Google Announced a $120M Fund for Global AI Education and Training

Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced a $120 million fund for global AI education and training, which will be operated in partnership with local nonprofits and NGOs. Sundar Pichai Introduced his Global AI Opportunity Fund during a speech at the UN Summit of the Future last Saturday. “AI is poised to accelerate progress at unprecedented scale. We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to unlock human potential for everyone, everywhere,” he said. “We can drive deeper partnerships to ensure the technology benefits everyone.” Regarding the AI opportunity, he said that AI is boosting productivity across sectors and empowering governments to provide public services. Some studies show that AI could boost global labor productivity by 1.4 percentage points, and increase global GDP by 7%, within the next decade. “AI will have limitations … be it issues with accuracy, factuality, and bias … as well as the risks of misapplication and misuse, like the creation of deep fakes. It also presents new complexities, for example the impact on the future of work. For all these reasons, we believe that AI must be developed, deployed, and used responsibly from the start.” Pichai also highlighted “Grow with Google,” which has already trained one hundred million people worldwide in digital skills.

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OpenAI's o1 Correctly Solved 83.3% of the Problems, While GPT-4o Only 13.4%

The new OpenAI's o1 reasoning model —released on Thursday— scored 83% in a qualifying exam for the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO), while GPT-4o correctly solved only 13% of problems. Also, the coding abilities were evaluated in contests, and as indicated in an OpenAI research post, they reached the 89th percentile on competitive programming questions (Codeforces) competitions. Trained with reinforcement learning to perform complex reasoning, this new LLM that excels in math and coding thinks before it answers—it can produce a long internal chain of thought before responding to the user. According to OpenAI, it performs similarly to PhD students on challenging benchmark tasks in physics, chemistry, and biology. "Our large-scale reinforcement learning algorithm teaches the model to think productively using its chain of thought in a highly data-efficient training process. We have found that o1's performance consistently improves with more reinforcement learning (train-time compute) and with more time spent thinking (test-time compute). The constraints on scaling this approach differ substantially from those of LLM pretraining, and we are continuing to investigate them," said the company. o1 is rate-limited; weekly limits are currently 30 messages for o1-preview and 50 for o1-mini. An additional downside is its high, expensive price. In the API, o1-preview is $15 per 1 million input tokens and $60 per 1 million output tokens. That’s 3x the cost versus GPT-4o for input and 4x for output. (1 million tokens is equivalent to around 750,000 words.) OpenAI says it plans to offer o1-mini access to all free users of ChatGPT but hasn’t set a release date. We’ll hold the company to that date.

OpenAI Releases 'o1', a Model that Excels in Math and Coding

Open AI announced yesterday the release of a new model called o1 that excels in math and coding. This model is trained to answer more complex questions and solve more problems in science, coding, and math. For example, o1 can be used by healthcare researchers to annotate cell sequencing data, physicists to generate complicated mathematical formulas needed for quantum optics, and developers in all fields to build and execute multi-step workflows. The o1 beta can be tested in ChatGPT Plus. "We trained these models to spend more time thinking through problems before they respond, much like a person would. They learn to refine their thinking process through training, try different strategies, and recognize their mistakes," explained the company. The o1 model is being released alongside the o1-mini, a smaller, cheaper version optimized for STEM reasoning. These models aren’t available yet in the API. We're releasing a preview of OpenAI o1—a new series of AI models designed to spend more time thinking before they respond. These models can reason through complex tasks and solve harder problems than previous models in science, coding, and math. https://t.co/peKzzKX1bu — OpenAI (@OpenAI) September 12, 2024

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Harvard Showed Student Engagement Doubled with a Tailored AI Tutor to a Physics Course

