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- Innovation Profs - 3/11/2025
Innovation Profs - 3/11/2025
Your weekly guide to generative AI tools and news
Innovation Profs
March 11, 2025
Next AI Lunch Club is Wednesday
Are you a social media manager looking to use AI in your work? Or are you just curious how Meta, YouTube and others are implementing generative AI into their networks? Our next AI Lunch Club event will be a look at how AI is being used in social media this Wednesday (March 12). You’ll learn about…
How to create your own AI for people to chat with in Instagram
How to get the most from Meta’s AI advertising tools
How LinkedIn is using generative AI to better connect job seekers with job opportunities
Two apps that are foreshadowing a future where humans and AI bots interact
And more!
March 26: What are the ethical implications of using generative AI? That will be the topic of our next AI Lunch Club on March 26. Chris Porter will lead a session on AI Ethics to provide an overview of the broader ethical issues associated with generative AI, offering practical insights to help you better understand and address these critical issues. Bring your questions for what we hope will be an engaging and thought-provoking conversation.
More Lunch Club:
April 9: AI in Law and Policy
Latest Gen AI News
OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 AI model comes to more ChatGPT users
GPT-4.5, OpenAI’s biggest model released to date, was released several weeks back, with ChatGPT Pro users given first access to the model. Last week, ChatGPT Plus users were given access to GPT-4.5 as well, albeit with fairly severe rate limits, reportedly around 50 messages per week. This is due to the fact that running GPT-4.5 is expensive, 30 times the input cost and 15 times the output cost compared to GPT-4o.
Microsoft reportedly ramps up AI efforts to compete with OpenAI
To date, Microsoft and OpenAI have enjoyed a successful partnership, with Microsoft providing the data infrastructure to train OpenAI models and OpenAI models powering Microsoft Copilot. But cracks in the partnership are starting to emerge, as Microsoft is developing its own reasoning models amidst reports that OpenAI refused to share technical details with Microsoft about their own reasoning model o1.
In another chess move with Microsoft, OpenAI is pouring $12B into CoreWeave
Just yesterday, OpenAI launched a returning salvo in response to Microsoft’s move into the reasoning model space, partnering with cloud service provider CoreWeave to the tune of $12 billion dollars over a five year span to supply GPU support to OpenAI to train new models. As part of the deal, OpenAI will receive $350 million in equity in CoreWeave, which filed to be a public company last week. It’s worth noting that Microsoft accounted for 62% of CoreWeave’s revenue in 2024, so we’ll see what becomes of that partnership as OpenAI bolsters its ties with CoreWeave.
Amazon is reportedly developing its own AI ‘reasoning’ model
Microsoft is not the only Big Five tech companies trying to break into the reasoning model space, as Amazon is looking to develop their own reasoning model as well. It is anticipated that the model will be branded as part of the Nova family of models, as Amazon has already developed foundation models under that moniker.
Quick Hits
In the Classroom with the Innovation Profs
Follow along as we teach Drake University’s first ever generative AI course.
This week’s topic: Generative AI Video
Last week: Generative AI Audio
Lesson: Congratulations class, we’re one week away from spring break. Which also means we have one more week of our AI fundamentals. This week, we will be learning about tools to create and edit AI videos. Students will learn about a range of AI tools that create videos from text or from an image.
If you are an OpenAI subscriber, you have access to Suno. If not, there are some free options available. Students will explore tools including Runway, Pika, Dream Machine and Kling.
On the editing side, we will learn how to use Descript and Pictory to edit video from the text transcript. Descript has tools to automatically remove filler words and even to remove parts of a video when you are rambling. Pictory can, among other things, turn a web page into a video.
We’ll also explore tools for creating videos with AI avatars using the tools D-ID, Heygen and Synthesia.
Your reading: This week’s slides with video examples, Video prompting guide, Our list of Gen AI video tools.
Homework: Our students will be completing the five tasks on this list. If you complete them (any of them!), shoot us an email and let us know your thoughts.
Podcasting Profs
We’ve been interviewed on a few podcasts recently to discuss generative artificial intelligence. Hear what we had to say here:
Feb. 28 - Porter and Snider on Artificial Impact
Feb. 1 - Porter on Infinite Stream
Dec. 18 - Snider on You Don’t Need This Podcast
Interested in having us join your podcast? Email us at [email protected].
Tool of the week: HeyGen
HeyGen is a generative AI tool for creating videos. It offers features such as lifelike AI avatars and multilingual voice cloning, allowing businesses and creators to scale content production with ease.
Users can write a script and watch an avatar read it flawlessly. Existing videos can be updated to multiple languages in minutes, with accurate lip-syncing and voice matching.
We’ve known about HeyGen but have never explored the tool - until this week. Professor Snider uploaded a little over two minutes of video if him speaking to the camera. HeyGen was able to clone his voice and his movements to create this AI video.
AI-generated image of the week
This week we explored some different art styles for AI images.
Top-left: Quilling Artwork
Top-right: Kirigami
Bottom-left: Yarn art
Bottom-right: Prismatic
Prompt: A tree by a river, [art style here]What we found
McDonald’s is upgrading its 43,000 restaurants with cutting-edge technology, including internet-connected kitchen equipment, AI-driven drive-throughs, and AI-powered management tools.