Equitech Futures

It’s August. Somewhere a personal statement is sitting in one tab, half written, with ChatGPT open in the next one.

We ran Writing without the LLM once. Thomas Murray is running it again on August 21.

Sixty minutes, online. The whole premise: close the ChatGPT tab and write from your own experienced intelligence.

The timing is the point. This is the season of essays. Personal statements, scholarship applications, statements of purpose. If every draft starts in a chatbot, every draft ends up sounding like every other draft, and the reader on the other side notices.

The first draft is where the thinking happens. That is the part worth keeping.

August 21, 2:00 PM UTC. For Learner and Learner+.

Comment WRITING and we’ll send you the link.

18% to 57%.

Same AI model. Same question. Same weights. The only change was asking it to write the steps out first.

That was 2022. Four years on, the field still can’t agree on what those steps are doing. Writing the reasoning, or just showing reasoning that was already there?

FuturesHub’s QueBrief walks the actual evidence.

The finding worth sitting with: when researchers slipped model a hint that changed their answer, the written chain usually justified the answer on completely different grounds. Claude 3.7 Sonnet mentioned the hint about 25% of the time. DeepSeek-R1 about 39%.

Comment REASON and we’ll send the link to your DMs.

[ DeepSeek Claude Reasoning Research Ai answers QueBrief LLM model ]

Some of the best work is the quiet kind: turning around to help the people coming up next.

Labbi Karmacharya, Applied Data ‘23, Nepal, led a session on ethics and bias in AI with Women LEAD Nepal. Keshav Kumar Choudhary, Futures ‘24, India, went back to the Satyarthi Summer School as a teaching assistant, a year after being a student there. Samiksha Khadka, Applied Data ‘25, Nepal, mentored at the CSIT Association of Nepal AI Bootcamp. Ishika Panta, Civic Tech ‘26, Nepal, visited Narayani Adarbhut School with Global Shapers Kathmandu.

Congratulations to all four.

Celebrating two Equitech alumni who recently completed meaningful work.

Sunday Nwovu, Applied Data ‘23, Nigeria, earned his Master’s in Artificial Intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University Africa. Dabwitso Zumani Phiri, Civic Tech ‘23, Zambia, completed a consulting project with Build It International, supporting their Advocacy and Influencing Strategy.

Congratulations to both.

Congratulations to the Equitech Futures Institute Class of 2026.

Twenty Scholars from sixteen countries have officially completed the programme. Every face on this map is one of them.

Welcome to the Equitech Futures alumni network.

AI made building cheap. Knowing what’s worth building is still the rare part. That’s the whole focus of Human-Centered Venture Building, a four-week cohort on FuturesHub. You interview real users, run a real experiment, and test a working prototype.

Here’s Linda Kinning, who’s spent over ten years building ventures, answering the questions people keep asking.

If you’re building something, or wish you’d started, this is the swipe worth stopping on. Applications close in two days.

If you have an Idea or you are building something, Check this out. Comment ‘Interested’ to receive registration link in your Inbox.

Open and funded for Learner+ members of FuturesHub.

Our Equitech network is building for the people they serve.

Rohan Myers, a neighborhood voting dashboard. Alaa Almouiz, ImplantSAC through the ZAKA AI Machine Learning Specialization. Marika Pescosolido, Law-Tie for pro-bono legal access. Ashna Devaprasad, an AI model supporting vulnerable children with the UK government.

Congratulations to each of them.

This is a program to help you take an idea you can’t stop thinking about and finally find out if it’s worth building.

Human-Centered Venture Building Summer School 2026 is a four week cohort on FuturesHub, led by Linda Kinning. The last course she taught this way produced a startup that’s still running today. This time, she works on your idea: real user interviews, a real experiment, and a prototype you test with real people.

Comment APPLY or message us and we’ll send you the application link and all the details.

Celebrating alumni who have been selected for new fellowships.

Sabrina Santos, Futures ‘25, Brazil, named an A360 Fellow. Jangael Rosales, Futures ‘25, United States, named a Tayo Data and Technology Fellow, supported by the Filipino Young Leaders Program. Mmeli “Victory” Isaac-Ironondu, Civic Tech ‘23, Nigeria, selected as a Fellow for the Young Professionals Bootcamp.

Congratulations to each of them.