Walmart Says Is Improving Its Product Catalog 100 Times Faster than Human-Led Methods

Walmart's CEO Doug McMillon said on the Q2 financial earnings call with analysts last week that the company is using AI to dramatically improve its productivity and save money, finding "tangible ways" to leverage this technology to improve customer, member, and employee experiences. The multibillion-dollar company is exploring generative AI in all areas of its business ops. One area where Walmart uses its product catalog is its product catalog, where multiple LLMs are being implemented to update and improve over 850 million product catalog entries 100 times faster than human-led methods. "Without the use of generative AI, this work would have required nearly 100 times the current headcount to complete in the same amount of time, and for associates picking online orders, showing them high-quality images of product packages helps them quickly find what they're looking for," McMillan said. Also, customers can now use AI-powered search and a new shopping assistant on Walmart’s app and website—it even provides advice for questions like “Which TV is best for watching sports?” Walmart Inc. plans to continue experimenting with AI globally across all parts of its business.

Runway ML Released Its Latest Text-to-Video Model 'Gen-3 Alpha Turbo'

Coursera Improves Its AI Assistant 'Coach' and Adds More Course Materials

California Will Train and Certificate Students and Educators on NVIDIA's Generative AI

Elon Musk-Owned xAI Releases Grok-2 and Grok-2 Mini in Beta

Elon Musk-owned xAI released Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini in beta this week. Both models, with increased capabilities in chat, coding, and reasoning, were released to Grok users on the X platform. Later this month, xAI will make them available through enterprise API. Grok-2 is a step forward from the previous model, Grok-1.5, and, according to the company, it outperforms Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4-Turbo. "Grok-2 has shown significant improvements in reasoning with retrieved content and its tool use capabilities, such as correctly identifying missing information, reasoning through sequences of events, and discarding irrelevant posts," said Musk’s AI company. Grok-2 integrates real-time information from the x platform, and it's accessible through the Grok tab in the x app. Meanwhile, Grok-mini is a small sibling of Grok-2.

Students Use Massively AI for Search, Check Grammar, and Summarize Documents

A global survey with 4,000 respondents in 16 countries conducted by the Digital Education Council (DEC) this week revealed that 86% of students already use AI in their studies, with 54% of them on a weekly basis. These are the main outcomes of the survey. • ChatGPT, Grammarly, and Microsoft Copilot are the most used tools. • In addition, many AI applications now operate seamlessly in the background and are perceived as standard features rather than distinct AI tools. • Students expect their institutions to get more involved in using AI in teaching and learning, especially in addressing the gaps in AI knowledge and skills. • They anticipate far more potential around career exploration and learning support. They are especially worried about AI in assessment. • Faculty members are expected to increase their use of AI in teaching, research, and administration, given that many have lost many opportunities.       • On EdTech Newsletter: What Students Want When It Comes To AI  

OpenAI Issues Fine-Tuning for GPT-4o

Google Introduces 'Gemini Live', Its New Voice Assistant for Android Phones

Anthropic Makes Available Prompt Caching on Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3 Haiku

NVIDIA Provided Free Access to Its NIM Software Platform

NVIDIA started this month to provide free access to its containerized AI NIM microservices for development, testing, and research to over 5 million program members. The latest downloadable NIM microservices include open-sourced Meta’s Llama 3.1 8B and Mistral AI’s compact Mistral 7B Instruct. Developer program members can use NIM microservices on up to two nodes or 16 GPUs. Organizations must sign up for a free 90-day NVIDIA AI Enterprise license to use NIM in production. The ability to use simple APIs to integrate pre-trained LLMs into products has significantly increased developer usage of endpoints and application development frameworks. NVIDIA NIM enables developers to deploy their AI model endpoints rapidly. In the NVIDIA API Catalog, these developers select a microservice, download a NIM microservice, and get an API key for the container. Nvidia's NIM aims to create an ecosystem of AI-ready containers. It includes support for models from NVIDIA, A121, Adept, Cohere, Getty Images, and Shutterstock, as well as open models from Google, Hugging Face, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Stability AI. Nvidia is already working with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to make these NIM microservices available on SageMaker, Kubernetes Engine, and Azure AI. They’ll also be integrated into frameworks like Deepset, LangChain, and LlamaIndex. The company plans to add additional capabilities, such as making the Nvidia RAG LLM operator available as an NIM. [Disclosure: ibl.ai, the parent company of iblnews.org, has NVIDIA as a client]  

Microsoft Prepares the Launch of an Open-Source LLM for Math Tutoring

Microsoft announced it is exploring AI-powered math tutoring with Khan Academy using a new open-source small language model. The model is a fine-tuned version of Phi-3, Microsoft’s family of small language models (SLMs). It has been trained on data from Accelerate Learning and UPchieve, including synthetic math tutoring chats. In this initiative, Khan Academy provides explanatory educational content, including high-quality math problem questions and step-by-step answer sets, ongoing feedback, and benchmarking data to evaluate performance. This tutoring tool can generate problems for specific grade levels and math topics, help students learn through guided explanations, and provide customized summaries of tutoring sessions for students and teachers with initial functionality supporting middle-school math. "Phi-3 models not only outperform models of the same size and next size up across language, reasoning, coding, and math benchmarks, but they also do so in more cost-effective ways," said Microsoft. • Preview of phi-3-vision-128k-instruct with NVIDIA

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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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OpenAI Launches Educational GPT Model

Adaptive Learning Platforms Show 40% Improvement

Microsoft Education Copilot Beta Launch

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