Ethan B. Holland

This is part of the full AI Virtual Inn of Court September 2025 Member Meeting presentation.

• March 7, 2025
  • OpenAI Plans Premium AI “Agents” with Monthly Fees Up to $20,000
  • Amazon Developing AI Reasoning Model Under Nova Brand
  • AI financial analyst Endex emerges from stealth with OpenAI partnership
  • Adam Silverman Predicts UI Design Will Shift From Human to Agent Experience
• March 14, 2025
  • OpenAI is pushing the pace of agent adoption (AIs that can take action on your behalf) with the addition of commands that can help developers build agents that can search the web, look through local files, and even control your computer.
  • Legal AI provider, Harvey, has built agents that are outperforming humans at law firms.
    • https://x.com/harvey/status/1899491666429632907 <-Watch this later!
  • Another breakthrough product comes out of China called Manus, with building hype coming off of the previous week’s announcement. This is a product that is built on top of Anthropic’s Claude that has 29 additional agent tools, like browser control.  https://manus.im/ 
  • The Pentagon signed a deal to use AI agents for military planning.

• March 21 2025
  • Nvidia released two open models that allow AI agents to reason.
  • Anthropic has given its AI the ability to search the web
  • A new study came out that shows that AI agents are doubling their abilities every seven months.
• March 28, 2025
  • A few months ago, Anthropic released a structured method of allowing AI models to talk to third-party systems. This is called the “Model Context Protocol” or MCP for short. This week OpenAI announced that it would adopt Anthropic’s standard.
  • Researchers at Harvard conducted a randomized trial with 776 Procter & Gamble employees and found that a single person can work as well as a two-person team if given AI tools.
  • A trend in the last two weeks is developers releasing text files with detailed language model instructions in text.
  • Lockheed Martin and Google announced an integration of Google’s AI tools into Lockheed’s factory systems.

• April 4, 2025
  • Amazon released an amazing new model that can perform tasks using web browsers. It has over 90% accuracy.
  • Automation tool Zapier has now integrated over 8000 apps with the model context protocol. It may take a few more months for this to trickle down to lay people, but I think automation of tasks is going to be a welcome discovery once it becomes demystified.
• April 11, 2025
  • Google launched their own open agent protocol that allows agents from different vendors to communicate. At the same time, Google announced they will adopt and support Anthropic’s model context protocol (MCP) agent structure.
  • Google released a Deep Research competitor to OpenAI and Perplexity. Thanks to Google’s deep integration with search, Google’s Deep Research is already outperforming PhD-level researchers when given access to the web.
  • Adobe plans to integrate AI agents throughout its Creative Cloud product lineup to automate the mundane parts of creative operations as well as improve context-aware search within videos and photos.

• April 25, 2025
  • Anthropic predicts fully automated AI employees within the next 12 months.
  • Along those lines, Microsoft predicts that 2025 will be the year that “frontier firms” emerge and AI employees begin to lead operational tasks.
  • Anthropic launched a research feature. This means that Google, OpenAI, Perplexity, Claude, and DeepSeek all now have robust research capabilities. This is also a harbinger for the end of the Internet as we know it.
  • ElevenLabs, the audio AI company, has developed a method to allow voice agents to transfer calls to other voice agents. That’s a spectacular development and it implies that different specialists agents could take on different tasks and transfer those tasks, just like humans do now. I would say call centers are soon to be an extinct species.
  • A new benchmark has shown that OpenAI’s O3 model can outperform 94 percent of expert virologists.
• May 02, 2025
  • Yelp began testing AI-powered voice agents to help restaurants and businesses manage incoming phone calls.

• May 9, 2025
  • Google Gemini’s 2.5 Pro model became the first model to achieve the number one rank across all text, vision, and web dev benchmarks simultaneously. The model can watch videos and convert them into functional web applications. Gemini has such a large memory that it can review 50,000 lines of code (!) at once within a chat window with no problem.  
  • Former Google CEO Eric Schmitt has a startup called FutureHouse which has built five specialized artificial intelligence agents to help scientists navigate large amounts of data and research.
• May 16, 2025
  • Google released AlphaEvolve, a strong reasoning agent that found the best human solution to 70% of the toughest known logic problems. It actually went beyond humans, and for 20% of the problems (!), it found a novel solution that no one had thought of before and improved on the best known solution. Google is using this model to self improve its workflow and has been able to achieve 23% efficiency boosts internally.
  • OpenAI’s latest models are exceeding human doctors across standard medical knowledge tests. Six months ago, “AI plus humans” were the best at the test but now “AI without humans” is the best.

