Innovation Profs - 5/20/2025

You can still sign up for Thursday’s Gen AI Workshop

🤖 Gen AI Boot Camp
When: 9 a.m.-3 p.m. May 22
Where: In-person at Drake University of on Zoom
Cost: $249 (bring 3 or more for $149 each)
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

OpenAI brings its GPT-4.1 models to ChatGPT

GPT-4.1 is no longer only available to access by developers via the OpenAI API. As of last Wednesday, paid ChatGPT users can now access the model, which is particularly well-suited to coding tasks, exceeding the coding functionality of GPT-4o while being faster than OpenAI’s reasoning models. If you’re a free ChatGPT user, you’re not left out without a consolation prize, as GPT-4.1 mini, a lightweight version of GPT-4.1, will replace GPT-4o mini as the default model for all users (once they exceed the free usage limits for GPT-4o).

Stability AI releases an audio-generating model that can run on smartphones

Stability AI, the company behind image generation tool Stable Diffusion, is extending beyond the AI image business in releasing Stable Audio Open Small, an AI-powered audio generation tool. Two benefits of Stable Audio Open Small: the underlying model is small enough to run locally on a smartphone and the model was reportedly trained on a royalty-free training set (avoiding murky copyright issues). Two drawbacks of the tool: it currently only accepts English-language prompts and is not capable of producing music with vocals or high-quality sound. Still, this is a promising development in the AI audio space.

OpenAI introduces Codex, its first full-fledged AI agent for coding

Last week OpenAI released its agentic coding tool Codex, powered by the model codex-1, which is a fine-tuned variant of OpenAI’s o3 reasoning model. “The tool is meant to allow experienced developers to delegate rote and relatively simple programming tasks to an AI agent that will generate production-ready code and show its work along the way.” A research preview of Codex is only available to higher tier paid ChatGPT users (ChatGPT Pro, Teams, and Enterprise users) but will later be released to ChatGPT Plus users as well.

Quick Hits

Tool of the week: PageOn

PageOn.ai is an AI-powered platform designed to transform complex information into visually engaging presentations, webpages, and infographics with minimal effort. It caters to professionals, educators, marketers, and content creators seeking to streamline the creation of dynamic, data-driven content.

AI-generated image of the week

Will we be giving out these patches at our Generative AI Boot Camp Thursday? No. But you should come anyway!

Prompt: A vibrant, embroidered military-style patch featuring the bold text 'Generative AI Boot Camp.' The patch is colorful, with sharp stitching detail, insignia-style symbols like lightning bolts, gears, or a computer chip, and a bold border. Design evokes classic army unit patches but with a futuristic tech twist. Photorealistic, close-up view, textured fabric background, 4K resolution.

What we found

Google AI Studio includes a new generate media tab, with access to Google's Veo 2 video generator, Gemini 2.0 image generation, and Imagen 3.

And users can try them all for free. Users can prompt Veo 2 to make videos up to 8 seconds long at 720p resolution for free.