Category: Top News

IBL News | New York

AI infrastructure, developer tools, observability, and workflow orchestration startup LangChain Inc. has raised $100 million in new funding at an approximate $1 billion valuation led by IVP, according to TechCrunch.

The company [the team in the picture above] had previously raised $35 million in two rounds from investors, including Benchmark Capital Management Company, Sequoia Capital, and Amplify Partners, reportedly valuing LangChain at $200 million at the time.

Founded in 2022 as an open-source project by engineer Harrison Chase, LangChain develops infrastructure and tools designed to simplify the creation of applications powered by LLMs for developers and companies. The company provides modular components that connect LLMs with data, tools, application programming interfaces, and workflows, enabling more advanced and interactive AI behavior.

LangChain’s core offering is a framework that enables developers to chain together calls to LLMs, search systems, and other tools. This approach supports complex, multi-step reasoning, agent-based workflows, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipelines.

The startup’s open-source code has addressed these problems by providing a framework for building apps on top of LLM models. It has become a hugely popular project on GitHub (111,000 stars, over 18,000 forks).

The company offers various tools to assist users in managing and interacting with LLMs, including LangSmith, a separate, closed-source product for observability, evaluation, and monitoring of LLM applications, specifically agents.

LangSmith has led the company to achieve annual recurring revenue (ARR) between $12 million and $16 million, according to TechCrunch.

Competitors of LangSmith are open-source Langfuse and Helicone.

There’s also LangServe, a tool for turning LangChain applications into production-ready APIs. The tool makes it easier to deploy and scale language model workflows in real environments without building infrastructure from scratch.

IBL News | New York

Boston University (BU) announced it is cutting its annual $2.5 billion operating budget by 5% for the upcoming year and laying off 120 staff members, primarily due to the “recent and ongoing federal actions” by the Trump administration. BU will also eliminate 120 jobs that are currently open.

University leaders also cited other challenges such as declining graduate enrollment, a looming demographic drop-off in high school seniors, and rising inflation.

In addition, as a popular destination for international students (with a third of its students from abroad) and a research institution, BU can be impacted by the White House’s moves to restrict student visas and cut federal research spending. In 2024, it received $579 million in federal research funding.

Boston University’s President Melissa Gilliam said, “There is no way around this. Yet, it is also a necessary step in ensuring our future.”

Another challenge is the new increase to the federal endowment tax passed by Congress this month, which raises the rate from 1.4% to 4-8%.

About 3,000 graduate and PhD students who teach classes and conduct research at BU also received a sizable raise in October after a months-long strike.

IBL News | New York

Elon Musk’s company, xAI, released ‘Grok 4’, its latest model, last week, in response to OpenAI’s GPT-5, which is expected to be released in September. This model, which can analyze images and respond to questions, is deeply integrated into the X social platform.

“With respect to academic questions, Grok 4 is better than PhD level in every subject, and at times, it may lack common sense, and it has not yet invented new technologies or discovered new physics, but that is just a matter of time,” said Elon Musk. [See the product video presentation below.]

xAI also unveiled a new $300-per-month AI subscription plan, SuperGrok Heavy, the company’s multi-agent version that offers increased performance.

The plan is similar to ultra-premium tiers offered by OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

Musk claimed that Grok 4 Heavy spawns multiple agents to work on a problem simultaneously, and then they all compare their work “like a study group” to find the best answer.

The company ensured that Grok 4 — also released through its API — demonstrates frontier-level performance on several benchmarks, including Humanity’s Last Exam. Grok 4 scored 25.4% on Humanity’s Last Exam without “tools,” outperforming Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, which scored 21.6%, and OpenAI’s o3 (high), which scored 21%.

With “tools,” Grok 4 Heavy was able to achieve a score of 44.4%, outperforming Gemini 2.5 Pro with tools, which scored 26.9%, according to the company.

xAI announced that its AI coding model will be available in August, a multi-modal agent in September, and a video-generation model in October.

IBL News | New York

Educational publisher McGraw-Hill filed this month for an initial public offering (IPO), seeking to obtain funding primarily to repay debt. It will trade on the NYSE under the symbol “MH,” and Goldman Sachs is the lead underwriter for the IPO.

Backed by billionaire Tom Gores’ Platinum Equity, who acquired the company for $4.5 billion in 2021, Columbus, Ohio-based McGraw-Hill is one of the most recognized names in the publishing industry.

It has a global sales team of 1,500 and a yearly revenue of $2.1 billion. Its net loss narrowed to $85.8 million, compared with $193 million the previous year.

The company is pursuing a listing at a time when AI is dramatically reshaping the education industry, and as the IPO market gradually reopens.

In January 2024, Britannica Group, the company behind the 250-year-old Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Merriam-Webster dictionary, also filed for an IPO but has not moved forward since.

IBL News | New York

Microsoft announced this week that it will provide over $4 billion in cash, technology services, cloud computing credits, and resources to train students in schools, community colleges, technical colleges, and nonprofits on the use of AI.

The company, which develops the Copilot chatbot, is also launching the Microsoft Elevate Academy to provide AI skills training and certification to 20 million people.

Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, said in an interview, “Microsoft will serve as an advocate to ensure that students in every school across the country have access to AI education.”

The announcement came as tech companies are racing to train millions of teachers and students on their AI tools.

Last week, the American Federation of Teachers, a union representing 1.8 million members, announced the establishment of a national AI training center for educators, with $23 million in funding from Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

Last week, several dozen companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI, signed a White House pledge promising to provide schools with funding, technology, and training materials for AI education.

