Category: Top News

IBL News | New York

OpenAI introduced shopping research to all users this month. Released for the holiday season, the feature has been post-trained on GPT-5-Thinking mini with reinforcement learning for shopping tasks.

Essentially, ChatGPT conducts deep research for users across the Internet, including reviews, comments, and high-quality sources, helping them find the right products without sifting through multiple sites. The model might ask clarifying questions.

The users just describe what they are looking for, i.e., “Find an affordable electric bike that can be folded and stored in a small apartment.”

The chatbot considers users’ past conversations and their memory graph to deliver a personalized buyer’s guide in minutes.

The company ensured that this tool “performs especially well in detail-heavy categories like electronics, beauty, home and garden, kitchen and appliances, and sports and outdoor.”

For simple shopping questions, such as checking a price or confirming a feature, a regular ChatGPT response is quick.

When the user wants in-depth shopping research, such as comparisons, constraints, and trade-offs, the model takes a few minutes to provide a more detailed, well-researched answer.

The company trained the model to read trusted sites, cite reliable sources, and synthesize information to produce high-quality product research. It is also designed to be an interactive experience that can update and refine its research in real time, adjusting to user product preferences.

To purchase an item, they can click through to the retailer’s site. In the future, OpenAI plans to offer merchants in Instant Checkout the option to purchase directly through ChatGPT for merchants who are part of Instant Checkout⁠.

IBL News | New York

AI and robots are already remaking the Chinese economy, trying to limit the need for human intervention.

The goal of the Communist Party leaders continues to be to maintain its dominance as the world’s factory floor to sustain its exports, overcoming today’s challenge of rising costs at home and tariffs abroad.

AI offers a lifeline to head off those risks by helping China make and ship more stuff faster, cheaper, and with fewer workers, The Wall Street Journal reports.

And China wants to deploy what is available today quicker than the U.S. can, locking in any advantages. However, U.S. companies, such as Amazon.com and Walmart, are prioritizing automation in similar ways to Chinese firms.

According to the International Federation of Robotics, China installed 295,000 industrial robots last year, nearly nine times as many as the U.S. and more than the rest of the world combined. The number of operational robots surpassed two million in 2024, the most of any country.

One risk is that AI could destroy more factory jobs than China expects, leaving it with too many unemployed workers. However, Chinese leaders are betting that the country’s shrinking population, projected to fall by 200 million over the next three decades, will offset job cuts in factories, boosting productivity without raising unemployment.

Today, China’s average factory wages are far higher than in countries such as India.

IBL News | New York

Data centers the size of theme parks are sprouting around the country, and developers and chipmakers are raking in hundreds of billions of dollars in investments.

The US economy in 2025 is split into two: Everything tied to artificial intelligence is booming. Just about everything else is not, an analysis in The New York Times says.

Investments in computer equipment and software accounted for more than 90 percent of growth in gross domestic product in the first half of the year, with the AI gold rush explaining the economy’s surprising resilience this year.

U.S. companies spent more than $60 billion on computer equipment in the second quarter, up 45 percent from a year earlier. They spent another $10 billion on data center construction, up 35% from the previous year. Artificial intelligence probably accounts for most of that growth, economists and industry experts say.

“Unemployment has risen, hiring has slowed, and industries including manufacturing and home building are cutting jobs. Consumer sentiment has slumped amid high prices. The public sector has been weighed down by budget cuts and federal layoffs. Tariffs, and the uncertainty surrounding them, have been a drag on international trade and led to slower investment by many companies.”

In the stock market, seven companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, now account for well over a third of the S&P 500 index’s value. Just one of the so-called Magnificent Seven, Nvidia, which makes the chips that power many of the most advanced large language models, recently, though briefly, topped $5 trillion in market value.

Such valuations are predicated on assumptions that recent rapid growth will continue for years.

IBL News | New York

OpenAI is rolling out the group chats feature globally, allowing people to collaborate with ChatGPT in a single shared conversation. Up to 20 people can participate in a group chat.

