2025: The Year AI Stopped Being a Tool and Became Infrastructure

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, and why AI literacy certificates already feel obsolete. The centrepiece is Dale's Napster analogy: when the product can be generated for $20/month, universities have to sell the concert, not the CD. Part 1 of 2.[00:00] — Three facts that sum up AI in 2025: $750B valuations, student death lawsuits, and university bans [02:37] — Andrew Maynard's "critical disconnect" model and why 2025 proved both its assumptions wrong [03:54] — AI shifts from chatbot to infrastructure — Operator, Claude Code, browsing agents, and Fei-Fei Li's World Labs [05:16] — The plagiarism debate is dead: Dale on writing horse-drawn carriage speeding tickets in a robotaxi era [07:13] — The safety collapse: lawsuits against OpenAI, the AI Safety Index failing every major lab, and Grok's deepfake problem [10:29] — The double-edged sword: Reid Hoffman's optimism vs. the real mental health costs [12:08] — Anthropic's Claude Constitution and whether universities should be shaping AI's moral frameworks [14:42] — The salad bar problem: why prompt engineering certificates are already the new "proficient in Microsoft Word" [17:38] — The financial ouroboros: Galloway, Oracle's $80B loss, and validating stock prices with compliance budgets [22:04] — Ghosting a degree, the Napster analogy, and why universities need to find their concert model🎙️ Adjunct Intelligence is the weekly briefing for higher-ed professionals who want AI as a cheat code—not a headache.Every episode:• Real tests of AI tools in education and professional workflows• Fast, Monday-morning actions you can actually try• Clear signal through the noise (no hype, no jargon)👉 Subscribe on [YouTube] | [Apple Podcasts] | [Spotify]👉 Share this with a colleague who still says “I’ll figure AI out later”👉 Join the conversation on LinkedIn with #AdjunctIntelligenceStay curious. Stay intelligent. Stay the human in the loop.