Innovation Profs - 5/27/2025

Latest Gen AI News

Google is putting more AI in more places

Last week’s Google I/O conference for developers featured a host of AI-related announcements, including:

• Flow, a new filmmaking tool powered by Google’s AI-powered video generation tool Veo 3, the latest version of which was also announced at the conference,

• Imagen 4, the latest version of Google’s image generation platform, with improvements that include the ability to better render text in images,

• broader access to the Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro models,

• Deep Think, a new reasoning mode for the Gemini 2.5 Pro model,

• increased access in the US to AI Mode, a chat-based version of search, and

• video overviews in NotebookLM.

Google also announced Google AI Ultra, their $250-per-month AI platform intended to compete with the pricey ChatGPT Pro and Claude Max.

Anthropic launches Claude 4, its most powerful AI model yet

The LLM rat race continues, as Anthropic launched the latest versions of several Claude models last week: Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4. Readers may recall that Claude models come in three varieties, Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus (ranging from smaller to larger models). Both Haiku and Sonnet have seen updates over the past year (Haiku was upgraded from version 3 to 3.5, and Sonnet from 3 to 3.5 to 3.7), but Opus has not been updated for over a year. With the update to Claude 4 Opus, Anthropic has achieved what they claim is “the best coding model in the world,” at least according to certain coding benchmarks.

Microsoft just launched an AI that discovered a new chemical in 200 hours instead of years

Microsoft Discovery is a newly announced platform designed to “accelerate scientific research and development,” as announced last week at Microsoft’s annual Build conference for developers. As a proof of concept for how the tool can aid scientific research, Discovery was used to accelerate the discovery of a new coolant for cooling data centers. As reported by Jason Zander, a Microsoft executive, “In 200 hours with this framework, we were able to go through and screen 367,000 potential candidates that we came up with. We actually took it to a partner, and they actually synthesized it.” The tool represents the next step in agentic AI, as it combines the power of specialized agents with high-performance computing to potentially solve complex problems.

Google has a new tool to help detect AI-generated content

The problem of detecting when content is AI-generated is well known. In an effort to address this problem, Google has introduced SynthID Detector, which can be used to detect whether certain images, text, audio, and video was created with Google’s various generative AI tools. SynthID Detector works by checking for watermarks that are embedded in the outputs of various Google tools. Reportedly, the detector is not exact, as it can only “highlight which parts of the content are more likely to have been watermarked with SynthID.” Still, this is a promising development for identifying AI-generated content.

Quick Hits

Tool of the week: Google Flow

Google Flow is an AI-powered filmmaking tool introduced at Google I/O 2025, designed to help users generate cinematic-quality videos using natural language prompts. It integrates three of Google's advanced AI models:

• Veo 3: Generates high-fidelity videos with native audio, including dialogue and ambient sounds.

• Imagen 4: Creates detailed images from text prompts.

• Gemini: Simplifies the prompting process through conversational interactions.

Flow is available in the U.S. through Google's AI Pro and AI Ultra subscription plans.

AI-generated image of the week

We’re gearing up for our kids’ last days of school here at Innovation Profs headquarters. And that means looking for design ideas for the last day.

Prompt: A vintage-inspired, hand-lettered t-shirt design centered around the phrase "Last Day of First Grade" in a playful, retro serif font. The text is in a deep teal color, slightly distressed to give it a worn, nostalgic feel. Below the text, a cheerful, hand-drawn illustration of a stack of colorful school books and a single, bright yellow pencil rests casually. The background is a soft, faded cream color, creating a warm and inviting aesthetic perfect for commemorating a special milestone.

What we found

The Will Smith spaghetti test using Google Veo 3 video creation tool.

We’ve come a long way!