Innovation Profs - 2/24/2025

Your weekly guide to generative AI tools and news

Innovation Profs
February 25, 2025

AI Lunch Clubs start tomorrow

AI lunch club starts this week with 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. And we think you’ll agree!

More Lunch Clubs:
March 12: AI in Social Media
March 26: AI Ethics NEW LOW PRICE!
April 9: AI in Law and Policy NEW LOW PRICE!

Latest Gen AI News

Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet takes aim at OpenAI and DeepSeek in AI’s next big battle

Anthropic has officially entered the reasoning model competition with its release of Claude 3.7 Sonnet just yesterday. Unlike the reasoning models put out by OpenAI and DeepSeek, Claude 3.7 Sonnet users are able to specify how much time the model should “think” before yielding its output. As explained by Anthropic’s head of product development for research, “We just believe that reasoning is a core part and core component of an AI, rather than a separate thing that you have to pay separately to access. Just like humans, the AI should handle both quick responses and complex thinking. For a simple question like ‘what time is it?’, it should answer instantly. But for complex tasks — like planning a two-week Italy trip while accommodating gluten-free dietary needs — it needs more extensive processing time.”

Microsoft’s CEO says Xbox ‘will have a catalog of games using generative AI’

Microsoft has introduced Muse, a generative AI model that can produce “game visuals, controller actions, or both.” According to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft is planning to use the tool to develop a catalog of games. “It’s just very cool… one thing that we wanted to go after was, using gameplay data, can you actually generate games that are both consistent and then have the ability to generate the diversity of what that game represents and then are persistent to user mods, right? So that’s what this is,”

Google launches a free AI coding assistant with very high usage caps

Today Google released a free consumer version of Gemini Code Assist for Individuals, with its sights on competing with GitHub’s Copilot coding assistant. Powered by a Gemini 2.0 variant, users will have a cap of 180,000 code completions per month, which is 90 times the usage limit of GitHub’s free Copilot plan. Code Assist users can also make up to 240 chat requests per day, which also vastly exceeds the limit of Copilot’s chat feature. Finally, Code Assist’s context window comes in at 128,000 tokens, four times larger than that of any competitor, allowing users to process a significant amount of code in a given conversation.

Quick Hits

Anthropic used Pokémon to benchmark its newest AI model | TechCrunch

Anthropic used Pokémon to benchmark its newest AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet. Really.

techcrunch.com/2025/02/24/anthropic-used-pokemon-to-benchmark-its-newest-ai-model

Exclusive: 1 in 3 college students are using ChatGPT, but variability across states could be a cause for concern

A new report from OpenAI shows that students in places like Wyoming could be left behind when it comes to obtaining AI skills.

fortune.com/education/articles/openai-report-more-than-one-third-college-aged-adults-use-chatgpt

1,000 artists release 'silent' album to protest UK copyright sell-out to AI | TechCrunch

The U.K. government is pushing forward with plans to attract more AI companies to the region by changing copyright law.

techcrunch.com/2025/02/24/1000-artists-release-silent-album-to-protest-uk-copyright-sell-out-to-ai

What are the best AI tools for research? Nature’s guide

There are many large language models to choose from; some excel at coding, whereas others are better for synthesizing information.

www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00437-0

I’m Not Convinced Ethical Generative AI Currently Exists

WIRED’s advice columnist considers whether some AI tools are more ethical than others, and if developers can make AI wiser.

www.wired.com/story/the-prompt-ethical-generative-ai-does-not-exist

OpenAI Researchers Find That Even the Best AI Is "Unable To Solve the Majority" of Coding Problems

OpenAI researchers have admitted that even the most advanced AI models can't really solve the coding problems put in front of them.

futurism.com/openai-researchers-coding-fail

Why GPT can't think like us

Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly large language models like GPT-4, has shown impressive performance on reasoning tasks. But does AI truly understand abstract concepts, or is it just mimicking patterns?

techxplore.com/news/2025-02-gpt.amp

Is AI really thinking and reasoning — or just pretending to?

The best answer — AI has “jagged intelligence” — lies in between hype and skepticism.

www.vox.com/future-perfect/400531/ai-reasoning-models-openai-deepseek

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 Image Prompting
Last week: Intro to Text-to-Image Prompting

Lesson: We will focus on two areas this week as we look to become better at image prompting - advanced prompting techniques and AI image editing tools. For advanced prompting, we will discuss the various settings in our image creation tools, art styles to choose from and a framework for writing image prompts. For editing, we will discuss inpainting, outpainting and the editor options in Midjourney and DALL-E.

Your reading: Midjourney parameter guide, Mastering advanced prompting, Inpainting and Outpainting, Editing in DALL-E

Homework: This week’s homework will challenge you to use some advanced image prompting techniques. You’ll be able to stick to free programs, but you may run out of credits if trying to finish this in one sitting.

Tool of the week: Carousel Studio

Carousels posts are proven to get the most reach on LinkedIn, but most LinkedIn users are not designers. Enter Carousel Studio, a new tool that lets you create beautiful LinkedIn carousels in Canva for free.

It includes ready-to-use templates, customization options, and AI-generated content. See it in action here.

AI-generated image of the week

We used outpainting in Midjourney to transform this tree into a vast world of giant creatures. Outpainting was used four times in the process (with different prompts each time), but we’ll show the starting and final images. Read more about outpainting in this week’s “In the classroom” above.

Final prompt: gargantuan creatures inhabiting the vast reaches of the known world

What we found

AI-generated videos have been missing one key element - audio. Until now. Audio Generation is now live in Dream Machine. Users can sync immersive sound to AI-generated videos with one click, or fine-tune the audio using text prompts. It's available in beta for free. See a demo: