IBL News

Category: Top News

  • OpenAI Issues o3-pro, Its Most Intelligent AI Reasoning Model

    OpenAI Issues o3-pro, Its Most Intelligent AI Reasoning Model

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI launched o3-pro, an AI reasoning model that the company claims is its “most intelligent model yet, designed to think longer and provide the most reliable responses.”

    It’s available for Pro users in ChatGPT and its API.

    In contrast to conventional AI models, reasoning models work through problems step by step, enabling them to perform more reliably in math, science, and coding.

    It can search the web, analyze files, reason about visual inputs, use Python, personalize responses using memory, and more. Because o3-pro has access to tools, responses typically take longer to complete than those of o1-pro.

    o3-pro is priced at $20 per million input tokens and $80 per million output tokens in the API. A million input tokens is equivalent to about 750,000 words, a bit longer than “War and Peace.”

  • Sam Altman: “Humanity is Close to Building Digital Superintelligence”

    Sam Altman: “Humanity is Close to Building Digital Superintelligence”

    IBL News | New York

    Sam Altman, CEO at OpenAI, wrote a post, with no AI help, titled “The Gentle Singularity” this month.

    IBL News summarized Sam Altman’s thoughts:

    “As datacenter production gets automated, the cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity. (People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes. It also uses about 0.000085 gallons of water; roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon.)”

    These are the most remarkable thoughts expressed by the author:

    • “The takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence.”

    • “We have recently built systems that are smarter than people in many ways.”

    • “The gains to quality of life from AI driving faster scientific progress and increased productivity will be enormous; the future can be vastly better than the present.”

    • “2025 has seen the arrival of agents that can do real cognitive work; writing computer code will never be the same. 2026 will likely see the arrival of systems that can figure out novel insights. 2027 may see the arrival of robots that can do tasks in the real world.”

    • “With advanced AI is we may be able to discover new computing substrates, better algorithms, and who knows what else.”

    • “We will build ever-more-wonderful things for each other.”

    • “By 2035, maybe we will go from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonization the next year; or from a major materials science breakthrough one year to true high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces the next year.”

    • “We (the whole industry, not just OpenAI) are building a brain for the world. It will be extremely personalized and easy for everyone to use; we will be limited by good ideas.”

    • “OpenAI is a lot of things now, but before anything else, we are a superintelligence research company. We have a lot of work in front of us, but most of the path in front of us is now lit, and the dark areas are receding fast.”

    • “May we scale smoothly, exponentially and uneventfully through superintelligence.”

  • OpenAI Aims to Embed Its AI Assistants Into Universities, Following the Footsteps of Google and Microsoft

    OpenAI Aims to Embed Its AI Assistants Into Universities, Following the Footsteps of Google and Microsoft

    Mikel Amigot, IBL News | New York

    OpenAI is selling premium AI services to universities trying to “become part of the core infrastructure of higher education,” said Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s vice president of education and former manager at Coursera, in an interview with The New York Times [in the picture above].

    At the same time, it’s running a marketing campaign targeting students and courting them as future customers — essentially as rivals like Google and Microsoft have been doing for years, pushing their computers and software into schools.

    The startup envisions students graduating with their AI assistants and utilizing them throughout their careers in the workplace, like they do with their school-issued Gmail accounts.

    On their side, Elon Musk’s xAI and Google have been offering free AI services for college students during the exam period.

    Overall, OpenAI aims to embed its AI technology within universities by providing students with AI assistants to help tutor and guide them from orientation through graduation, featuring tools such as chatbots, practice job interview tools, voice model tools, and tools to quiz aloud ahead of a test.

    Meanwhile, faculty members can build custom chatbots for their students by uploading course materials, such as lecture notes, slides, videos, and quizzes, into ChatGPT.

    OpenAI’s sales pitch has been named “AI-native universities.”

    Three of its clients are the University of Maryland, California State University (with 460,000 students across its 23 campuses), and Duke University (through a platform called DukeGPT).

    Millions of college students regularly use AI chatbots for writing essays and term papers, researching, composing code, and generating ideas.

