Category: Top News

  • Amazon Releases “Quick Suite”, a Collection of AI Agentic Tools

    Amazon Releases “Quick Suite”, a Collection of AI Agentic Tools

    IBL News | New York

    This month, Amazon issued its new agentic platform, Quick Suite, a collection of AI tools that analyze and gather data from multiple applications, turning natural language queries into enterprise actions, processes, and workflows.

    As a unified digital workspace for day-to-day work, it connects internal documents, emails, and databases with external third-party apps, sources, and services, including Amazon S3, Snowflake, Google Drive, and Microsoft SharePoint.

    It also integrates with third-party services like Salesforce for customer data, Zendesk for support tickets, and Slack for team collaboration.

    These enterprise processes often require consultation with specialized teams to analyze advanced datasets,

    Amazon Quick Suite includes productivity capabilities such as research, interactive visualizations (in competition with Tableau and Microsoft Power BI), and business intelligence and automation tools and agents.

    Amazon made Quick Suite available in two tiers: a Professional plan starting at $20 per user per month, and an Enterprise plan at $40 per user per month with advanced features.

    AWS marketing chief Julia White said to Bloomberg that existing customers of the Amazon Q Business AI software, which launched 18 months ago, will be encouraged to migrate to the new platform.

    The company said Quick Suite has already been deployed to tens of thousands of Amazon employees, reporting that “the tool has reduced complex data analysis tasks from months to minutes, for example, based on internal use.”

    In addition, it has rolled out the platform to hundreds of corporate beta customers, citing examples of cost savings and efficiency improvements.

    However, since Amazon does not own a native productivity suite like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, it has to convince users to adopt its platform as an overlay on top of those tools.

    This month, Google announced a unified Gemini Enterprise AI agent subscription, consolidating its business-focused AI tools.




  • Top Tech Firms Launch The React Foundation

    Top Tech Firms Launch The React Foundation

    IBL News | New York

    The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit that fosters a vendor-neutral environment for open source projects, announced the creation of the React Foundation.

    Its mission is to help the community and its members maintain React’s infrastructure, organize the React Conf, and create initiatives to support the React ecosystem, with its UI developments.

    A decade ago, Meta open-sourced React. Since then, React has grown into one of the world’s most popular environments, powering over 50 million websites and products built by companies such as Microsoft, Shopify, Bloomberg, Discord, Coinbase, the NFL, and others.

    With React Native, React has expanded to support platforms beyond the web, including mobile, tablets, desktops, TVs, gaming consoles, and even mixed reality devices.

    The React Foundation’s governing board will consist of representatives from Amazon, Callstack, Expo, Meta, Microsoft, Software Mansion, and Vercel, with the intention to expand further over time.

    The technical governance structure will be independent of the React Foundation.

    Meta has committed to a five-year partnership with the React Foundation, including over $3 million in funding and dedicated engineering support.

  • OpenAI Extends the Video Length to 25 Seconds on Sora 2

    OpenAI Extends the Video Length to 25 Seconds on Sora 2

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI announced yesterday that all users can now generate videos up to 15 seconds on the Sora 2 app and web. Pro users ($200 a month), however, can generate videos up to 25 seconds on the web, opening new possibilities for marketing and promotional videos.

    Another update states that Storyboards are now available on the web to Pro users.

    Both announcements were made through OpenAI’s X account.

    Previously, Sora 2 has been limiting standard users to 10-second clips or shorter.

  • Patients Report Cases of AI Substituting Human Therapists

    Patients Report Cases of AI Substituting Human Therapists

    IBL News | New York

    Some therapists are secretly using AI during sessions, risking their clients’ trust and data privacy in the process, according to a story posted in MIT Technology Review.

    Specifically, ChatGPT is providing summaries, responses, and analysis of patients’ questions.

    Substituting the chatbot for human therapists follows the unexpected ramifications of AI in the field of psychotherapy, as is happening in many other professions.

