicálvaro to Barajas led the authorities to think about ways to improve the road. The problem is that there was something that hindered their plans: the temple of Nuestra Señora de la Soledad. The possibility of demolishing the hermitage or even moving it was put on the table, an idea difficult to execute considering that it was built based on brick and masonry. Neighborhood pressure ensured that both proposals were shelved and the building remained in place, although next to the road. Was that all? No. In the 90s the temple once again generated debate because it was located in the middle of the project to connect Plaza de Castilla with the airport through the M-11. Once again, the hermitage survived again, but at the cost of being left in an even more peculiar situation: the solution that was put on the table to avoid demolishing it was to open a tunnel under the ground. As the years went by, the old walls of the temple would see another project to improve the connection of an area that has ended up marked by the growth of the capital and the pull of the Madrid-Barajas airport, which today is an entry, exit or transit point for more than 60 million of travelers per year, in addition to thousands of tons of merchandise. The hermitage has endured, but it has not come for free: now it is isolated in a roundabout, converted into a junction of roads. Breaking the norm. The COAM admits that Barajas is not a common case. “We must recognize how unusual it is to know how to make the conservation of these monuments compatible with the layout of large infrastructures such as, in this case, the express access route to the airport,” points out the schoolfor which the temple is today “a strange monument”, “practically useless for its former purposes, isolated at the roundabout at the intersection of the expressway and Logroño avenue.” The situation of the hermitage is far from being ideal in any case. And not only because it has been left “alien” to the town, connected by a zebra crossing. There are those who warn that, like other historical monuments in a similar situation, the temple is very exposed to road traffic, with its load of pollution, smoke and the vibrations generated by the passage of cars, buses and trucks. Images | Google Earth and Wikipedia 1 and 2 In Xataka | There is a new very profitable and not at all legal business in Madrid: charging immigrants a fortune to register them in their homes

The question is not whether Tim Cook will soon stop being CEO of Apple, but who will succeed him: Crossover 1×30

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The end of an era is approaching, they say. Or maybe not. The rumors about Tim Cook’s potential “retirement” are contradictory, and if a few days ago the Financial Times spoke about He would retire early next year.yesterday new data they threw down that possibility. But here it happens that when the river sounds, it carries water, and this conversation does not come from now, but from months ago…or years. The current CEO of Apple came to this position in 2011, after the death of Steve Jobs, and since then he has turned the company into an absolute money-making machine. One that, yes, has disappointed with (theoretical) projects like Project Titan, with a Vision Pro that for the moment is still not taking off or with the surprising irrelevance in the AI ​​segment. That’s not the problem, of course. Although Apple has consolidated itself among the three companies with the largest market capitalization in the world in recent years, what it lacks is spark and the ability to innovate. Today Apple continues to depend heavily on the iPhone, although it is true that in recent years the services have given it a lot of joy. That makes it especially interesting to set up a pool with the main candidates to succeed Tim Cook, and that is what we have done in this new installment of Crossover, in which we debate Cook’s career, but also about who can take that baton. And many variables come into play here. From that operational strategy—will the new Apple be more innovative, or will it continue to focus on making money?—to the geopolitical implications of choosing a new CEO. Because let’s face it: This position is not just technologicalbut also political and diplomatic. There is a lot to cut through here, and it will certainly be interesting to see how the next few months go. On YouTube | Crossover In Xataka | Tim Cook has admitted that Apple is “very open” to acquisitions in AI. These are our candidates

If the question is how to keep an empire together, the ancient Wari were clear: with psychedelic beer

