Welcome back to Zero Shot, where Rohin, Praveen, and Brady deliver their takes on new developments in artificial intelligence every Wednesday.

This week, Rohin considers how AI will change the way employers hire. With AI-generated responses being the norm, hiring managers see a larger variation between the quality of submitted materials and in-person interviews than ever before. Applicants might need to “show and tell” to demonstrate their expertise. The importance of strong verbal communication, quick response times, and language fluency could also matter more. 

Then, Praveen takes us through the four seasons of AI and how Deepseek acknowledged a growing gap between closed and open-source language models, which marks the difference between AI development in the US and China. Naturally, Deepseek is building new stuff: an attention mechanism that will be used in its newer models to handle long context more efficiently.

Finally, Brady maps out how mobile apps will soon become pipes that feed agents. A new ZTE phone that is steered by an AI agent developed by Bytedance offers a glimpse into the future, where screens matter less and “machine users” emerge. There will need to be new ways of thinking about the metrics that matter—daily active users and session lengths won’t tell us much—and there are other fundamental implications for UI/UX design.

Zero Shot’s cover art is generated by AI. Everything else is made by humans.

Send us your ideas, critiques, and suggestions at zeroshot@the-ken.com, or drop us a note just to say hi. We love hearing from our listeners.

*

Additional Reading

Worry, the explainer is dead
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/12/sorry-the-explainer-is-dead/

Japanese game studio tasks job seekers to draw in front of them to make sure their portfolios aren't AI-made
https://80.lv/articles/japanese-game-studio-tasks-job-seekers-to-draw-in-front-of-them-to-make-sure-their-portfolios-aren-t-ai-made

Why does AI write like… that?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/magazine/chatbot-writing-style.html

What it’s like to interview a software engineer preparing with AI
https://www.kapwing.com/blog/what-its-like-to-interview-a-software-engineer-preparing-with-ai/

“There are four seasons in a year”
https://x.com/mehulmpt/status/1995474826031460466

DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the frontier of open large language models
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02556

Alibaba Cloud founder expects big AI shakeup after OpenAI hype
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0PaVrpFD14  

Demo of ByteDance’s AI agent on a ZTE phone
https://x.com/TaylorOgan/status/1996539953979785521

AI browsers aren’t smart enough yet to take over the internet
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-12-08/what-is-agentic-browsing-and-why-are-ai-browsers-not-replacing-chrome-yet

Woman hailed as hero for smashing man’s Meta smart glasses on subway
https://futurism.com/future-society/woman-hero-smashing-meta-smart-glasses-subway

OpenAI, ARIA, and SEO: Making the web worse
https://adrianroselli.com/2025/10/openai-aria-and-seo-making-the-web-worse.html

Trump administration moves to deny visas to factcheckers and content moderators
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/05/trump-administration-us-visa-crackdown