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IBL News | New York

This month, when we saw the creation of Moltbook, a Reddit clone where AI agents using OpenClaw could communicate with one another, some thought that computers had begun to organize against humans.

“What’s currently going on at [Moltbook] is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently,” Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and previous AI director at Tesla, wrote on X at the time.

However, due to Moltbook’s security vulnerabilities and flaws, anyone could create an account, impersonate robots in an interesting way, and even upvote posts without any guardrails or rate limits, making the technology unusable. Moreover, on a social network for agents, someone could try to perform mass prompt injection and send Bitcoin to a specific crypto wallet address.

For sure, Moltbook made for a fascinating moment in internet culture and went viral.

The open-source AI agent OpenClaw has amassed over 200,000 stars on GitHub, making it one of the most popular code repositories ever posted on the platform.

AI agents are not novel, but OpenClaw made them easier to use and to communicate with, via customizable agents that can be used in natural language via WhatsApp, Discord, iMessage, Slack, and most other popular messaging apps.

OpenClaw users can leverage any underlying AI model they have access to, whether via Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, or another service. Users can download “skills” from a marketplace called ClawHub, which can automate most of what one can do on a computer, from managing an email inbox to trading stocks.

The skill associated with Moltbook, for example, enabled AI agents to post, comment, and browse the website.

Some experts say that, at the end of the day, OpenClaw is nothing novel and does not break new scientific ground. It is an iterative improvement on what people are already doing, hitting a new capability threshold by just organizing and combining these existing capabilities to do tasks autonomously. It’s not just a wrapper to ChatGPT, or Claude, or any other AI model.

Currently, developers are snatching up Mac Minis to power extensive OpenClaw setups that might be able to accomplish far more than a human could on their own.

In this context, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted that AI agents will allow a solo entrepreneur to turn a startup into a unicorn, seem plausible.

IBL News | Washington, DC

The acclaimed book “The Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning” received a second edition, updated to cover basics, practical classroom applications, and ethical considerations such as cheating and academic integrity.

The book offers strategies for using AI to support course prep, grading, and assignment creation. It also emphasizes the need for critical thinking and AI literacy to prepare students for a changing world.

This guide for educators aims to demystify AI for faculty, providing actionable advice and exercises to help them navigate this new educational landscape.

IBL News | Orlando, Florida

Socrait, a voice-enabled AI tool that listens to classes and logs useful points for teachers, was named the winner of FETC’s Pitchfest 2.0, the gamified startup competition for K-12 educators and IT leaders who attended the Future of Education Technology Conference this week in Orlando, Florida.

Flawlessly executed, the FETC 2026 conference brought together thousands of K-12 attendees to explore the future of technology in education. In addition to keynotes, sessions, and hands-on workshops, the Orange County Convention Center’s expansive exhibit hall featured over 450 leading solution providers.

Discussions covered a range of topics, including the potential impact of agentic AI on university operations and educational practices. The integration of AI was a major focus. Educators and administrators were provided with insights and strategies for leveraging AI technology to enhance learning outcomes and prepare students for the future.

“Socrait was built by a teacher, for teachers, to reduce the cognitive and administrative burnout of tracking, documenting, and following up on everything that happens in class each day,” said Jim Clor, Co-Founder and Senior Vice President at Socrait.

“When companies listen and iterate with schools, we all benefit from better, more effective products that truly serve students,” explained Jennifer Womble, FETC Conference Chair.

[Jim Clor and Jennifer Womble, in the picture on the right]

The competition featured audience voting through the FETC app based on pitch videos, along with six school and district leader judges.

Yourway Learning finished in second place, followed by QuestionWell AI, Savannah Math Labs, and ReframeXR.

Don’t be sad because it’s over…smile because it’s happening again next year! ❤️🎉

Another successful @fetc #FETC is in the books! Thank y’all again for an AMAZING conference!