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Archaeologists have found a key to better understand the Waria pre-Inca civilization that flourished among the 6th and 11th centuries AD and expanded throughout much of what is now Peru and areas of Argentina and Chile. The most curious thing is that the findings do not tell us about its architecture, military practices, social structure or economy, but about something apparently much simpler but crucial for the prosperity of the empire: the love of its bosses for psychedelic beer. Psychedelic beer? Exact. The concept is not new. We know that thousands of years ago The Egyptians already made cocktails with wine and hallucinogens (among other ingredients) and the hobby of the cultures pre-Inca cultures by psychoactive plants or the use of psychotropic substances in pre-Columbian Mesoamerican societies. The curious thing about the Wari is not so much what drugs they used but who did it and (above all) why. Its use would not be limited to priests in rituals, but would be used for political purposes. “We see this type of hallucinogen use as a different context than previous civilizations, which seem to have jealously reserved the use of hallucinogens for a select few, or the late Inca Empire that emphasized mass consumption of beer but did not use psychotropic substances such as vilca,” explains Professor Matthew Biwerwho in 2022 already published with other colleagues a study on the subject based on excavations in Quilcapampa (Peru). What did they consume? A mixture of chicha and vilca. To be more precise, an alcoholic drink made from the berries of the plant. Schinus molle and a psychedelic called Anadenanthera colubrina. Archaeologists are aware for a long time that the consumption of this last substance (vilca) dates back to at least 4,000 years ago, especially through pipes or inhaled such as monkfish. This is suggested by remains located in the Inca Cave, an Argentine site. In the Wari site of Quilcapampa, however, archaeologists have found vilca seeds near remains of chicha made with Schinus mollewhich leads them to think that the Wari not only consumed it with the help of pipes, but that they mixed it with chicha to drink it in psychedelic cocktails. Why is it important? Among other things, these concoctions served Wari leaders to show their power. By offering the mixture to their guests they were not only showing off their hospitality, they were also offering a luxury that was not available to everyone. Archaeologists located remains of vilca in Quilcampampa, but in reality the plant grows at hundreds of kilometers from there, in Ayacucho and Cusco. “The Wari added vilca to chicha to impress guests at their feasts, who could not repeat the experience. This created a relationship of debt between the Wari and their guests, probably from the surrounding region,” pointed out Professor Matthew Biwer years ago, when he published his first research. Was it useful for something else? Yes. And that’s what’s really interesting about a new study Posted by Jacob Keer and Justin Jennings in Magazine of American Archeologywhere they focus on another function of the psychedelic concoction based on chicha and vilca. According to their analysis, the cocktail helped the Wari leaders to consolidate their power. As? Organizing communal celebrations in which drinks were offered, fraternization feasts that were held in almost closed patios. “Except for a small patch of sky, they were isolated from the rest of the world in a high-walled interior space,” they relate researchers in your article. “This was the place where they spent hours together, drinking, eating, talking and praying. The hours that the participants spent together must have represented an unforgettable collective experience that forged strong bonds between those who attended.” What was it for? To strengthen ties. These feasts served Wari leaders to force alliances and consolidate their power. And not only because of the staging. Researchers have studied the effects that the psychedelic concoction may have had on attendees, increasing their empathy, facilitating the creation of long-term bonds and smoothing out rough edges in an expanding empire. “Although archaeologists are paying increasing attention to the role of psychedelics in past societies, they devote little time to their long-term psychological effects. One of these effects is neuroplasticity, which can lead to long-lasting prosocial feelings,” the study points outwhich highlights that the “glow” after consuming vilca (an effect that lasted for days) could help unify communities, “playing a fundamental role in the Wari government.” The combination of vilca and beer would in fact help to partially reduce the psychedelic effects, but prolong them over time. Do you all agree? The researchers suggest that people who consumed the psychedelic cocktail showed “greater openness and empathy”, an advantageous attitude in an empire in which “people who had been strangers or even enemies” coexisted. However, not everyone sees it equally clearly. Live Science recently interviewed to several experts, outside the study, who do not hide their skepticism. Among other reasons because they do not see enough evidence that the Wari mixed vilca and beer. It is true that remains were found nearby and there was no trace of pipes or any other indication that the vilca was consumed in the traditional way, but they are missing overwhelming evidence, such as ceramic fragments that preserve both compounds. Images | Wikipedia In Xataka | The Incas did not need writing to forge an empire. And we are closer to solving the key object in your organization

Germany is trying to stop its electricity dependence on China. The question is whether that is even possible.

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Almost four years ago, Germany learned a painful lesson: your industry cannot depend on the energy of a geopolitical rival. The Russian gas crisis after the invasion of Ukraine forced the Germans to make more than one sacrifice while the country’s energy model was transformed. Now, at the gates of 2026, Friedrich Merz’s government faces a déjà vu disturbing. The same stone twice. Germany may have become independent of Gazprom’s gas pipelines, but its solar panels and grid technology bear, directly or indirectly, China’s stamp. Good: Berlin has just hit the brakes. The collapse of a seemingly innocuous financial operation last week has revealed that Germany is carefully reviewing every watt that enters its system to avoid repeating the historic Russian gas mistake. The trigger. The Italian company Snam SpA intended to acquire a minority stake in Open Grid Europe (OGE), one of the largest gas network operators in Germany. On paper, it was an investment between European partners. In practice, the German Economy Ministry saw the shadow of Beijing. The problem was not Snam, but its shareholders. The state-owned State Grid Corporation of China owns 35% of Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, which in turn owns a third of Snam. For the Merz government, that was risk enough. Given Berlin’s refusal to accept the proposed solutions, Snam withdrew its offer last week. A clear message. Berlin does not want companies with Chinese state participation to have access to the country’s energy arteries, even indirectly, which marks a change in doctrine compared to the era of Olaf Scholz, who at the time allowed the Chinese shipping company Cosco to enter the port of Hamburg. The current executive is much more defensive: national security takes precedence over capital. The question is… Too late? If blocking the purchase of a gas network is relatively simple, unraveling technological dependence on China is a logistical and economic nightmare. 95% of the photovoltaic cells installed in Germany come from Chinese manufacturers. And almost the entire wind industry, especially offshore, depends on rare earths controlled by China. The German energy transition is based on Asian hardware. Germany needs Chinese technology to meet its climate goals. And he doesn’t hide it. The German government has already raised this concern in international forums, denouncing the Chinese overcapacity in sectors such as electric mobility and solar energy. Technology that is needed but now considered a “systemic risk.” Is decoupling possible? In 2018, the German government already had to intervene so that the state bank KfW bought a stake in the network operator 50Hertz, preventing it from falling into the hands, again, of the Chinese State Grid. Seven years later, the strategy of “patching” individual acquisitions seems insufficient in the face of structural dependence. If the experience with Russia is any guide, Berlin seems to have decided that, this time, the price of security must be paid in advance, before anyone decides to turn off the tap. But today, the reality of the market is stubborn: replacing Chinese hardware means, almost invariably, paying more and taking longer to deploy renewables. Image | rawpixel In Xataka | If you were expecting cheap electricity this winter, we have bad news: Holland

OpenAI just launched ChatGPT for teachers. The question now is how much education we are willing to delegate to AI

