Innovation Profs - 6/24/2025

Latest Gen AI News

Midjourney adds AI video generation

Midjourney’s first AI video generation model, V1, is now available. Midjourney users with a $10 per month subscription can generate five-second clips, with the option to extend clips by four seconds up to four times. The release of this AI video model comes just as Disney has sued Midjourney for copyright infringement, as we reported last week.

The cracks in the OpenAI-Microsoft relationship are reportedly widening

Regular readers of our newsletter and attendees of our workshop have likely heard about the partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft (remember, GPT-4 was trained at the Microsoft data centers in West Des Moines in July 2022). That partnership has shown signs of weakening, as OpenAI has pursued other partnerships for cloud platforms and Microsoft has been developing their own LLMs. According to a Wall Street Journal report, this tension may soon boil over into something more openly adversarial: “OpenAI executives have considered publicly accusing Microsoft of anticompetitive behavior throughout their partnership. OpenAI executives also mulled whether to seek a federal regulatory review of their contract with Microsoft.” We’ll be watching this potential clash closely.

A Knockout Blow for LLMs?

A few weeks back, Apple researchers released “The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity,” a report that casts doubt on whether reasoning models like OpenAI’s o1, Claude Sonnet 3.7, or DeepSeek R1 can be construed as doing anything that actually resembles reasoning. The key finding of this study is that reasoning models, when given a battery of puzzles of increasing complexity, eventually lower the amount of “reasoning” put into solving the problems while performance collapses to a complete rate of failure (plateauing at an accuracy rate of zero). Surprisingly, even when equipped with information about how to solve the problem in question, the reasoning models still perform with a low degree of accuracy. Read more about the study in the linked article.

Quick Hits

Tool of the week: AI Guide

Ethan Mollick, professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, published a guide to which AI systems to use and how to use them effectively. Mollick suggests starting by picking one of three systems (Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini). Read the guide to learn about voice mode, deep research and why you should go beyond the free versions.

AI-generated image of the week

We tested Midjourney’s new video generation option, which is quickly becoming a favorite in this space. We first had to generative an image, then turned that into a five-second video, and then extended for four more seconds.

Here’s the video (converted to a GIF so it will show in this email):

Prompt: realistic photo, a sunny afternoon at a neighborhood baseball game. A 6-year-old child wearing a blue jersey and a baseball cap stands at the plate holding a bat and ready to swing. Parents cheer softly in the background. the boy swings the bat and hits the ball. the camera follows him as he runs the bases

What we found

Elevenlabs introduced 11ai, a free experimental personal assistant that connects with Slack, Perplexity and more. Check it out here and watch the video at the link below.