IBL News

Category: Top News

  • The White House Issued Executive Orders to Advance AI Education

    The White House Issued Executive Orders to Advance AI Education

    IBL News | New York

    President Donald Trump signed seven executive orders on April 23 impacting elementary, secondary, and postsecondary education, addressing AI, school discipline, workforce development, apprenticeships, HBCUs, and accreditation, among other issues.

    Leaders from labor, commerce, and education departments, including Secretary Linda McMahon, joined the president in the Oval Office. She released a statement about the orders.

    Trump’s executive order on AI stated that it will ensure that “schoolchildren, young Americans, are adequately trained in AI tools so that they can be competitive in the economy years from now into the future as AI becomes a bigger and bigger deal.”

    The order broadly seeks to improve K-12 education through AI and enhance teacher training on AI:

    • Establishes the White House Task Force on AI Education;
    • Establishes a Presidential AI Challenge, which will encourage and highlight student and educator achievements in AI, promote wide geographic adoption of technological advancement, and foster collaboration between government, academia, philanthropy, and industry to address national challenges with AI solutions.
    • Seek to increase participation in AI-related Registered Apprenticeships;
    • Establishes public-private partnerships to provide resources for K-12 AI education; and
    • Prioritizes the use of AI in discretionary grant programs for teacher training and prioritizes research on the use of AI in education.

    Another executive order, “Preparing Americans for High-Paying Skilled Trade Jobs of the Future,” focused on modernizing American workforce programs. It seeks “to align with our country’s reindustrialization needs and equip American workers to fill the growing demand for skilled trades and other occupations.”

    “My Administration will further protect and strengthen Registered Apprenticeships and build on their successes to seize new opportunities and unlock the limitless potential of the American worker.”

    The order plans to reach and surpass 1 million new active apprentices.

    In her statement, McMahon said, “Not every student needs to attend a four-year university to enter a family-sustaining career. The Trump Administration will support communities across the country offering career-aligned programs like apprenticeships and dual enrollment to meet the needs of their workforce best.” 

    Trump signed an executive order titled “White House Initiative to Promote Excellence and Innovation at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs),” accompanied by this additional information.

    The order stated that the administration’s policy is to support HBCUs. It established the White House Initiative on HBCUs and the President’s Board of Advisors on HBCUs.

    Trump signed an executive order titled “Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education,” which was accompanied by this additional information.

    “Many third-party accreditors have relied on a sort of woke ideology to accredit universities instead of accrediting based on merit and performance,” said a Trump administration representative.

    “The Department of Education will create a competitive marketplace of higher education accreditors, which will give colleges and universities incentives and support to focus on lowering college costs, fostering innovation, and delivering a high-quality postsecondary education,” said Linda McMahon.

  • Meta Introduces Its AI Assistant App, which Includes Voice Conversation and Discover Feed

    Meta Introduces Its AI Assistant App, which Includes Voice Conversation and Discover Feed

    IBL News | New York

    Meta this week introduced the first version of its AI assistant built with Llama 4 and featuring voice conversation at the forefront.

    It also features a Discover Feed that enables users to explore how others are utilizing AI.

    Meta is the first AI company to add a social component to its chatbot. Across the industry, AI chatbots and social media are converging. Elon Musk’s X has already integrated closely with Grok. OpenAI, meanwhile, is planning to add a social feed to ChatGPT.

    The new Meta AI app is connected to meta.ai and serves as a companion app for its Ray-Ban AI glasses.

    “While speaking with AI using your voice isn’t new, we’ve improved our underlying model with Llama 4 to bring you responses that feel more personal and relevant, and more conversational in tone. And the app integrates with other Meta AI features like image generation and editing, which can now all be done through a voice or text conversation with your AI assistant,” explained the company.

    Currently, people use Meta AI daily across WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger.

    Screen showing Meta AI app homescreen

     

     

  • ChatGPT Will Include Non Ad-Driven Product Recommendations on Its Search Results

    ChatGPT Will Include Non Ad-Driven Product Recommendations on Its Search Results

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI upgraded its web search tool in the default model of ChatGPT, GPT-4, with shopping features and product recommendations, which include direct links to web pages where users can purchase products, although the company won’t receive any kickback from users’ purchases.

    These results are related to categories like fashion, beauty, home goods, and electronics. They surface when a user query implies shopping intent, such as “gifts for someone who loves cooking,” the company announced this week.

    The shopping outcomes will be based on structured metadata from third-party sources, including pricing, product descriptions, and reviews.

    “These products are chosen independently and are not ads,” said the company. Any merchant can appear in the ChatGPT search as long as it has a discoverable site that is not blocking a web crawler called OAI-SearchBot.

    Web owners might need to update theirrobots.txt file to ensure OAI-SearchBot has access.