In 2023, Amazon announced a new company program, “AI Ready,” to provide free online Amazon AI skills courses for two million people.

IBL News | New York

Google began rolling out its video generation model Veo 3 to paying subscribers of Gemini’s AI plan ($20) in 159 countries.

The service is capped at three up to eight-second-long videos per day.

Veo 3 was shown off in May during the Google I/O 2025 developer conference.

Google featured Veo 3 as an “AI filmmaking tool to create cinematic scenes and stories.” It generates sound effects, background noises, and even dialogue to accompany the videos it creates. Veo 3 also improves upon its predecessor, Veo 2, in terms of the quality of footage it can generate.

The user describes, with text prompts, scenes they have in mind, and a video is created.

The company introduced a more advanced version dubbed “Google AI Ultra,” available at $124.99 per month, which provides access to the 2.5 Pro Deep Think advanced reasoning model.

Additional examples of these short cinematic videos, provided by Google along with their corresponding text prompts, can be found on this page.

In this area of video generation, Google competes with Microsoft, Scenario, Runway, Pika, and OpenAI’s Sora. Other startups include Lightricks, Genmo, Higgsfield, Kling, Luma, and Alibaba. However, audio output stands to be a big differentiator for Veo 3.

Google didn’t disclose where it sourced the content to train Veo 3, but analysts say that YouTube is a strong possibility.

UPDATE July 1, 2025: 

Google said on Thursday it’s adding an image-to-video generation feature to its Veo 3. The company had already rolled out this feature in its video tool called Flow, which was launched in May at Google’s I/O developer conference.

IBL News | New York

Mattel, the U.S. maker of Barbie, Hot Wheels, and Uno cars, is partnering with OpenAI to develop toys and games that incorporate AI into the play experience.

The first product is expected to be released later this year.

The move comes at a time when toy manufacturers are grappling with President Trump’s shifting trade policy toward China.

Mattel will also incorporate OpenAI’s advanced AI tools, such as ChatGPT Enterprise, into its business operations to enhance product innovation, the company said.

In the last year, Mattel has relied on producing films, TV shows, and mobile games based on its products to reduce the impact of a slowdown in its core toy business.

“With OpenAI, Mattel has access to an advanced set of AI capabilities alongside new tools to enable productivity, creativity, and company-wide transformation at scale,” said OpenAI operating chief Brad Lightcap.

IBL News | New York

Three top news organizations — Yahoo News, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg — are reliably generating reader-friendly summaries with Generative AI.

These optimized texts at the top of the stories work well for both busy readers and Googlebot, providing a quick understanding of the content’s subject matter.

The news organization and aggregator Yahoo News developed a “Key Takeaways” feature for some articles on its site.

The summaries are designed to extract information directly from the article itself, rather than incorporating data from across the internet.

With these AI-powered features, user engagement increased by 50%, and time spent per user rose by 165% since the relaunch.

(Kat Downs Mulder, general manager of Yahoo News, said the acquisition of the app Artifact “really accelerated” the newsroom’s AI development process.)

AI-generated summaries at The Wall Street Journal are presented as three bullet points, referred to as “Key Points.”

Every summary prominently displays a “What’s this?” button that quickly explains the feature to readers.

“An artificial-intelligence tool created this summary, which was based on the text of the article and checked by an editor,” the Journal tells readers who click on the “What’s this?” button. “Read more about how we use artificial intelligence in our journalism.”

The Journal first began working on the feature in early 2024.

Initially, the work was scoped for the Newswires product, targeted towards B2B clients who wanted key information without reading the full article text.

Google Gemini powers the key points.

The Journal plans to experiment with more AI-generated features.

Its chatbots (Lars, the Taxbot, and Joannabot) help readers explore topics where we have deep expertise and authority.

The AI summaries on Bloomberg.com are called Takeaways. AI summaries also appear on Bloomberg stories on the Bloomberg Terminal.

Bloomberg features them on longform pieces and plans to include them in its opinion pieces in the future.

These summaries, which are clear and concise snapshots, are especially welcome in fast-moving news.

IBL News | New York

Sixty-eight organizations have signed to date the White House’s Pledge to America’s Youth: Investing in AI Education over the next four years, which follows President Trump’s April 23 executive order in this regard.

Some companies signing the pledge include Google, Amazon, Apple, IBM, Pearson, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, Cisco, Dell, Intel, McGraw-Hill, Workday, Booz Allen, and Magic School AI.

These organizations pledge “to make available, over the next four years, resources for youth and teachers through funding and grants, educational materials and curricula, technology and tools, teacher professional development programs, workforce development resources, and/or technical expertise and mentorship,” working alongside the White House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence Education.

“The Pledge will help make AI education accessible to K-12 students across the country, sparking curiosity in the technology and preparing the next generation for an AI-enabled economy. Fostering young people’s interest and expertise in artificial intelligence is crucial to maintaining American technological dominance,” added.

Michael Kratsios, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Chair of the White House Task Force on AI Education, invited other organizations to join the pledge.

“AI is reshaping our economy and the way we live and work, and we must ensure the next generation of American workers is equipped with the skills they need to lead in this new era,” said Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer. 

Brian Stone, performing the duties of the National Science Foundation (NSF) director, said that his institution will fund cutting-edge research, support teacher development, and expand access to STEM education.

As of June 30, 2025, these were the organizations supporting the Pledge: