Google's White Paper Explains How GenAI Is Building the Campus of Tomorrow

More than half of colleges and universities are focused on staying ahead in the generative AI race by harnessing their data. A white paper from Google Cloud, released by the Chronicle of Higher Education, highlights that campuses are demonstrating remarkable resilience and creativity by using GenAI and multimodal models for personalized learning and other uses. "With the right approach and a trusted platform, GenAI can help your institution personalize content across every medium, gain valuable insights from student data, and achieve measurable ROI —all with enterprise-grade security and scalability," says the report. Roy Daiany, Industry Director for Education and Careers at Google, explained, "A university’s first-party data is its competitive differentiator. By effectively harnessing that data and combining it with AI, institutions are able to lower costs and increase efficiency." • Download the Report (PDF) [Disclosure: ibl.ai, the parent company of iblnews.org, is a partner of Google Cloud]

OpenAI Launched 'Tasks', a Basic Agent that Sets Reminders or Recurring Tasks

ACI Introduced Its Marketplace with 18,000 Training Courses and AI-Mentorship

An Open Source High Performance Video Generation Model from a Chinese Company

Nvidia Partnered with CrewAI to Harness the Power of Agents

Nvidia announced a partnership with CrewAI yesterday to provide an agent orchestration solution with enterprise-grade performance and complete infrastructure control. Currently, PwC’s enterprise and startup Parloa are using this service. CrewAI now powers 4.5M+ Crews with multiple AI Agents weekly across industries. "The integration of CrewAI with NVIDIA AI Enterprise and NIM microservices marks a leap forward in production-grade AI agents," said Justin Boitano, VP of Enterprise AI at NVIDIA The two companies see this transformation across back-office automation, sales & marketing operations, financial analysis, and coding and software automation. This production-ready demo showcased AI agents powered by Meta's Llama 3.3 model on NVIDIA NIMs. https://iblnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/66cf2bfc3ed15b02da0ca770_67693cf4813591e04df34a70_video-transcode.mp4 Ok this is SO COOL 🤯🤯🤯 I just made an AI agent that calls restaurants to make reservations for me. How it works: 1. You punch in the name of the restaurant and desired time and number of guests. 2. It calls the restaurant (in an incredibly real sounding voice) and makes… pic.twitter.com/2oMNrhaGPO — Andrew Wilkinson (@awilkinson) January 7, 2025

ElevenLabs Launched an Audio Tool for Agents with Law Latency

The text-to-speech platform ElevenLabs launched a powerful AI tool named "Conversational AI" this month that allows to build agents with voice. The voice interaction shows low latency and interruption handling for back-and-forth conversation. The model allows for swapping between Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT or bringing a custom implementation. It features external function calling and integrates with any third-party app to get real-time information. The agents are powered by 70 realistic-sounding AI voices in up to 32 languages and are built on users' knowledge base. As use cases, ElevenLabs mentioned the following: • Customer Support to handle customer inquiries 24/7. • Scheduling for appointment booking and management, from healthcare to personal services. • Outbound Sales for cold calling at scale and qualifying leads. • Gaming experiences. • Education for personalized learning experiences, offering explanations, quizzes, and adaptive lessons based on a student's progress. • Fan engagement with interactive experiences from trivia to personalized content recommendations.

Google Gemini's 'LearnLM' Outperformed Other AI Models on Adaptive Learning

Getty Images Plans to Merge with Rival Shutterstock

Nvidia Launched an Open-Source Video Model to Generate Synthetic Data and a Personal Supercomputer for AI

A Charter School in Arizona Will Teach Its Academic Curriculum Entirely by AI

A charter school in Arizona, Unbound Academy, received official approval to offer next year a fully online experience from through to eighth grades, giving students two hours of academic instruction taught entirely by AI. The Arizona State Board for Charter Schools greenlighted the initiative. Unbound Academy proposed in its application an "AI-driven adaptive learning technology that condenses academic instruction into a two-hour window." Unbound’s approach leans on edtech platforms like Khan Academy and IXL, with students engaging with "interactive, AI-powered platforms that continuously adjust to their individual learning pace and style." Guides, rather than traditional teachers, will provide "targeted interventions and coaching" for each student. Academic instruction will be whittled down to just two hours. The remainder of the student’s day will include "life-skills workshops" about critical thinking, creative problem-solving, financial literacy, public speaking, goal setting, and entrepreneurship. The school promised a learning experience without frustration or boredom, ensuring optimal engagement and progress. Supported by major players like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Unbound aims to refine its model for broader adoption across states like Arkansas and Utah. "The founders of Unbound Academic Institute began with opening a high-end private school, Alpha, for the same reason Elon Musk started with higher-end Teslas: to create a product that generates insights and funding for future research and development," the company wrote in its application. Arizona’s Bold Step into AI-Education. So it begins Arizona has approved an unprecedented educational model: a charter school where students will receive two hours of daily academic instruction directed entirely by AI. Unbound Academy, launching next year, is a fully online… pic.twitter.com/6ZAd4bPYFX — Chubby♨️ (@kimmonismus) December 22, 2024

Experts Predict that Agents Will Become Widespread in the First Quarter of 2025

Salesforce Inc. said it signed deals to install AI agents at more than 200 companies, including Accenture, Adecco Group, FedEx Corp., and IBM. Experts predict that agents will become more widespread in the first quarter of 2025, reshaping workforces at companies. Agents are AI tools that can handle multistep, repetitive tasks like onboarding clients, approving expenses and other administrative tasks, and answering customer service requests, all with minimal human supervision. "This is really the rise of digital labor," Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said. "Agents are the next giant breakthrough," said OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman. "An agent acts like a really smart senior coworker with whom you can collaborate on a project," he added. Salesforce launched its agent product, “Agentforce,” two months ago, while OpenAI is set to unveil an agent at a research preview in January. • Bloomberg: Big Tech's New AI Obsession: Agents That Do Your Work for You

......