    “Publishers who allow OAI-SearchBotto access their content, can track referral traffic from ChatGPT using analytics platforms such as Google Analytics. ChatGPT automatically includes the UTM parameter utm_source=chatgpt.com in referral URLs, enabling clear tracking and analysis of inbound traffic from ChatGPT search results.”

    OpenAI ensured that this web crawler was not used to train its AI foundation models with content.

    Online shopping is one of Google’s most important businesses. Now, OpenAI is attempting to compete with rival Google by creating a more personalized experience for finding products and information on the internet.

  • Character.AI Releases AvatarFX, an Advanced Video Generation Model

    Character.AI Releases AvatarFX, an Advanced Video Generation Model

    IBL News | New York

    Character.AI, this month, unveiled, in closed beta, its video generation model, called ‘AvatarFX, intended for animating characters in human-like mode and 2D cartoons.

    With AvatarFX, users can generate and animate videos from preexisting photos of real people.

    To avoid deepfakes, Character.AI will apply watermarks to videos generated by AvatarFX.

    The company added that its AI will block the generation of videos of minors, recognizable celebrities, and politicians.

  • Used by ‘Vibe Coders’, Supabase Reaches a Valuation of 2 Billion

    Used by ‘Vibe Coders’, Supabase Reaches a Valuation of 2 Billion

    IBL News | New York

    Supabase, an open-source platform used by vibe coders and general developers for managing Postgres databases, achieved a $2 billion valuation after raising $200 million in its Series D round.

    This funding round was led by Accel, with contributions from Coatue, Y Combinator, Craft Ventures, Felicis, and angel investors, including Kevin Weil from OpenAI, Guillermo Rauch from Vercel, and Taylor Otwell from Laravel.

    Founded in 2020, and currently used by two million developers who manage 3.5 million databases, Supabase [its team in the picture above] introduced itself as an alternative to Google’s Firebase.

    Its sign-up rate has just doubled in the past three months due to the Vibe coding movement, with apps like Vercel, Bolt, Lovable, Cursor, and Replit, among others.

    Guillermo Rauch, CEO at Vercel, who first invested in Supabase in 2021, sees Vibe coding as a key tailwind for the startup.

    Vercel, last valued at $3.25 billion, is widely viewed as a leader in the vibe coding movement.

  • GPT‑4.1, GPT‑4.1 Mini, and GPT‑4.1 Nano, New OpenAI Models with Context Windows with Up to 1M Tokens

    GPT‑4.1, GPT‑4.1 Mini, and GPT‑4.1 Nano, New OpenAI Models with Context Windows with Up to 1M Tokens

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI launched three new models — GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and GPT-4.1 nano — in its API this month, featuring larger context windows (up to 1 million tokens) and improved performance in coding and instruction over GPT‑4o and GPT‑4o mini.

    “To this end, the GPT‑4.1 model family offers exceptional performance at a lower cost,” said the company.

    “For tasks that demand low latency, GPT‑4.1 nano is our fastest and cheapest model available; it delivers exceptional performance at a small size with its 1 million token context window.”

    Only available via the API, GPT‑4.1 arrives as OpenAI rivals like Google and Anthropic released, respectively, Gemini 2.5 Pro, which also has a 1-million-token context window, and Claude 3.7 Sonnet. Also, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek launched an upgraded V3.

    “OpenAI’s ambition is to create an “agentic software engineer,” as CFO Sarah Friar put it during a tech summit in London last month.

    GPT-4.1 costs $2 per million input tokens and $8 per million output tokens. GPT-4.1 mini is $0.40/million input tokens and $1.60/million output tokens, and GPT-4.1 nano is $0.10/million input tokens and $0.40/million output tokens.

     

  • Brisk AI Teaching Assistant Chrome Extension Reached 2,000 K-12 Schools

    Brisk AI Teaching Assistant Chrome Extension Reached 2,000 K-12 Schools

    IBL News | New York

    Over 2,000 K-12 schools in 100 countries have installed Brisk’s Chrome extension, which allows teachers to write lesson plans, tests, and presentations, and grade work, since its launch in February 2025.

    With 40 tools, the platform uses generative AI, computer vision, and other features.

    The most popular tool in the stack, “Targeted Feedback,” uses generative AI to read student essays (on Google Docs) and create comments tailored to age, a grading rubric, or other standards. Before sharing anything with students, teachers can review and edit the comments.

    “The existing edtech stack as we know it, which is around 140 different tools that the average teacher in the U.S. uses in a given school year, is not ready for AI,” said Brisk’s CEO and founder, Arman Jaffer.

    The San Francisco-based Brisk raised $15 million in funding with investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Owl Ventures, South Park Commons, and Springbank Collective.

    The funding will be used in part to build more tools, and in part to expand to more platforms. A Microsoft integration, aimed at the many Microsoft shop schools, is planned for autumn 2025.

