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- Innovation Profs - 2/11/2025
Innovation Profs - 2/11/2025
Your weekly guide to generative AI tools and news
Innovation Profs
February 11, 2025
In the Classroom with the Innovation Profs
Follow along as we teach Drake University’s first ever generative AI course.
This week’s topic: Advanced Prompting Techniques
Lesson: We will continue exploring the capabilities of large language models. Students will explore text prompting with images, LLM parameters, advanced prompting techniques, reasoning models and building a prompt library.
Your reading: Guide to LLM Parameters, Image inputs, Reasoning models, Prompt libraries.
Homework: Create a prompt library designed to assist a professional in a specific role within a company (ideally your role in your company). This library will help generate ideas, solve problems, and complete key tasks using AI tools like ChatGPT. The goal is to design prompts that align with the role’s responsibilities, ensuring they are strategic, effective, and tailored to the specific needs of the role. See more assignments our students will complete this week here.
AI Lunch Club Returns
We’re bringing back our generative AI lunch club. The next event will be an Introduction to Microsoft 365 Copilot on Feb. 26. If you are getting started with or considering adding Copilot for work, you won’t want to miss this one. We’ve been testing Copilot and find it an invaluable productivity tool. More Lunch Clubs:
March 12: AI in Social Media
March 26: AI Ethics - sign-up coming soon
April 9: AI in Law and Policy - sign-up coming soon
Latest Gen AI News
A Super Bowl ad featuring Google’s Gemini AI contained a whopper of a mistake about cheese
Watch out, cheddar and mozzarella: Gouda is on the rise! At least that’d be the case if we’re to believe a statement made in a Google Gemini Super Bowl ad that gouda “is one of the most popular cheeses in the world, accounting for 50 to 60 percent of the world’s cheese consumption.” This isn’t the first cheese-related mistake that Google Gemini has made, highlighting the persistent problem of hallucination that has plagued Google’s AI tool, and to varying extents, all LLM tools. Google has taken concrete steps to mitigate this problem, but unfortunately, these types of publicly visible stumbles detract from the strong potential of tools like Google’s Deep Research and newer models like Gemini 2.0 Pro Experimental.
Conversational Alexa being unveiled on Feb 26, as Siri waits until 2026
We’re just about two weeks away from the unveiling of the LLM-powered Alexa (also known as “Remarkable Alexa,” although it’s unclear whether this name will be the official one). Amazon has announced February 26 as the date of an “Alexa-focused” event, but Amazon insiders have confirmed that the event will highlight the “souped-up” Alexa, which will powered by Anthropic’s Claude models. We highlighted the coming of this feature back in September 2024 and June 2024 with scant details, so it will be worth watching to finally learn about the main features of the product (for instance, where it will fall within the $5-$10 monthly anticipated cost range and which Claude models will be available for conversations).
Nearly 500K students across California get access to ChatGPT
The California State University system has adopted ChatGPT Edu, which grants ChatGPT access “to more than 460,000 students and over 63,000 staff and faculty across its 23 campuses.” According to OpenAI, the partnership is “the largest implementation of ChatGPT by any single organization or company anywhere in the world.” A similar partnership with Arizona State University was announced just over a year ago. Whether other massive university systems will follow suit, particularly as we head toward a period of potentially unstable university budgets, remains to be seen.
Quick Hits
Tool of the week: Apple Invites
Apple’s newest app is an event planner that is powered by AI. Here’s what Apple says about its new Invites app: “Users can tap in to the built-in Image Playground experience to produce original images using concepts, descriptions, and people from their photo library. And when composing invitations, users can use Writing Tools to help find just the right turn of phrase to meet the moment.”
AI-generated image of the week
Congrats to the Super Bowl LIX champions. We made this image using Ideogram (and we didn’t even ask it to use Iowa native Cooper DeJean’s number 33).
Prompt: an eagle wearing a green Philadelphia Eagles football jersey flying in the sky while carrying the Vince Lombardi trophyGet starting with Generative AI
New to generative AI? Here are some places to start…
What we found
Anthropic’s latest findings indicate that coding tops the list of AI use cases. The company’s newly released Economic Index, designed to track AI’s effect on the job market over time, reports that 37.5 percent of all requests to its chatbot Claude fell under the “computer and mathematical” category. Notably, the research also shows that in more than half of all instances, AI was used to collaborate with people on tasks, rather than replace them.
Bonus: See how much AI animation has changed in the past two years.