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What happens when a teacher uses artificial intelligence to prepare his classes, a student uses it to do homework, and finally, that same teacher uses AI again to correct them? It may not be the norm yetbut that scenario no longer sounds so far away. The speed at which these tools have been integrated into classrooms has opened a fundamental debate: what do we really learn if we let technology do the work for us? And what does the educational system lose if this process becomes a habit? The landing of AI in education is neither coincidental nor recent. Technological tools have been present in classrooms for years, with platforms such as Google Classroom either Moodle. The novelty is not in using technology, but in relying on systems capable of generating content, proposing solutions or even being used in pedagogical decisions. That is where the big developers—Google, Microsoft, Anthropic and, more recently, OpenAI—have decided to go a step further and position themselves at the center of the educational debate. Here OpenAI lands with a dedicated proposal for teachers in the United States. We are talking about a version of ChatGPT Designed for primary and secondary educators, free for verified teachers, with administrative controls for centers and school districts. Unlike the service that almost all of us know, OpenAI ensures that the data generated in these environments will not be used, by default, to train its models. What ChatGPT offers for teachers Personalized assistance. It allows you to enter school level, curriculum and desired format so that the answers adapt to the real style of the classroom. It is the teacher who controls that configuration. Integration with usual resources. You can generate presentations with Canva, import lesson plans or documents from Google Drive and Microsoft 365, and start a conversation with that context already activated. Ideas from other teachers. Show real examples of teachers already using ChatGPT in their classes, directly below the editor, as a source of inspiration. Teaching collaboration. It makes it easy to create custom GPTs and shared templates to plan units, lessons, or assessments among colleagues in the same school or district. Management from the center. It offers a manageable workspace, with secure accounts and differentiated roles for teachers and academic leaders. What is OpenAI pursuing with this? Among the 800 million weekly ChatGPT users there are many teachers. The company explains that they are using the tool to design teaching units, adapt the curriculum to regional standards or generate examples that help evaluate their students. Let’s look at some of the usage examples you have shared: Generate examples for a task You are an expert English teacher. Using the prompts in the accompanying readings, generate seven different sample answers. Responses should be one paragraph in length and range in quality from very well written to very poor. They must be written following the RACES format (restate, respond, cite, explain and summarize). Include a justification for each answer, indicating your level of writing. Plan a multi-week drive My science department is redesigning the 8th grade physical science curriculum and I need help creating a teaching unit based on the attached objectives. Please make a plan for a 20-day unit with 55-minute classes. I need a guiding question for each day to help focus learning. Provide hands-on activities for students to explore these topics. As we can see, AI is here to stay, and trying to ignore it is not an option. The real question is how to use it without replacing the act of learning, which is much more than completing a task. Because if the teacher uses AI to solve what he has to prepare, and the student does the same to deliver what is required of him, what remains of that process beyond compliance? The educational system is not based on the ability to deliver results, but on the ability to think, make mistakes and argue with one’s own knowledge. An MIT study provides data that begins to illuminate the debate: users who wrote essays with ChatGPT produced the text 60% faster, but their cognitive effort was relevant was reduced by 32%. That is, they achieve a more polished result, but with less mental work. Another study, in this case from the SBS Swiss Business Schoolnotes that the increased use of AI is linked to the deterioration of critical thinking skills. We still do not know what effects this dynamic will have in the medium or long term. What we do know is that the classroom has become a territory where big technology companies want to be. And that the real educational challenge of the next decade will not be deciding whether we use AI, but deciding how much of the educational process we are willing to delegate to it. Images | Xataka with Gemini 3 | OpenAI In Xataka | The problem is not that the AI ​​is not able to read the time. The problem is confirming that he does not reason and only repeats what he has seen.

The only thing that Europe’s AI Law has achieved is to leave us lame. The question is whether turning back will do any good.