We will see you next year back here in the great city of Orlando from 1/26-1/29! pic.twitter.com/5PkstUK12R

— Victoria Thompson, M.S. is at FETC! (@VictoriaTheTech) January 14, 2026

Feeling incredibly grateful to be back at #FETC this year! Excited to share the magic of Augmented Reality and the power of Google NotebookLM with educators who inspire every day. Grateful for this community and the chance to keep learning together. pic.twitter.com/6c7IYt6Kd5

— Zeny Ulloa, Ed. S. 🙏🌴💻 (@zeny_ulloa) January 12, 2026

Fantastic week as always at the #FETC26 conference, it was a great honor to be a featured speaker for the classroom leaders track and terrific sharing sessions with teachers from around the world on creative uses of educational technology! #FETC never disappoints!! pic.twitter.com/z2GERRtLSP

— Tim Needles (@timneedles) January 14, 2026

Final countdown to @fetc with 1 day to go! Registration is in the west concourse of the @orangecountyconventioncenter🧡 it will open Sunday January 11 at 7:00 AM! We are glad you are here #gamechangers! Remember, it happens in the hallways! Come join us at the #FETC #edtech… pic.twitter.com/tvzg467xEz

— Jennifer Womble →#FETC Jan. 11-14, 2026 (@JenWomble) January 11, 2026

IBL News | New York

As the pace of change itself has accelerated, organizations are moving from endless pilots to impact with real business value—and a sense of urgency behind it. And successful businesses are moving from “What can we do?” to “What should we do?”, prioritizing velocity over perfection.

The telephone took 50 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took seven years. Mobile reshaped consumer behavior. Cloud computing was transformative. A leading generative AI tool, ChatGPT, reached about twice that many in two months. Three years later, ChatGPT has over 800 million weekly users, roughly 10% of the planet’s population.

Each improvement simultaneously accelerates all the others: Better technology enables more applications. More applications generate more data. More data attracts more investment. More investment builds better infrastructure. Better infrastructure reduces costs. Lower costs allow more experimentation.

Deloitte subject-matter experts and external technology leaders stated in a report released this December that the data reveals several trends and interconnected forces:

• AI is going physical, converging with robotics.

• Organizations are automating broken processes, solving single points of pain, instead of redesigning operations. Gartner predicts that 40% of agentic projects will fail by 2027.

• Organizations are discovering their existing infrastructure strategies aren’t designed to scale AI to production-scale deployment.

• Token costs have dropped 280-fold in two years; yet some enterprises are seeing monthly bills in the tens of millions. Usage exploded faster than costs declined.

• Leaders are shifting from incremental IT management to orchestrating human-agent teams, with CIOs becoming AI evangelists. “Success requires modular architectures, embedded governance, and perpetual evolution as core capabilities,” said Deloitte. 

• “The organizations that succeed will probably not be those with the most sophisticated technology. They’ll be those with the courage to redesign rather than automate, and the velocity to execute before the window closes.”

• “The gap between laggards and leaders grows exponentially.”

IBL News | New York

The George Washington University launched its GW Engineering AI Academy in November to equip faculty to lead change through AI fluency and an entrepreneurial mindset.

This strategic initiative aims to position the GW’s School of Engineering and Applied Science as an AI-forward institution, taking a leadership position.

“We’re building AI literacy across our school, moving from uncertainty to confidence, from tools to workflows, and from passive adoption to intentional innovation,” said Professor Lorena Barba, GW Engineering AI Academy Director.

“The entrepreneurial mindset aids in challenging the status quo, recognizing opportunities at the intersection of disparate concepts, and solving complex problems to drive meaningful societal impact and human flourishing. Our vision is: AI Literacy as the Foundation for Transformation.”

The integration of AI literacy with the Entrepreneurial Mindset is a framework championed by the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN), of which GW is a partner. This framework follows “a set of attitudes, habits, and behaviors conducive to problem-solving, innovation, and value creation, especially in engineering contexts.”

“The result of this initiative is engineering education that prepares students not just to use AI, but to shape how AI serves humanity,” explained Lorena Barba.

For the inaugural session with the first faculty cohort, the GW Engineering AI Academy focused on AI Workflows, exploring how to move from being an AI “operator” to an AI “manager, orchestrating a team of digital specialists.

The second session focused on context management by curating and maintaining an optimal information bank available in everyone’s AI assistant.

IBL News | New York

The Trump Administration is dismissing the risks of AI — from mass job losses to a potential financial bubble — as it is chasing faster growth and cheers soaring stock prices.

Asked whether he harbors any fears about an emerging bubble that can damage the economy, President Trump recently said, “No. I love AI.”

In an elaborated report, The New York Times concludes that the president and his top aides have fully embraced AI and showered its leading corporate backers with money and regulatory support.

That optimism was on display on Tuesday, after the federal government reported that the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of more than 4 percent last quarter.

Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, said the new data indicated the president’s broader agenda was working, as he touted signs of a “boom” in AI.

