Innovation Profs - 10/21/2025

Latest Gen AI News

Anthropic is giving away its powerful Claude Haiku 4.5 AI for free to take on OpenAI

Last week Anthropic released Claude Haiku 4.5, a model that is cheaper and faster than larger model Claude Sonnet 4 while surpassing it in performance. In a somewhat surprising move, Claude Haiku 4.5 is now available to all users of the Claude web platform.

Anthropic connects Claude to Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and OneDrive

In other Anthropic-related news, Claude can now be integrated with Microsoft 365, accessing documents in Sharepoint and OneDrive to inform its responses to user prompts. Claude Team and Enterprise users can also use the Microsoft 365 connector to access Word documents, Teams messages, and Outlook emails.

Microsoft AI debuts its Nano Banana rival, and it’s already a top text-to-image model

MAI-Image-1 is Microsoft’s new in-house AI image generation tool that was announced last week. Significantly, MAI-Image-1 debuted among the top ten of image generation tools in the Text-to-Image Arena of the Chatbot Leaderboard, even surpassing one of our favorites, Ideogram.

Google’s AI videos get a big upgrade with Veo 3.1

Lately we’ve been posting quite a few stories about Sora 2, OpenAI’s video generation tool. Now Google has updated its own video generation tool Veo, releasing version 3.1 last week. Compared to Veo 3, Veo 3.1 has improved audio quality, a higher degree of prompt adherence (i.e., videos better align with user prompts), and configurable landscape 16:9 and portrait 9:16 aspect ratios,

Microsoft tests Mico, a new tutor for Copilot Study Mode

In last Friday’s newsletter, we gave an overview of ChatGPT’s Study Mode. As no good LLM feature is without its competitors, it’s unsurprising to learn that Microsoft is testing its own Study and Learn mode, complete with a friendly avatar Mico to encourage learners along, functioning like a version of Clippy for the latest generation.

Quick Hits

Tool of the week: ReclaimAI

Reclaim.ai is an AI-powered calendar and scheduling app that helps individuals, teams and organizations automatically allocate time for meetings, tasks, habits and focus work.

It integrates with your existing calendars (Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook) and uses preferences + scheduling rules to defend “important time” (e.g., focus blocks, routines) and optimize when things get scheduled. There’s a free plan that they say will always remain free.

AI-generated image of the week

We’re sticking with the Halloween theme this week, and asking ChatGPT (left) and Nano Banana (right) to create an image inspired by the spooky holiday. Nano Banana certainly finished its image faster, but which one do you like better?

Prompt: create an image that includes everything people love about halloween

What we found

It turns out humans aren’t the only ones developing brain rot from viral social media content.