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December 8 was a fateful day for the European Union, but not many realized it. And it was because that day the AI ​​Act was passedthe European regulation on artificial intelligence. Thierry Breton, European commissioner, he was pleased with a tweet that automatically became a meme. I was bragging about how Europe had tripped itself up. The responses to that tweet They made it clear that the reception of the regulations was very different from what the EU would have expected. The criticism was forceful and very clear: with these regulations the only thing the EU was achieving was to slow down innovation and make it even more difficult to compete in a segment that was defining the world. While the US and China joined the party without asking permission and without asking for forgiveness, Europe stayed at home happily crocheting. That regulation, which came into force in August 2024instantly caused the AI ​​segment out at two speeds: that of Europe, almost at a standstill, and that of the rest of the world, which stepped on the accelerator (without looking too closely at the consequences). We have seen the consequences of that in the last two years. Europe has been relegated to the second (or third) plane, and with honorable exceptions like the Spanish Freepik or the French Mistral, we have very little to talk about in this area. Meanwhile, the US dominates the commercial plane and China is a steamroller both at a training level as in your open model development. Europe wants to turn back: the question is whether it is too late Yesterday the European Commission presented a project for simplify various digital regulationsand the most important modifications actually affect the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPRor GRPD for its acronym in English). The changes proposed by the Commission will make it easier for companies to share sets of anonymised and pseudo-anonymised personal data. That will have a direct impact on the capacity of AI companies, which They will be able to legally use personal data to train their data models as long as that process meets the rest of the GDPR requirements. The proposal also softens one of the key elements of the AI ​​Act, which, as we say, came into force in August 2024 but included several elements that would come into force some time later. Thus, now the “grace period” for the regulations that regulate the high risk AI systems —those that pose a “serious risk” to health, safety or fundamental rights—is widespread. It was supposed to be activated in summer 2016, but now that regulation will only apply when it is confirmed that “the necessary standards and supporting tools are available” for AI companies… whatever those standards and tools are, yet to be defined. Other amendments in that new Digital Omnibus include simplified requirements for the documentation required of SMEsin addition to a unified interface so that companies can report cybersecurity incidents. Henna Virkkunen, vice president of technological sovereignty at the European Commission, explained that: “In the EU we have all the ingredients to be successful. However, our businesses, especially startups and small businesses, are often held back by a set of rigid rules. By reducing bureaucracy, simplifying EU legislation, opening access to data and introducing a common European business portfolio, we are creating space for innovation to be produced and commercialized in Europe. This is being done the European way: by ensuring that users’ fundamental rights remain fully protected.” These amendments to current digital regulations will now have to be approved by the European Parliament and the 27 member states of the European Union — which will need a qualified majority— to approve it. That process could last months, and during it the proposals themselves could see notable changes before being applied. As indicated in The Guardianthis “massive setback” of this regulation has caused concern among groups fighting to continue protecting privacy of European citizens. The European Digital Rights (EDRi), a pan-European network of NGOs, Indian that if the changes to the regulation are accepted, it will become easier for technology companies to collect and use personal data to train AI models without asking for consent. The European agenda seemed to change when former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi warned last fall of how Europe had fallen worryingly behind in the technology race. That speech was a breath of fresh air for Europeand European business groups have welcomed the proposal with optimism, but believe that they still fall short. A representative of the Computer and Communications Industry Association of which Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta are members indicated that “efforts to simplify digital and technology regulations should not stop there.” One click for cookies This simplification of regulation that affects all types of digital scenarios can have a positive effect. Accepting or rejecting cookies has become a daily torture for millions of Europeansbut the user experience may improve significantly in the coming months. And it may get better because the EU has proposed a modernization of policies related to cookies. To try to improve the browsing experience, it will limit the number of times cookie warning banners appear, but also will make it possible for us to accept or reject cookies with a single click. In fact, the future may be even more promising, because what is intended is that said consent (or denial) of cookies is integrated into our browser so that once we configure it, the websites are not constantly asking us if we accept cookies or not: the browser will know what we want and will answer for us at all times. In that “digital package” it is specified that once we accept or reject cookies with that “single-click“, websites must respect that choice of citizens for six months. Image | Christian Lue In Xataka | For the EU, our privacy has always been more important than AI. Until he understood that he was left behind

Gemini 3 promises more quality and precision than ever in its responses. The question is whether we will really notice the difference