  • OpenAI Made Its Latest Image Generator Available In Its API for Developers

    OpenAI Made Its Latest Image Generator Available In Its API for Developers

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI released the image generation feature of ChatGPT to its API on Wednesday, allowing developers to integrate it into their apps and services.

    Launched in late March, this feature went viral for its ability to create realistic Ghibli Studio-style photos and AI action figures. Over 130 million ChatGPT users created more than 700 million images in just the first week of the tool’s availability, according to the company.

    OpenAI’s natively multimodal model, gpt-image-1, can create images across different styles, follow custom guidelines, leverage world knowledge, and render text.

    Developers can generate multiple images at a time using gpt-image-1 and control the generation quality, thereby adjusting the speed.

    All images created are watermarked with C2PA metadata, allowing them to be identified as AI-generated by supported platforms and apps.

    According to OpenAI, gpt-image-1 employs the same safety guardrails as image generation in ChatGPT.

    Pricing is $5 per million input tokens for text and $10 per million input tokens for images, and $40 per million output tokens for images. That translates to around 2 cents, 7 cents, and 19 cents per generated image for low, medium, and high-quality square images, respectively.

    OpenAI said that companies like Adobe, Airtable, Wix, Instacart, GoDaddy, Canva, and Figma are already using or experimenting with gpt-image-1. Figma’s Figma Design platform, for example, now allows users to generate and edit images via gpt-image-1, while Instacart is testing the model for images related to recipes and shopping lists.

  • OpenAI Released the Smartest Agentic Models o3 and o4-Mini

    OpenAI Released the Smartest Agentic Models o3 and o4-Mini

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI released this month o3 and o4-mini, the smartest models trained to think for longer before responding, typically in under a minute.

    These agentic models can search the web for public utility data, write Python code to build a forecast, generate a graph or image, and explain the key factors behind the prediction, chaining together multiple tool calls.

    They tackle multi-faceted questions and produce detailed and thoughtful answers to solve more complex problems.

    OpenAI o3 is our most powerful reasoning model that pushes the frontier across coding, math, science, visual perception, and more,” said OpenAI.

    “It performs especially strongly at visual tasks like analyzing images, charts, and graphics. In evaluations by external experts, o3 makes 20 percent fewer major errors than OpenAI o1 on difficult, real-world tasks—especially excelling in areas like programming, business/consulting, and creative ideation.”

    OpenAI o4-mini is a smaller model optimized for fast, cost-efficient reasoning—it achieves remarkable performance in math, coding, and visual tasks.

     

  • SchoolAI Raised Another $25 Million in Funding for Its ‘Classroom Experience’ Platform

    SchoolAI Raised Another $25 Million in Funding for Its ‘Classroom Experience’ Platform

    IBL News | New York

    SchoolAI raised $25 million in Series A funding in a round led by Insight Partners. Existing investors include NextView Ventures, The General Partnership, and Peterson Ventures. SchoolAI’s total funding is $32 million to date.

    SchoolAI’s Classroom Experience platform combines AI assistants for teachers that help with classroom preparation and administrative work. At the same time, SchoolAI’s Spaces uses personalized AI tutors, games, and lessons that can adapt to each student’s unique learning style and interests.

    These tools give teachers actionable insights into student performance and allow them to deliver targeted support when it matters most.

    According to the company, SchoolAI is used in over a million classrooms across all 50 U.S. States and over 80 countries worldwide. The platform is embedded in more than 400 school districts through strategic partnerships that train teachers and students on how to use AI safely and in a managed way.

    Launched for classrooms in August of 2023, SchoolAI noted how teachers, instructional coaches, and school leaders are using their tools:

    • “Personalized Learning Companions: Teacher-designed AI ‘Spaces’ that adapt to each student’s interests, learning pace, and style. These 1:1 AI tutors can provide immediate support, dramatically increasing student engagement and learning.
    • Simple Teacher Workflows: Easy-to-use AI assistants that help teachers prepare for class: lesson planning, targeted assessments, personalized feedback, and other administrative tasks–freeing teachers to focus on meaningful student connection while staying aligned to district and state standards.
    • Deep Accessibility and Support Features: SchoolAI supports more than 99 languages for supporting multilingual students, has real-time text-to-speech and speech-to-text for younger students, custom instructions for targeted student accommodations, and additional accessibility features for easy reading and writing.
    • Data-Driven Support Systems: Real-time dashboards can surface actionable data and insights, revealing which students need academic or other support, help students stay on track, flag concerns, and raise opportunities to improve future lessons.
    • Seamless Integration With Existing Tools: SchoolAI integrates directly with established platforms like Canvas, PowerSchool, and Google Classroom, so teachers can use AI with the tools they and their students are already using.
    • Enterprise-Grade Security & School-Ready Safety: A safe, managed, and secure learning environment fully compliant with FERPA and COPPA regulations, with SOC 2 certification providing the highest standards of data protection for students and schools.”