However, many economists and even some technologists in Silicon Valley say that AI might cause significant job losses and pose a risk of financial havoc.

President Trump, who has long viewed the stock market as a barometer of his economic success, has celebrated the soaring stock prices of major technology companies like Nvidia.

Through a series of executive orders, signed over the last 11 months, Mr. Trump has moved to eliminate regulatory guardrails and make it easier for tech companies to build data centers, power their operations, sell computer chips, and source critical materials.

He has done so under the advisement of David Sacks, a Silicon Valley investor now serving at the White House, who has publicly likened AI skeptics to a “doomer cult.”

For now, economic data show no mass firings due to AI. But it also proves how it is reshaping the labor force, particularly for younger Americans, including recent college graduates.

A study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that companies embracing AI in the region mainly opted to retrain their workers, rather than let people go. More striking, however, was the slow rate at which these companies were hiring new workers, especially for college-educated positions.

The New York Fed’s report also found that adoption disproportionately reduced employment for workers ages 22 to 25 in industries set to be highly affected by the technology.

This month, President Trump signed a directive that restricted states from imposing their own regulations on the technology.

IBL News | New York

Universities and public colleges are in a hurry to make their webpages, online course content, and mobile apps accessible to people with disabilities by April 2026 to meet compliance guidelines and requirements.

The Department of Justice gave institutions two years to comply with its regulations under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), effective April 2024.

Experts in Higher Ed said that this Act will require serious time and financial investment, making it prohibitive for many institutions.

Compliance requires publicly funded entities to ensure that all web and media content — thousands of webpages — adheres to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

It means every PDF file must be accessible, captions and audio descriptions must accompany every video, and every sound clip must be paired with a transcript.

Faculty have to make course materials accessible, and any third-party tech platform from vendors must also be compliant.

The consequences of not responding are severe, as the DOJ has taken a larger role in enforcing civil rights laws in higher ed under the second Trump administration. Also, legal and activist groups can sue noncompliant institutions.

Some experts have pointed out that the White House can use the new rules in its negotiations with higher ed institutions, given the widespread lack of preparation.

IBL News | New York

Enterprises are rapidly transitioning from experimentation to proving measurable ROI, said a research study conducted by The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “Gen AI is becoming deeply integrated into modern work.”

The report examines how generative AI technology is being adopted in mainstream enterprises, highlighting the ROI.

The shift is moving from exploration to pilots to more disciplined, enterprise-level adoption, according to the study, which concludes that “the next phase is not about adoption; it is about advantage.”

• 82% of enterprises used Gen AI at least weekly, and 46% used it daily, with 89% agreeing that Gen AI enhances employees’ skills.

• A total of 72% of organizations formally measured the ROI of Gen AI, focusing on productivity gains and incremental profit.

• Three out of four leaders see positive returns on Gen AI investments.

The Wharton School predicted that approximately one-third of Gen AI technology budgets will be allocated to internal R&D, indicating that many enterprises are building custom capabilities for the future.

IBL News | New York 

OpenAI announced yesterday that it has 1 million business customers worldwide using ChatGPT for Work, either directly or through its developer platform.

Organizations related to areas such as financial services, healthcare, and retail are among the most active. Consumer adoption is also at high rates, with 800 million users weekly.

The San Francisco-based lab is set to generate $13 billion in revenue this year as it continues to expand sales.

To support the enterprise acceleration, OpenAI launched a new wave of tools and integrations, such as:

• Company knowledge consolidates all the context from connected apps (Slack, SharePoint, Google Drive, GitHub, Canva, Figma, Zillow, Spotify, among others) into ChatGPT.
• Codex model for code generation, refactoring, and workflow automation.
• AgentKit allows users to create and build enterprise agents.
• Multimodal models, such as the Image Generation API, Sora 2, gpt-realtime, and Realtime API to build production voice agents.
• Databricks has made OpenAI models available natively on its stack.
• The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) enables the creation of conversational commerce experiences in ChatGPT. Shopify, Etsy, Walmart, PayPal, and Salesforce are among the companies utilizing this protocol.

OpenAI quoted a recent Wharton study to highlight that 75% of enterprises report a positive ROI, and fewer than 5% report a negative return. “When AI is deployed with the right use case and infrastructure, teams see real results,” said the firm.

This week, too, OpenAI agreed to pay Amazon.com $38 billion for computing power in a multiyear deal. That marks the first partnership between the startup and the cloud company.