Harvard University unveiled a study conducted in the fall of 2023 showing that student engagement in the classroom doubled when an AI Tutor was tailored to a physics course. This tool helped students learn more material. They also self-reported significantly more engagement and motivation to learn. These preliminary findings have inspired other large Harvard classes to test their approach, The Harvard Gazette wrote. More specifically, the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning is collaborating with Harvard University Information Technology to pilot similar AI chatbots in a handful of large introductory courses this fall. Harvard University is also developing resources to enable any instructor to integrate tutor bots into their courses. This custom-designed AI chatbot proved surprisingly more effective than a typical "active learning" classroom setting in which students learn from a human instructor as a group. The study was led by lecturer Gregory Kestin and senior lecturer Kelly Miller. They analyzed the learning outcomes of 194 students enrolled last fall in Kestin’s Physical Sciences 2 course, which is physics for life sciences majors. "We went into the study extremely curious about whether our AI tutor could be as effective as in-person instructors," Kestin, who also serves as associate director of science education, said. "And I certainly didn’t expect students to find the AI-powered lesson more engaging." "It was shocking and super exciting," Miller said, considering that PS2 is already "very, very well taught." The researchers wrote in their paper that the experiment shows the advantage of using AI tutoring as students’ first substantial introduction to challenging material. "If AI can be used to effectively teach introductory material to students outside of class, this would allow “precious class time” to be spent developing higher-order skills, such as advanced problem-solving, project-based learning, and group work." However, Kestin and Miller warned about potential misuses: "AI tutors shouldn’t ‘think’ for students but help them build critical thinking skills. AI tutors shouldn’t replace in-person instruction, but help all students better prepare for it — and possibly in a more engaging way than ever before." "Students with a very strong background in the material may be less engaged, and they’re sometimes bored," Miller said. "Students who don’t have the background sometimes struggle to keep up. So the fact that this AI tutor can support that difference is probably the biggest thing." The website that hosts the tutor was built on ChatGPT. Still, rather than defaulting to ChatGPT behavior, the custom tutor provided users with information guided by research-based and refined prompt engineering and "scaffolding' to ensure the lessons were accurate and well-structured. Mathematics instructor Eva Politou will introduce a version of this AI tutor to Math 21a (Multivariable Calculus) this fall. Every week, students will generate questions about a specific topic and search for answers with the AI tutor as a guide. "The primary goal of the AI tutor is to promote an inquiry-based studying method," Politou explained. "We want students to practice generating questions, critically approaching real-life scenarios, and becoming active agents of their own understanding and learning."   document.createElement('video'); https://iblnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/TeachGPT-Screen-Capture-sped-up-cropped.mp4  

Apple's Generative AI Suite for iPhone, iPad, and Mac Will Roll Out in October

Apple announced yesterday that its Generative AI suite, Apple Intelligence, will start rolling out in beta in October 2024 in the U.S. with iO 18.1, iPad 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1. In addition, Apple introduced the new iPhone 16 lineup (iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, iPhone 16 Pro Max, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max), built for Apple Intelligence and features more advanced A18 and A18 Pro chips. This AI suite, available as a free software update, will include improved Siri, which will have a brand-new design and a glowing light that wraps around the edge of the screen when active on an iPhone, iPad, or CarPlay. https://iblnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Apple-Intelligence-Siri.mp4 It will also include Writing Tools for rewriting, proofreading, and summarizing text nearly everywhere they write, including Mail, Notes, Pages, and third-party apps. In Photos, the Memories feature now enables users to create movies by simply typing a description. In addition, natural language can be used to search for specific photos and videos. The new Clean Up tool can identify and remove distracting objects in a photo's background without accidentally altering the subject. Users can record, transcribe, and summarize audio in the Notes and Phone apps. The phone app automatically notifies participants when a recording is initiated while on a call. Once the call ends, Apple Intelligence generates a summary to help recall key points. Across a user’s inbox, summaries convey the most important information of each email instead of simply previewing the first few lines. Smart Reply in Mail provides users with suggestions for a quick response and identifies questions in an email to ensure everything is answered. Priority Notifications surface what’s most important. https://iblnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Apple-Intelligence-Priority-Notifications.mp4 More Apple Intelligence features will roll out later this year and in the months following. Users can access ChatGPT for free without creating an account, and ChatGPT’s data-use policies apply—for example, IP addresses are obscured, and requests are stored.

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Today's Summary

Monday, November 24, 2025

Education technology today is marked by rising AI adoption among educators and innovative personalized learning approaches.

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Today in AI & EdTech

Monday, November 24, 2025

AI is transforming the education technology landscape as more teachers adopt intelligent tools, driving forward and adaptive learning experiences.

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