• May 23, 2025
  • Microsoft launched a science agent which discovered a new material in a few hours. Not only was the new material discovered, but scientists were able to synthesize the compound in the laboratory.
• May 30, 2025
  • OpenAI went on the record that they plan to launch a super assistant in the first half of 2025.
  • Doctors at Harvard and Stanford benchmarked OpenAI’s o1 preview model and reconfirmed it displayed superhuman diagnostics and reasoning in medicine.
• June 20, 2025
  • Microsoft released an upgrade to its assistant that can see and analyze what’s on your computer screen to give real-time guidance or directions to troubleshoot or modify settings and use software.
  • The UK deployed a system called Extract that converts complex planning documents, including handwritten notes and blurry maps, into digital data within 40 seconds.
  • Japan’s largest bank partnered with AI company Sakana to automate banking document creation.

• June 20, 2025 (continued)
  • Russia’s Sberbank announced plans to create their own AI system with advanced reasoning capabilities.
  • Salesforce released a marketing suite of tools that can handle routine marketing tasks like building audience segments, writing email copy, and managing ad performance. These agents can work independently or assist marketing managers, and take directions like building a campaign or creating personalized offers.
  • A model specifically trained for medical use can answer questions as well as human physicians on healthcare benchmarks. What’s really wild about this model is that it is 70% smaller than most models and can run on a laptop locally. We’re getting to the point where everyone will be able to have a physician in their pocket without even being connected to the cloud.

• June 27, 2025
  • Legal AI software company Harvey released a demonstration of their latest workflow tool, which essentially chopped the bottom out of legal work and would terrify me if I were a student in law school.
  • OpenAI added both document editing and chat to ChatGPT, which directly competes against Microsoft Office and Google Docs
  • Microsoft announced a very small model that can run locally on a PC to help users change system settings, using natural language… basically like Alexa for your laptop settings.
• July 4, 2025
  • A legal AI assistant company called Legora made the radar this week with an introduction of a product called workflows (the same exact name as the product from competing firm Harvey). This allows the automation of due diligence document analysis and legal research using natural language commands. It seems like a harbinger of the end of the paralegal era.
  • Writing assistant company Grammarly is acquiring email automation provider Superhuman to combine writing assistance with email management for automating transactional communication. (real estate, law, accounting, sales)

• July 11, 2025
  • A new tool trained to work on Excel spreadsheets is able to achieve a score of 80% on the Excel World Championship test in only 10 minutes. That is 10 times faster than a human.
• July 18, 2025
  • Anthropic launched an enterprise solution for major financial data providers. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund beta tested it and reported a 20% efficiency boost, equivalent to 213,000 saved hours. AIG sped up their underwriting time by 5x and improved data accuracy from 75% to 90%.  
  • OpenAI launched an agent designed for investment banking. It’s specifically made to analyze financial documents and create pitch decks and can also help with valuations and due diligence. Beta testers reported up to 70% reductions in document prep time.
  • Andrej Karpathy mused that if AI becomes the main consumer of data and research papers, the format and language might become compressed or shifted to accommodate the efficiency of an LLM as a reader. – WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR SEARCH IF THE USERS ARE AI BOTS AND NOT PEOPLE?

• July 25, 2025
  • Multiple models threw their hat into the ring of the recent International Mathematics Olympiad, a world class high school math competition.
    • Google Gemini and OpenAI both achieved gold medals in the math competition.
• August 8, 2025
  • Google launched Gemini DeepThink which is a consumer version of the thinking engine used to win the International Math Olympiad recently.
  • Singapore start-up Manus announced Wide Research which empowers multiple agents across multiple models (as a wrapper). It’s supposedly incredibly powerful for dauntingly scaled tasks like researching all Fortune 100 companies at the same time.
  • Andreessen Horowitz is backing voice agent platform, EliseAI, which makes AI voice agents for property management, and healthcare, at a $2B valuation! 
  • ElevenLabs announced their redesigned interface for AI voice conversation agents.
  • Shopify continues to roll out conversational commerce agents.