IBL News

Category: Newsletters

  • Manus Introduces Slides, Which Creates Structured Presentations on Google

    Manus Introduces Slides, Which Creates Structured Presentations on Google

    IBL News | New York

    This month, Manus introduced a feature that allows users to create structured slide presentations instantly.

    With a single prompt, Manus generates tailored slide decks.

    Interestingly, slides can be edited on the same screen and later exported as Google Slides.

    An example can be seen here.

  • Google Infuses in Gemini 2.5 Its Family of Models Fine-Tuned for Education, LearnLM

    Google Infuses in Gemini 2.5 Its Family of Models Fine-Tuned for Education, LearnLM

    IBL News | New York

    To make the learning process more active, engaging, and effective, Google announced at the I/O 2025 annual event that it’s infusing its family of models, fine-tuned for education, with Gemini 2.5 LearnLM.

    The Gemini’s multimodality feature allows remixing information into any format — audio, video, images, and text.

    Another Google tool that has been enhanced is NotebookLM, which enables users to upload sources for research and makes the system an expert, presenting the outcome as audio Audio Overviews and Mind Maps.

     

    Additionally, Google announced that it will soon introduce a feature that enables users to convert the content of their notebooks into educational videos.

    Google continues to enhance its new search modality, called AI Mode, with advanced reasoning, multimodality, web links, the ability to ask follow-up questions, and soon, Deep Search.

    In April, Google gave U.S. college students a free Gemini upgrade through 2026 final exams. The company is now expanding its offerings to students in Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Students in these countries will receive free access to the Google AI Pro plan for 15 months, helping them fine-tune their writing, study for exams, and get homework help, along with 2 TB of free storage, NotebookLM, and more.

    Students globally will also have the ability to create custom quizzes to help them prepare for exams by simply asking Gemini to “create a practice quiz…” on any topic, or base them on uploaded documents such as class notes.

    The quiz experience provides hints, offers explanations for both right and wrong answers, and provides a helpful summary at the end, highlighting areas of strength as well as those that may benefit from further study.

    Later this year, the search giant will introduce Sparkify, which will turn users’ questions or ideas into short animated videos through the latest Gemini and Veo models.

     

    With Project Astra, Google is prototyping a conversational, personalized tutor that can help with homework. The tools walk users through problems step-by-step, identify mistakes, and even generate diagrams to help explain concepts if they get stuck. This research project will be coming to Google products later this year. Android Trusted Testers can sign up for the waitlist to see a preview.

  • Anthropic Introduced the Claude 4, with Advanced Features in Coding and Reasoning, and AI agents

    Anthropic Introduced the Claude 4, with Advanced Features in Coding and Reasoning, and AI agents

    IBL News | New York

    Anthropic last week launched Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, which offer advanced features in coding, reasoning, and AI agents.

    “Claude Opus 4 is the world’s best coding model, with sustained performance on complex, long-running tasks and agent workflows. Claude Sonnet 4 is a significant upgrade to Claude Sonnet 3.7, delivering superior coding and reasoning while responding more precisely to your instructions,” advertised the company.

    Both models can use tools like web search and demonstrate improved memory capabilities.

    In addition, the company announced that Claude Code was generally available. It supports background tasks via GitHub Actions and native integrations with VS Code and JetBrains, displaying edits directly in users’ files for pair programming.

    Anthropic, a start-up founded by ex-OpenAI researchers, released four new capabilities on the Anthropic API, enabling developers to build more powerful code execution tools, the MCP connector, Files API, and the ability to cache prompts for up to one hour.

    Claude Opus 4 powers known frontier agent products like Cursor, Replit, Block, Rakuten, and Cognition.

    Anthropic’s Claude 4 models arrived as the company looks to substantially grow revenue. Reportedly, the organization aims to reach $2.2 billion in earnings this year.

  • Microsoft Announced the Multi-Agent Orchestration System During Its Build Conference

    Microsoft Announced the Multi-Agent Orchestration System During Its Build Conference

    IBL News | New York

    Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella unveiled the company’s biggest product moves, including Copilot and Azure updates, developer tools, and more, during this week’s Build conference in Seattle.

    “We’ve entered the era of AI agents. Thanks to groundbreaking advancements in reasoning and memory, AI models are now more capable and efficient, and we’re seeing how AI systems can help us all solve problems in new ways,” said Satya Nadella.

    As an example, the company mentioned that 15 million developers are already using GitHub Copilot, streamlining the way they code, check, deploy, and troubleshoot.

    Hundreds of thousands of customers are using Microsoft 365 Copilot to help research, brainstorm and develop solutions, and more than 230,000 organizations — including 90% of the Fortune 500 — have already used Copilot Studio to build AI agents and automations.

    The Multi-Agent Orchestration, or how multiple specialized AI agents work together to accelerate work, was one of the notorious announcements.

    One example was an onboarding process handled by several agents: one managed human resources paperwork, another set up IT accounts, and a third scheduled training sessions. Each agent handled its part and reported back, with the system summarizing the results for the user.

    In sales, one agent pulled CRM data, another drafted a proposal, and a third scheduled follow-ups in Outlook.

    Microsoft announced that it is moving toward an open, connected agent ecosystem, with Model Context Protocol (MCP), a protocol that lets agents securely access data and services across platforms, and NLWeb, a system that helps websites become accessible to AI agents via natural language.

    The goal is to create an environment where agents can collaborate and interact freely across the web and different apps, no matter who built them or where they run.

