Category: Top News

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:

IBL News | New York

The Linux Foundation announced the launch, along with a hundred top tech companies, of the Agent2Agent (A2A) project, an open and interoperable ecosystem for AI agents.

This protocol was developed by Google to address the challenge of scaling AI agents across enterprise environments, regardless of platform, vendor, or framework.

A2A enables autonomous agents to discover one another, exchange information securely, and collaborate across systems.

“This allows developers and organizations to unite agents from multiple sources and platforms, improving modularity, mitigating vendor lock-in, and accelerating innovation,” said the Linux Foundation.

Brands like Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cisco, Salesforce, SAP, and ServiceNow participate in the project.

Under the Linux Foundation’s governance, A2A claims it will remain vendor-neutral and foster a vibrant ecosystem of developers, researchers, and companies.

IBL News | New York

Google shared updates across Gemini, Google Workspace for Education, and Chromebook this week during the ISTE edtech conference, following its goal of integrating its AI tools deeply into the classroom.

Announcements were featured in a PDF Launch Guide and included:

IBL News, New York

Google Cloud and Pearson, a leading UK company in the K-12 space, will collaborate to deliver AI-powered tools for personalized learning and academic success, the two companies announced last week. It will be “a multi-year strategic collaboration,” according to their press release.

Teachers will be provided with data-driven insights to view students’ progress and learning needs, enabling more targeted instruction.

In addition, schools will be able to use and scale Google’s Veo and Imagen generation tools over Pearson’s content and services.

Google Cloud will use Pearson’s Credly for professional badges and certificates.

Both organizations stated that they will further “explore opportunities for integration across their product suites.”

Google Cloud currently competes in the educational space with other cloud services firms such as Microsoft’s Azure and AWS. It offers the Vertex AI Platform, Gemini, agenticAI, LearnLM, and other models fine-tuned for learning.

Omar Abbosh, Pearson CEO. said “By combining Pearson’s deep learning expertise with Google’s technology and AI capabilities, we will deliver a more personalized experience for students and equip K-12 teachers with tools that help them to focus on what matters most: sparking curiosity, developing critical thinking, and fostering a lifelong love of learning.”

IBL News | New York

Character.AI unveiled a new suite of multi-modal and multimedia features this week to engage with and create Characters.

These enhancements include the AvatarFX video-generation model, which allows for the creation of up to five videos per day. Users upload a photo that serves as the basis for the video clip, select a voice, and write out the dialogue for the character.

Users can also turn these videos into Scenes and Streams, which enable users to create videos featuring their characters and then share them on a new social feed.

Experts criticized these deployments, saying that Character.AI’s multimedia offerings expand the potential for these products to be abused.

Techcrunch wrote, “Character.AI has a track record of abuse on its platform; parents have filed lawsuits against the company, claiming chatbots attempted to convince their children to self-harm, to kill themselves, or to kill their parents. One 14-year-old boy died by suicide after he was encouraged to do so by a Character.AI bot, with whom he had developed an unhealthy, obsessive relationship.”

Character.AI responds that it watermarks each video, although bad actors can circumvent this safeguard. “Our goal is to provide an engaging space that fosters creativity while maintaining a safe environment for all,” Character.AI said in its blog post.

IBL News | New York

Anthropic, this week, introduced a beta feature that allows Claude to build, host, and share AI-powered apps within the chatbot, leveraging its Artifacts capability, as shown in the video below.

Developers can see and interact with these apps, iterating faster on their creation, as Claude creates artifacts that interact with the chatbot through an API.

“Simply describe what you want to create, and Claude will write the code for you,” explains the start-up.  “Describe any app idea to Claude—a personalized storytelling tool, coding tutor, creative writing assistant—and watch it come to life, no coding required.”

It’s a kind of vibe coding feature, but with the ability to see results inside Claude.

IBL News | New York

Salesforce is utilizing AI tools for 30% to 50% of its software engineering and customer service work, achieving a 93% accuracy rate, according to its CEO, Marc Benioff [in the picture above].

The San Francisco-based software company is currently selling an AI product that promises to handle customer service tasks without human supervision.

This automation is another example of a large company replacing labor with AI tools.

Recently, executives at Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc. announced that AI is generating approximately 30% of new computer software code on specific projects within their companies.

“All of us have to get our heads around this idea that AI can do things that we were doing before,” Benioff said. “We can move on to do higher-value work.”