The company’s goal is to make ChatGPT more social by turning it into a shared space for collaboration and interaction with others.

Friends, family members, and co-workers can share space to plan, make decisions, or work through ideas and content together. Group chats are separate from private conversations, and users’ personal ChatGPT memory is not shared.

To start a group chat, the user taps the people icon in the top right corner of any new or existing chat. When adding someone to an existing chat, ChatGPT creates a copy of the conversation as a new group chat, keeping the original conversation separate.

Users can invite others by sharing a link with one to twenty people, and anyone in the group can share that link to bring others in.

Responses are powered by GPT‑5.1 Auto. ChatGPT follows the flow of the conversation and decides when to respond and when to stay quiet based on the context of the group conversation.

IBL News | New York

AI startup Genspark closed a $275 million Series B round, bringing its valuation to the unicorn territory with $1.25 billion.

This round was backed by Emergence Capital Partners, SBI Investment, LG Technology Ventures, UpHonest Capital, and Pavilion Capital, a subsidiary of Singapore’s state-owned investor Temasek.

Palo Alto-based Genspark.ai offers a suite of AI workplace agents to automate everyday tasks, from creating slide decks to researching meeting attendees to recording meeting notes from an Apple Watch.

Its single, integrated platform has attracted users over the complexity of other productivity tools, reaching $50 million in annualized revenue.

The startup’s founder, Eric Jing, is a Microsoft veteran who built an early voice assistant valued at over $5 billion, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The CEO and cofounder, Wen Sang, is an MIT PhD who founded and sold Smarking, an enterprise software company backed by Y Combinator and Khosla Ventures.

IBL News | New York

OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teachers this Wednesday, providing a free K-12 workspace across the U.S. until June 2027.
This work builds on the company’s partnership with the American Federation of Teachers⁠. Today, three in five teachers use an AI tool, mostly to save working hours.

This ChatGPT for Teachers, a version of ChatGPT designed for K-12 educators and school districts, not for students, also includes administrative controls for managers. It supports FERPA requirements.

OpenAI requires verification to set up a free workspace for teachers and staff at U.S. K–12 schools or districts.

OpenAI is initially launching ChatGPT for Teachers with a cohort of districts that represent 150,000 educators. The startup also released an AI Literacy Blueprint.

Leah Belsky, vice president of education at OpenAI, ensured that student data would be protected and that anything shared within ChatGPT for Teachers would not be used to train OpenAI models.

This month marks the third anniversary of the launch of its generic ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022.

Since then, many teachers and parents have argued that students can use the tool to cheat and avoid engaging in critical thinking.

IBL News | New York

The AI revolution is reaching almost every company, but only a handful know how to utilize it effectively.

A McKinsey’s new State of AI 2025 report, done after surveying around 2,000, states that
Most organizations are still in the experimentation or pilot phase with AI, having not yet begun to scale AI across the enterprise.

Sixty-two percent of survey respondents report that their organizations are at least experimenting with AI agents, also indicating that AI is enabling their innovation.

In other words, most companies remain stuck in pilot mode, testing ideas rather than transforming operations, with an overall modest business impact.

The McKinsey report notes how redesigning workflows is a key success factor among companies. In this regard, half of those AI high performers intend to use AI to transform their businesses.

In terms of jobs, roughly 32 percent of firms expect job cuts of three percent or more next year, while only 13 percent foresee hiring growth.

IBL News | New York

Google released yesterday Gemini 3, its most advanced model, with better reasoning capabilities and improved context, requiring less prompting from the user. It is also integrated in AI Mode in Search.

”We continue to push the frontiers of intelligence, agents, and personalization to make AI truly helpful for everyone,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO at Google.

In the recent history of Google’s AI developments, Gemini 1 started with native multimodality and long context window, expanding the kinds of information that could be processed.

Meanwhile, Gemini 2 laid the foundation for agentic capabilities and pushed the frontiers on reasoning and thinking, leading to Gemini 2.5 Pro.

IBL News | New York

OpenAI released GPT-5.1 on its API platform last week.