    The San Francisco–based startup service for universities, ChatGPT Edu, offers additional features, including specific privacy protections, compared to the company’s free chatbot. ChatGPT Edu also enables faculty and staff to create custom chatbots for use within the university.

    OpenAI states that it does not utilize the information entered by students, faculty, and administrators into ChatGPT Edu for training its AI.

  • Harvard Releases a Dataset that Contains a Book Collection of 394 Million Titles

    Harvard Releases a Dataset that Contains a Book Collection of 394 Million Titles

    IBL News | New York

    Harvard University has released a dataset of library books, named Institutional Books 1.0, for researchers, which contains over 394 million records, according to the AP.

    These materials, preserved and organized by generations of librarians, comprise nearly one million books in 254 languages, dating back to the 15th century.

    The largest concentration of works is from the 19th century, on subjects such as literature, philosophy, law, and agriculture.

    Supported financially by Microsoft and OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, the Harvard-based Institutional Data Initiative is collaborating with libraries and museums worldwide on how to prepare their AI collections for the public.

    “Librarians have always been the stewards of data and the stewards of information,” said Aristana Scourtas, who manages research at Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab.

    These datasets were shared this month on the Hugging Face platform, which hosts open-source AI models that anyone can download.

     

  • OpenAI Gets a $200 Million Contract to Develop AI Models for the Pentagon

    OpenAI Gets a $200 Million Contract to Develop AI Models for the Pentagon

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI was awarded a $200 million, one-year contract by the U.S. Department of Defense to develop “prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains.”

    The Defense Department specified that the contract is with OpenAI Public Sector LLC.

    The new contract represents a small portion of OpenAI’s revenue, which is generating over $10 billion in annualized sales. In March, the company announced a $40 billion financing round at a valuation of $300 billion.

    In April, Microsoft, which supplies cloud infrastructure to OpenAI, announced that the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency had authorized the use of the Azure OpenAI service with classified information.

    Also, this year, OpenAI said it would collaborate with defense technology startup Anduril to deploy advanced AI systems for “national security missions.”

    Currently, OpenAI is working to build additional AI infrastructure in the U.S. under the $500 billion Stargate project.

    In 2024, Anthropic, an OpenAI rival, announced plans to collaborate with Palantir and Amazon to provide its AI models to U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.

  • Claude.ai Began Rolling Out a “Voice Mode” Feature on its Chatbot

    Claude.ai Began Rolling Out a “Voice Mode” Feature on its Chatbot

    IBL News | New York

    Anthropic’s Claude began rolling out a “voice mode” (currently in beta) for its Claude chatbot apps last week.

    This feature enables users to engage in and maintain complete spoken conversations with Claude, according to the AI startup.

    Additionally, Anthropic’s voice mode enables users to discuss topics such as documents and images and select from five distinct voice options. Users can also switch between text and voice on the fly and view a transcript and summary of conversations.

    The capability comes with limits for free users, including a 20-30 conversation limit.

    Only paid Claude subscribers can use a Google Workspace connector that allows voice mode to access Google Calendar appointments and Gmail emails.

    Google Docs integration is exclusive to Claude Enterprise plans.

    OpenAI, Google’s Gemini Live, and xAI’s Grok already offer a similar voice feature, allowing users to interact with bots by speaking instead of typing.

  • The Ohio State Will Require College Students to Be Fluent on AI

    The Ohio State Will Require College Students to Be Fluent on AI

    IBL News | New York

    The Ohio State has launched a program named “AI Fluency Initiative” that will embed AI education throughout the undergraduate curriculum and ask every student to use artificial intelligence.

    “Through AI Fluency, Ohio State students will be fluent in both their major field of study and the application of AI in that area,” Ravi V. Bellamkonda, executive vice president and provost at the Ohio State University (OSU), said.

    OSU will officially incorporate AI fluency into every major, offering general education courses and helping faculty adapt existing courses to incorporate AI.

    The university will now require students to take an AI skills seminar, incorporating workshops into the existing framework, such as the First-Year Seminar program.

  • Meta Invests $14.3 Billion in Scale and Hires Its CEO

    Meta Invests $14.3 Billion in Scale and Hires Its CEO

    Mikel Amigot, IBL News | New York

    Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms Inc. has finalized a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI — taking a 49% stake — and recruited the company’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, 28, to join its AI team for producing data models.