    On the patient’s side, as many believe chatbots can provide an affordable alternative to in-person therapies, there are many cases of people using AI while they trip on psychedelics. Many experts say it’s a bad idea.

    Researchers often say that responses written by ChatGPT but misattributed to therapists are receiving the highest ratings overall.

    A growing number of companies, including Heidi Health, Upheal, Lyssn, and Blueprint, are marketing specialized tools to therapists, such as AI-assisted note-taking, training, and transcription services.

  • Techmeme Old-Style News Aggregator for Tech Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary

    Techmeme Old-Style News Aggregator for Tech Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary

    IBL News | New York

    Techmeme celebrated its 20th anniversary this month, a widely followed old-style news aggregator for tech industry leaders. This outlet curates and ranks news stories and adds links to key social media posts in X, LinkedIn, Threads, and Bluesky.

    It combines algorithms with a team of human editors.

    Unlike an RSS reader, Techmeme cannot be customized by the user.

    The company said, “Techmeme has remained incredibly consistent, even as technology, the web, and news have changed so profoundly. In 2005, Techmeme was a free, single-page website, continuously ranking and organizing links from news outlets, personal sites, and corporate sites, and it remains so in 2025.”

  • Reflection AI, Founded a Year Ago, Reaches a $8 Billion Valuation

    Reflection AI, Founded a Year Ago, Reaches a $8 Billion Valuation

    IBL News | New York

    Reflection AI, a startup founded by two former Google DeepMind researchers in March 2024, raised $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation this month.

    Investors in this latest round include Nvidia, Disruptive, DST, 1789, B Capital, Lightspeed, GIC, Eric Yuan, Eric Schmidt, Citi, Sequoia, CRV, and others.

    Along with its financial injection, Reflection AI — which provides a Chinese DeepSeek-style open source alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic — announced that it has recruited a team of top talent from DeepMind and OpenAI, forming a current team of about 60 people — mostly AI researchers and engineers across infrastructure, data training, and algorithm development.

    Reflection AI hasn’t yet released its first model, which will be largely text-based, but it plans to add multimodal capabilities in the future. The company will use the funds from this latest round to acquire the computing resources needed to train the new models, the first of which it aims to release early next year.

    “We built something once thought possible only inside the world’s top labs: a large-scale LLM and reinforcement learning platform capable of training massive Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) models at frontier scale,” Reflection AI wrote in a post on X.

    “DeepSeek and Qwen and all these models are our wake-up call because if we don’t do anything about it, then effectively, the global standard of intelligence will be built by someone else, but not in America.”

    DeepSeek had a breakthrough moment when it figured out how to train MoE-based architecture models at scale in an open way, followed by Qwen, Kimi, and other models in China.

    David Sacks, the White House AI and Crypto Czar, posted on X: “It’s great to see more American open source AI models. A meaningful segment of the global market will prefer the cost, customizability, and control that open source offers. We want the U.S. to win this category too.”

     

  • OpenAI Research on Usage Trends at ChatGPT: 24% Messages Seek Info, Majority of Chats Are Personal

    OpenAI Research on Usage Trends at ChatGPT: 24% Messages Seek Info, Majority of Chats Are Personal

    IBL News | New York

    The majority of requests to ChatGPT are related to personal lives rather than for help at work, and come from women and people aged 18 to 25, according to OpenAI, which disclosed these data as part of a study of what users do with AI.

    In June 2024, prompts to the chatbot were split roughly evenly between work and personal uses. By June 2025, nonwork uses made up 73 percent of all conversations, the company said.

    Additionally, the San Francisco-based company said it now has over 700 million weekly users.

    OpenAI sorted the more than 1 million chats studied across that period into seven categories. The largest category was practical guidance at 28.3 percent of all chats, which encompassed people seeking how-to advice, help with schoolwork, and tips on working out.

    The second, people asking ChatGPT for writing help, and here, for editing or critiquing text, followed by personal writing, mostly on emails and social media posts, or communication, a category defined to include helping with emails or social media posts.

    Generating computer code has also been enthusiastically adopted by many in the tech industry, with approximately 4.2% of the sampled chats related to programming.

