Google Tests an AI tool that Turns PDFs Into Interactive Textbooks

Google introduced its latest experiment this month: an AI tool that turns PDFs and textbooks into interactive lessons (mindmaps, immersive texts, slides, adaptive quizzes, and audio lessons). The tool, named "Learn Your Way", adapts the source materials to the user’s level and interests. According to Google, "Learn Your Way" has been developed in collaboration with pedagogy experts and is backed by research to drive quality and efficacy for every learner. "It demonstrates what's possible when we combine Google's cutting-edge AI research with effective learning science," said the software giant. Moreover, the actual research explains Google's guiding initiative of building an AI-augmented textbook.

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The UN Will Establish a Global Forum for Discussing AI Governance

As part of its General Assembly last week, the United Nations (UN) announced a plan to establish a global forum for discussing AI governance, aiming to gather ideas and best practices. The UN plans to form a 40-member panel of scientific experts to synthesize and analyze the research on AI risks and opportunities. The UN follows the pattern of previous similar efforts on climate change and nuclear policy. To launch the initiative, dozens of U.N. member nations, along with tech companies, academics, and nonprofits, spent last week summarizing their hopes and concerns about AI. This program is an effort to ensure that control of the AI is not left in the hands of a few tech companies and countries, as the United States and China. The UN highlighted its hope that AI can cure diseases, expand food production, and accelerate learning. It also identified risks, including mass surveillance, the spread of misinformation, the depletion of energy resources, and widening income gaps among individuals and nations.

Texas Tech Universities Ban Teaching About Transgender and Other Gender Topics

The five universities of the Texas Tech system directed their faculty to comply with an executive order from President Trump, which recognizes only male and female genders. The move, the first among large institutions of higher education, bans teaching about transgender and other gender topics. Currently, in K-12 classrooms, this is explicitly prohibited by Texas law. Chancellor Tedd L. Mitchell addressed the requirement in a letter dated last Thursday, citing President Trump’s order from January, a letter from Governor Greg Abbott that directed state agencies to follow Mr. Trump’s order, and a state law that requires government agencies to collect data on only two biological sexes, male and female. “While recognizing the First Amendment rights of employees in their personal capacity, faculty must comply with these laws in the instruction of students, within the course and scope of their employment,” Mitchell wrote. The letter followed the firing this month of a professor at Texas A&M who objected to a discussion of gender identity and then shared a video of the encounter with a Republican lawmaker. The university’s president, Mark Welsh, resigned soon after. Other public universities and community colleges have been exploring similar changes regarding the teaching of gender, according to the Texas conference of the American Association of University Professors. The New York Times reported on it. However, outside of Texas Tech, no institution appears to have put its guidance into writing yet. Earlier this year, the Mississippi Legislature passed a law banning diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as “promoting transgender ideology,” in the state’s schools and universities, but a federal judge put it on hold.

Anthropic Makes 'Sonnet 4.5', Its Latest Coding Model, Available This Week

OpenAI Issues Its Video Generation Model 'Sora 2' As An iOS App

Google's NotebookLM Introduced Flashcards and Quizzes As Study Guide

Around 40% of Employees Use AI At Work, Up From 20% in 2023

Showing an unprecedented adoption speed, in the U.S., 40% of employees report using AI at work, up from 20% two years ago, as the recently released Anthropic Economic Index stated. This advancement reflects the ease of use of AI, by just typing or speaking without specialized training. The study found that the shares of education and science usage are on the rise. While the use of Anthropic's Claude.ai chatbot for coding continues to dominate at 36%, educational tasks have surged from 9.3% to 12.4%, and scientific tasks have increased from 6.3% to 7.2%. Geographically, Singapore and Canada are among the countries with the highest usage per capita, while emerging economies, including Indonesia and India, use Claude less. Lower-adoption countries tend to see more coding usage, while high-adoption regions show diverse applications across education, science, and business. For example, coding tasks are over half of all usage in India versus roughly a third of all usage globally. “Rapidly advancing AI capabilities only reinforce the conclusion that immense change is on the horizon. And yet early AI adoption is strikingly uneven,” explains the Anthropic report. “We are still in the early stages of this AI-driven economic transformation. The actions that policymakers, business leaders, and the public take now will shape the years to come.”

Productivity Software Startup Notion AI Launches Customizable Agents

Productivity software startup Notion AI is expected to achieve $500 million in revenue this year and a valuation of over $10 billion. Productivity software is a highly competitive space, with Microsoft and Google at the center. Originally designed as a "writing assistant" for brainstorming, editing, and summarizing using an OpenAI model, the company has approximately 1,000 employees and over 100 million users. Corporate clients include Kaiser Permanente, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Nvidia, and Volvo Cars. This month, Notion launched a customizable agent — named Notion 3.0 with Agents — that creates documents to pull in data from various sources, utilizing models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Another custom agent can be instructed to produce and send a list of articles relevant to a person's interests on a weekly basis. Notion’s custom agents can perform actions in the background. In May, Notion.com introduced AI products for summarizing meetings and searching through corporate files.

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