    Also, the company presented its Agent Store, a platform where users can access and deploy various AI agents, including those built by Microsoft and third-party developers, within the Microsoft 365 Copilot and other Microsoft services. These agents are designed to perform specific tasks, such as summarizing documents, generating code, or managing meetings, and can be customized for individual needs or business requirements.

    • Microsoft Build 2025: All the Announcements
    • Official summary

    Microsoft Build 2025 Keynote: Everything Revealed, in 14 Minutes

  • Figma Releases New AI Tools for Creating Sites, App Prototypes, and Drawing

    Figma Releases New AI Tools for Creating Sites, App Prototypes, and Drawing

    IBL News | New York

    Figma, a design company, announced multiple AI features this month, during its Config annual conference. These include an AI creator for powering website and app prototypes, a way to create assets in bulk, a new drawing tool, and a blog post generator.

    With this launch, the company is trying to compete with Canva, Adobe, WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Replit, Lovable, and Hostinger, among other firms.

    However, the company denies directly competing with these creative tools by saying that it is in the business of building digital products, with a third of the company’s users being developers.

    Figma also announced a new plan, a content seat, starting at $8 monthly. This plan will give users access to Figma Buzz, Slides, FigJam, and Sites CMS.

  • Google’s Gemma Open Models Reach a Milestone of 150 Million Downloads

    Google’s Gemma Open Models Reach a Milestone of 150 Million Downloads

    IBL News | New York

    Google Gemini’s Gemma open models reached a milestone of 150 million downloads this month.

    Omar Sanseviero, a developer relations engineer at Google DeepMind, also revealed that developers have created more than 70,000 variants of Gemma on the AI dev platform Hugging Face.

    This collection of lightweight models, built from the same research and technology that powers Gemini 2.0, was launched in February 2024 to compete with another open model like Meta’s Llama. In late April, it exceeded 1.2 billion downloads.

    The latest Gemma releases are multimodal, enabling users to work with images and text in 100 languages. Versions are also fine-tuned for particular applications, like drug discovery.

    Gemma and Llama have non-standard licensing terms, which some developers say they might be risky for commercial use of the models.

     

  • OpenAI Launched Its Coding Agent Called ‘Codex’

    OpenAI Launched Its Coding Agent Called ‘Codex’

    Mikel Amigot, IBL News | New York

    OpenAI launched a paid software engineering agent called Codex yesterday. The agent iteratively runs     tests on its code until it achieves passing results.

    Vibe coding tools have surged in popularity in recent months, and OpenAI is attempting to capture a share of that market segment. In early May, the maker of ChatGPT reportedly closed a deal to acquire Windsurf, the developer behind another popular AI coding platform, for $3 billion. The launch of Codex shows that OpenAI is also building its own AI coding tools.

    Issued as a research preview, Codex can work on many tasks in parallel, write features, answer questions about the user’s codebase, fix bugs, and propose pull requests for review.

    Each task runs on a sandboxed virtual computer in the cloud, preloaded with the repository.

    According to OpenAI, it generates code that closely mirrors human style and PR preferences, adheres precisely to instructions, and can iteratively run tests until it receives a passing result.

    Codex, accessible through the sidebar in ChatGPT, is powered by Codex-1, a version of OpenAI o3 AI reasoning model optimized for software engineering tasks.

    OpenAI is also updating Codex CLI, the company’s recently launched open-source coding agent that runs in the user’s terminal, with a version of its o4-mini model that’s optimized for software engineering.

    In OpenAI’s API, it costs $1.50 per 1M input tokens (750,000 words) and $6 per 1M output tokens.

  • Stripe Allows iOS Developers to Dodge Apple’s Commission

    Stripe Allows iOS Developers to Dodge Apple’s Commission

    IBL News | New York

    iOS app developers can now accept payments with the processing platform Stripe, outside any app, without Apple Store commission fees.

    This possibility of linking payments outside the apps, dodging Apple’s commission fees, has unexpectedly come after a landmark ruling on Wednesday in the Epic v. Apple antitrust case. Apple can no longer charge developers 27 percent fees on purchases made outside apps, and it cannot dictate how developers point users to buy things elsewhere.

    Stripe product manager Michael Luo demoed how it works on X.

    A guide showed developers how to accept transactions outside an app using Stripe Checkout. Instead of showing a transaction page inside the app, it launches Safari and takes users straight to a “buy now” page.

    Other apps are also beginning to launch new updates that link to the web for in-app purchases, allowing the developers to skirt Apple’s commissions.

    Patreon announced yesterday that it will update its app so creators can accept payments outside Apple’s payment system.

    Also, Spotify said it’s letting users subscribe to premium plans from links inside its iOS app.

     

  • Anthropic Allows to Connect AI Apps to Tools and Data Through MCP

    Anthropic Allows to Connect AI Apps to Tools and Data Through MCP

    IBL News | New York

    Anthropic launched Integrations this month, a new way to connect apps and tools to its AI assistant Claude. It also announced that it has expanded its Advanced Research capability to allow this chatbot to search the web, users’ Google Workspace, and its Integrations. These tools, available in beta for paid users, are part of the company’s effort to compete with Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

    In November, Anthropic launched its MCP (Model Context Protocol), an open standard connecting AI apps to tools and data. With Integrations, Claude can work seamlessly with remote MCP servers across web and desktop apps.

    Several Integrations from Anthropopic partners, such as Atlassian, Zapier, Cloudflare, Intercom, Square, and PayPal, expand what Claude can do.

    For example, the Atlassian Integration lets Claude summarize and create pages in Atlassian’s Confluence workplace software.

  • 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.