    Another popular case for ChatGPT across the data included in the study was seeking information, a category that includes purchasable products, and the researchers said is a very close substitute for web search — the basis of Google’s $55 billion annual search ads business. Google has responded by putting content from its own AI tools at the top of search results pages.

    OpenAI used AI technology to analyze the chats it studied.

  • Indiana University (IU) Announced Its Adoption of ChatGPT Edu

    Indiana University (IU) Announced Its Adoption of ChatGPT Edu

    IBL News | New York

    Indiana University (IU) announced last month its adoption of OpenAI’s ChatGPT Edu to provide AI tools to 120,000 students, faculty, and staff.

    OpenAI is one of the contenders in the higher education segment, along with Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft for Education, and small companies such as ibl.ai — the parent company of this news service —, BoodleBox, and MagicSchool, among others.

    Indiana University will be the second-largest rollout of ChatGPT Edu by OpenAI.

    Over 30,000 members of the IU community were already using the free version of ChatGPT with IU email addresses, reported OpenAI.

    ChatGPT Edu is intended to enable:

    • Faculty to enhance course design and explore AI-enabled teaching strategies.
    • Staff to streamline administrative processes and improve efficiency.
    • Students to develop AI fluency and build workforce-ready skills.
    • Researchers to pursue new frontiers of inquiry with responsible AI tools.
    • The university to manage data securely within its institutional environment.

    In August, IU launched a new, free GenAI 101 course that serves as a foundational program to introduce generative AI concepts, applications, and responsible-use practices.

  • Biola University Will Receive a Gift of $40 Million to Advance Christian Tech Education

    Biola University Will Receive a Gift of $40 Million to Advance Christian Tech Education

    IBL News | New York

    Biola University, a 117-year-old Christian institution, received a transformational gift of $40 million from a Silicon Valley executive passionate about technology and Christian education who made the donation anonymously. The gift will go toward student scholarships, endowed professorships, and the construction of two engineering facilities.

    It will also enable the institution to develop forward-thinking programs that educate and equip students in emerging technologies, preparing them to lead with moral conviction and Christian character.

    Dr. Barry H. Corey, President of Biola University, said, “The gift will significantly enhance opportunities for students pursuing degrees in computer science, engineering, robotics, mathematics, and physics in a landscape shaped by the confluence of AI, cybersecurity, and the use of cloud.”

    In the new hands-on learning space, students will design, test, and build projects such as racing vehicles, robotic systems, aerial drones, and machine learning systems, preparing them for careers in high-demand sectors.

    “The vision of Biola’s School of Science, Technology and Health is to be identified among the world’s foremost Christ-centered STEM and health schools — a community abiding in truth, abounding with grace and compelled by Christ’s love to be a relevant and redemptive voice in the rapidly changing worlds of science, technology and health,” said Dr. Matthew Rouse, dean of the School of Science, Technology and Health.

  • Anthropic’s Claude Can Now Create PDFs, Excel Spreadsheets, and PowerPoint Slides

    Anthropic’s Claude Can Now Create PDFs, Excel Spreadsheets, and PowerPoint Slides

    IBL News | New York

    Anthropic announced this month that Claude will be able to create and edit PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint slides, documents, presentations, or projects within the chat interface.

    Users describe what they want to create, and the chatbot will output the file. Also, they can upload the content they want to edit or ask it to generate.

    Once it is done, users can download it or save it to their Google Drive.

    The service will be available to Max, Team, and Enterprise plan users.

    Some examples Anthropic provided included editing an essay and outputting it in a well-formatted PDF, as well as transforming raw data into cleaner projects with analysis, charts, and written insights.

    Anthropic said it enabled Claude to carry out this feature by giving it access to a private compute environment where it writes code and runs programs.

    “Over the past year, we’ve seen Claude move from answering questions to completing entire projects, and now we’re making that power more accessible. We’ve given Claude access to a private computer environment where it can write code and run programs to produce the files and analyses you need,” said the company.