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Google has announced the launch of Gemini 3its new artificial intelligence model. in the company They claim it is their most advanced reasoning model because it is “designed to understand depth and nuance.” Gemini 3 will also be available as standard as part of AI Mode in the renewed Google search engine (in this case and for the moment, only in the US). It is the first time that Google offers the benefits of its AI model from day one in the search engine, but it also reaches the Gemini app and the developers who work with AI Studio and Vertex AI. Behind him success of Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flashthe new version arrives in 30 new languages, including Catalan, Basque and Galicianand as we say you can start testing today in the United States… or outside of there via a VPN. Gemini 3 promises. At least in the tests Google highlights how the model’s behavior has been outstanding in various synthetic tests. Thus, Gemini 3 leads the LMArena classification with 1,501 points—the first to overcome the 1,500-point barrier. According to Google, the Gemini 3’s test results put it ahead of all its competitors in virtually all scenarios. In fact, he manages to reason “at the level of a PhD” according to the tests of Humanity’s Last Exam (exceeds 37.5% of the test without tools) and GPQA Diamond (91.9%). It also makes spectacular progress in mathematics, as demonstrated by the 23.4% on the MathArena Apex test: GPT 5.1 scores 1.0% and Claude Sonnet 4.5 1.6% on the same test, for example. The model also wants to be more direct: his answers are more “concise (…) and he prefers to offer valuable information instead of resorting to clichés and flattery. Tells you what you need to hear, not just what you want to hear“. Gemini 3’s ‘Deep Think’ mode goes even further in tests: in Humanity’s Last Exam it achieves 41.0%, but it also in the demanding ARC-AGI 2 It achieves 45.1% (with code execution), which also demonstrates progress in abstract reasoning and visual understanding. Gemini 3 explains the world to you in a simple way The model has a context window of up to one million tokens, which allows it to be used, for example, to analyze huge repositories of code or text and then work on that data. Its multimodal support allows you to analyze all types of information. For example, Gemini 3 can decipher and translate handwritten recipes in different languages ​​to create a family cookbook that you can share. Or analyze your pickleball games (we assume the same thing happens in other sports) and identify areas where you can improve and generate a training plan. Or scrutinize the data from a research paper and from it generate code for an interactive guide that helps us better understand those studies. In fact, integration with Google Search is an especially important part of Gemini 3, which being “embedded” in AI Mode It has the capacity to generate interactive visual elements (widgets, calculators, simulations) in real time. At Google they want the search to be more interactive than ever, and that will mean that sometimes the answers will not be just text, but rather a small interactive webapp that allows us to better understand the answer. Programming (and agents) to power The other crucial element of the model is its capacity in the area of ​​programming. Its results in tests of this type are once again outstanding, and for example it tops the WebDev Arena leaderboard with a score of 1,487 ELO. The model now behaves much more powerfully in the visual part. It also scores 54.2% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, which evaluates a model’s ability to use tools and operate a computer through a terminal. Additionally, it far outperforms 2.5 Pro in SWE-bench Verified (76.2%), a benchmark test that measures the effectiveness of scheduling agents. These Gemini 3 programming capabilities are intended to be used in a new agent development platform called Google Antigravity. The developer experience is using a “conventional” AI integrated development environment (IDE), but your agents can have access to the editor, terminal, and browser. That means these agents can autonomously plan and execute complex software tasks and validate their own code, making it easier for human developers to review and audit that code than ever before. The real challenge of the most recent models On paper Gemini 3 is postulated as a model that can really make a difference compared to its competitors. The test results and Gemini’s own trajectory make us think that the behavior of this model will indeed be remarkable. However The question is whether we will really notice the difference. In recent months we have seen how other AI companies have launched new models, but the impact for a large majority of users has been discreet: the previous models already performed really well, and although the new ones undoubtedly provide improvements, for many consultations these improvements allow us to perceive that jump in performance. Here we see two ways for Google to effectively demonstrate the capabilities of these models. The first opportunity for Gemini 3 will likely be in the area of ​​programming, and it will be these professionals who will likely be able to get the most out of those additional capabilities. But for the rest of the users, it will be that new AI Mode and the Gemini app that will have to make us notice those features. We are intrigued by this ability to respond with small interactive elements —graphics, widgets—, and perhaps with them we will really discover this new capacity of this chatbot. In Xataka | Let’s say goodbye to Google Assistant a decade later. Google has begun to delete its code to leave only one option: Gemini

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