    Scale offers data services to help companies, including Meta and OpenAI, train and improve their AI systems. It also builds custom AI applications for businesses and governments. The startup generated approximately $870 million in revenue in 2024 and is expected to reach $2 billion in revenue by the end of this year. Its new interim CEO will be Jason Droege.

    Zuckerberg was frustrated with Meta’s progress following the rollout in April of the company’s latest large language model, Llama 4. Not wanting to be left behind, the CEO of Meta took a more hands-on approach, making the recruitment of AI experts and scientists a top priority.

    He has been offering lucrative pay packages to attract top researchers from Alphabet Inc.’s Google and startup Sesame AI Inc. He has been following a playbook similar to Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Google, with arrangements designed to avoid the regulatory scrutiny that comes with significant acquisitions.

    Alphabet’s Google, the largest customer of Scale AI, announced it would cut ties with Scale after rival Meta bought a 49% stake in the AI data-labeling startup.

    Google was paying Scale approximately $200 million this year for the human-labeled training data, which is crucial for developing technology, including the sophisticated AI models that power Gemini, its ChatGPT competitor, one of the sources said.

    Other major customers of Scale, including Microsoft, are also backing away. Elon Musk’s xAI plans are exiting, too, arguing their concern to expose their research priorities and road map to a rival.
  • Hugging Face Unveiled Two Open-Source Humanoid Robots

    Hugging Face Unveiled Two Open-Source Humanoid Robots

    IBL News | New York

    AI development platform Hugging Face released two open-source robots, HopeJr and Reachy Mini. The first few units are expected to be shipped by the end of the year.

    HopeJR is a humanoid robot capable of walking, moving its arms, and manipulating many objects, with 66 independent movements. It costs under $3,000. 

    Reachy Mini is a desktop unit that can move its head, talk, listen, and be used to test AI apps. The cost will be around $300.

    “The important aspect is that these robots are open source, so anyone can assemble, rebuild, and understand how they work, and that they’re affordable, so that robotics doesn’t get dominated by just a few big players with dangerous black-box systems,” the company’s co-founder and CEO, Clem Delangue, told TechCrunch.

    This robot release was made possible in part by the company’s acquisition of humanoid robotics startup Pollen Robotics, which was announced in April.

    UPDATE JUL 9, 2025:
    Hugging Face said it plans to release two versions of the Reachy Mini. The first, Reachy Mini Wireless, will cost $449 and run a Raspberry Pi 5 mini computer. The second version is the Reachy Mini Lite, which requires a connection to a computing source and is priced at $299.

    The open-source robots are fully programmable in Python and come with a set of pre-installed demos, as well as integration with the Hugging Face Hub, which provides users with access to more than 1.7 million AI models and over 400,000 datasets.

  • AI Enterprise Search Glean Hits a Valuation of $7.2 Billion

    AI Enterprise Search Glean Hits a Valuation of $7.2 Billion

    IBL News | New York

    AI enterprise search, Palo Alto-based startup Glean raised a $150 million Series F by Wellington Management, landing at a valuation of $7.2 billion.

    In September 2024 received $260 million in Series E from investors such as Khosla Ventures, Bicycle Capital, Geodesic Capital, and Archerman Capital, as well as existing investors Altimeter, Capital One Ventures, Citi, Coatue, DST Global, General Catalyst, ICONIQ, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Latitude Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, and Sequoia Capital.

    This capital will be used to double the size of the R&D and sales teams, expand into overseas markets, and build more partnerships similar to recent ones with companies like Databricks, Snowflake, and Palo Alto Networks.

    Launched three years ago, Glean reported surpassing $100 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in its most recent fiscal year.

    It offers AI agents along with tools to search corporate documents via LLM-powered natural language, integrating with a wide array of workplace apps — Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Zendesk, Slack, and Salesforce. It creates a personalized knowledge graph for each user. Initially, Glean was focused on tech industry customers, but later expanded its reach to include finance, retail, and manufacturing.

    Large enterprises are concerned about being left behind, and many are working to ensure that their workforce becomes AI-first.