Innovation Profs - 2/24/2026

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Latest Gen AI News

Google just doubled its AI reasoning power with the surprise launch of Gemini 3.1 Pro

The clash of the LLM titans continues unabated, as this week Google launched their latest model Gemini 3.1 Pro, which is a significant improvement over Gemini 3 Pro across a number of benchmarks. Most notably, Gemini 3.1 Pro beats out Gemini 3 Pro on the important ARC-AGI-2 benchmark (“Abstract and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence,” which tests for fluid rather than crystallized intelligence) by a whopping 46 percentage points (77.1% to 31.%). Gemini users can access the new model through the Gemini app, NotebookLM, Vertex AI, and the Gemini API.

Anthropic's newest AI model is cheaper and faster

Anthropic continued to make waves in the LLM landscape with the release of Claude Sonnet 4.6. For those of you at home who are trying to keep track of the different Claude models, a few weeks back we reported on the release of Claude Opus 4.6, Anthropic’s most powerful model that underlies Claude Code (which, in turn, is having a significant impact on software development). Here’s what’s noteworthy about Sonnet 4.6: despite being considerably smaller than Claude Opus 4.5, Anthropic’s previous flagship model prior to the launch of Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6 matches or exceeds the performance of Opus 4.5 across most major LLM benchmarks while being 40% cheaper to run. And Sonnet 4.6 even outperforms Opus 4.6 on some financial and office-related tasks!

Meta is supporting AI-friendly lawmakers

Meta kicked off its largest-ever political spending effort, a $65 million campaign aimed at influencing state-level elections this year to protect the future of artificial intelligence. The investment is being channeled through four super PACs, including the newly formed Forge the Future Project for Republicans and Making Our Tomorrow for Democrats.

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👋 Sign up for upcoming workshops

Feb. 27: Are you ready to actually build things with generative AI? Sign up for our Hands-On With Generative AI Workshop at Drake University (or attend virtually) and complete six AI projects in six hours.

March 25: Google was a little late to the Gen AI party, but it caught up quick. Our 3-hour Google Gemini Virtual Workshop will show you all the ways Gemini can help boost your productivity in 2026. Sign up now for early bird pricing.

 🍟 Final AI Lunch Club virtual event

Our AI Lunch Club series continues with one more FREE virtual event to help you better understand generative AI tools. Click each link to get more info and to sign up:

• March 4 - Vibe coding with Claude, ChatGPT and Lovable

These events are offered free thanks to a sponsorship from technology and management consultancy, Lean TECHniques.

Quick Hits

Tool of the week: TL;DL by Headliner

If you are anything like me (Professor Snider here), your podcast list is longer than you have time to listen. TL;DL can help. This is a podcast summarizer. You can give it up to five podcast episodes, and it will use AI to edit those down into one 5, 10, 15 or 20-minute podcast that includes an AI voice host and clips from the actual podcasts. It takes about five minutes to create each episode.

AI-generated image of the week

Google Labs added a new “Photoshoot” feature in it’s AI marketing tool Pomelli. We don’t have a physical product, so we made a box for our new Gen AI Fundamentals course and tested out the new feature.

Prompt: No prompt needed. We uploaded the image and chose the templates we wanted to use.

What we found

Looking for some futuristic tech (we are, please send samples!)?

The Nuwa Pen lets you write on any notebook, and the built-in cameras instantly digitize your thoughts into searchable, editable text. Order for $299.

Fort is a wearable device that automatically identifies exercises, counts reps and analyzes your form. Pre-order for $289.

Ziea is an AI calendar designed to reclaim your focus (and charge your devices). It’s $289.