Innovation Profs - 5/13/2025

Your weekly guide to generative AI tools and news

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Innovation Profs
May 13, 2025

In this week’s newsletter

Upcoming Innovation Profs Events

😎 Hot GPT Summer 2
When: Noon Central on May 14
Where: Virtual on Zoom
Cost: FREE
Our free kickoff to summer is back. Join us for this 45-minute Zoom call to catch up on the latest advancements in the world of generative AI. Sign up now.

🤖 Gen AI Boot Camp
When: 9 a.m.-3 p.m. May 22
Where: In-person at Drake University of on Zoom
Cost: $199 early-bird rate through May 12
This hands-on workshop will give you the knowledge needed to supercharge your productivity at work with generative AI tools. You will learn about tools available now and in the future and leave with tangible ways to use gen AI at your job.

Latest Gen AI News

The US Copyright Office has thoughts on how AI is trained. Big Tech may not like it.

On Friday, the US Copyright Office released a report discussing the extent to which training AI models on copyrighted materials falls under fair use. “Various uses of copyrighted works in AI training are likely to be transformative. The extent to which they are fair, however, will depend on what works were used, from what source, for what purpose, and with what controls on the outputs — all of which can affect the market.” The report distinguishes between the use of AI models for research and their use for commercial purposes, allowing for transformative uses of copyrighted material in the research setting but questioning whether certain commercial applications count as transformative. There’s much more to unpack in the report, which can be found here.

Trump reportedly fires head of US copyright office after release of AI report

Just one day after the release of the above-described report, the head of the US Copyright Office, Shira Perlmutter, was terminated. Whether Perlmutter’s firing was due to the content of the AI report is unclear, although some employees of the US Copyright Office reportedly suspect that to be the case.

OpenAI just fixed ChatGPT’s most annoying business problem: meet the PDF export that changes everything

Yesterday OpenAI released a new feature for Deep Research, which allows users to download the reports generated by the tool as PDFs “with fully preserved formatting, tables, images, and clickable citations.” As the battle among AI giants continues on the deep research front, look for more competitors to add a similar feature to their own deep research tools.

Quick Hits

I'm a filmmaker who used AI to make a sci-fi film for under $300. I'm deeply conflicted about it.

Aleem Hossain, a professor at Occidental College, made a movie using AI. He told BI he thinks it's "pretty good" but he's conflicted about using AI.

www.yahoo.com/entertainment/articles/im-filmmaker-used-ai-sci-094501938.html

Hugging Face releases a free Operator-like agentic AI tool | TechCrunch

A team at Hugging Face has released a freely available, cloud-hosted computer-using AI "agent." But it's quite sluggish and occasionally makes mistakes.

techcrunch.com/2025/05/06/hugging-face-releases-a-free-operator-like-agentic-ai-tool

OpenAI's enterprise adoption appears to be accelerating, at the expense of rivals | TechCrunch

OpenAI appears to be pulling well ahead of rivals in the race to capture enterprises' AI spend, according to transaction data from fintech firm Ramp.

techcrunch.com/2025/05/10/openais-enterprise-adoption-appears-to-be-accelerating-at-the-expense-of-rivals

I took a 2-day 'vibe coding' class and successfully built a product. Here are my biggest takeaways

As a seriously non-technical person, I challenged myself to a two-day AI coding boot camp that promised I'd be able to build a fully functional app in 48 hours.

www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/05/08/i-took-a-2-day-vibe-coding-class-and-successfully-built-a-product.html

Is AI's Race for Bigger Models Over? Explore the Shift Towards Human-Like Reasoning in AI Development

Since OpenAI's ChatGPT launch, AI firms raced to build massive models, but scaling may have hit a wall with GPT-4.5's lackluster performance. Now, focus shifts to human-like reasoning, using techniques like chain-of-thought and metacognition.

spectrum.ieee.org/chain-of-thought-prompting

You can now fine-tune your enterprise’s own version of OpenAI’s o4-mini reasoning model with reinforcement learning

For organizations with clearly defined problems and verifiable answers, RFT offers a compelling way to align models.

venturebeat.com/ai/you-can-now-fine-tune-your-enterprises-own-version-of-openais-o4-mini-reasoning-model-with-reinforcement-learning

The effect of ChatGPT on students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking: insights from a meta-analysis - Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

As a new type of artificial intelligence, ChatGPT is becoming widely used in learning. However, academic consensus regarding its efficacy remains elusive.

www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04787-y

Google Releases 76-Page Whitepaper on AI Agents: A Deep Technical Dive into Agentic RAG, Evaluation Frameworks, and Real-World Architectures

Google Releases 76-Page Whitepaper on AI Agents: A Deep Technical Dive into Agentic RAG, Evaluation Frameworks, and Real-World Architectures

www.marktechpost.com/2025/05/06/google-releases-76-page-whitepaper-on-ai-agents-a-deep-technical-dive-into-agentic-rag-evaluation-frameworks-and-real-world-architectures/?amp

Tool of the week: Gemini Co-Drawing

The Gemini Co-Drawing Sample App in AI Studio lets you collaborate on art projects with Gemini. Draw your part of the image using your computer’s mouse, and let Gemini draw the rest through text prompts.

Can you guess which parts Google drew?

AI-generated image of the week

We tested out Ideogram 3.0’s graphic design capabilities with this advertisement. 

Prompt: Advertisement poster of small blue pills coming out of a bottle, the pills each have an OpenAI logo. Bottom text says "Your weekly dose of Generative AI news" in clean sans serif letters.

What we found

FaceAge is an AI tool introduced by Mass General Brigham’s researchers that can estimate a person's biological age and improve cancer survival outcome predictions by analyzing a photograph of their face.