AI Austria monthly: April'25 Update

AI Literacy Landscape launches, GenAI summit connects community, education adapts to AI surge, our 2 cents on most relevant news in GenAI, jobs, events and more...

Matthias Grabner

Ting Wasner-Lian

Clemens Wasner

, and 2 others

Apr 02, 2025

Charting the course through rapid AI shifts – your April briefing on literacy, community connection, and the fast-moving tech frontier is here.

🚀 Latest Developments

🏙️ Successful GenAI Sky Summit Held with PwC Austria

On Thursday, March 27th, 2025, the AI Austria GenAI community gathered for its Sky Summit, hosted by PwC Austria high in Vienna's DC Tower. The fully booked event featured focused discussions on key GenAI advancements. Topics spanned Agentic AI frameworks, synthetic data generation, combining flexibility with AI agents, and the latest news across the GenAI landscape. Strong engagement and valuable networking marked the successful evening, made possible by the partnership with PwC Austria. Stay connected with the community: » Full event recap on our website . Wanna join the AI Austria GenAI Community - check our LI page.

🗺️ AI Training Structured: Our AI Literacy Landscape 2025 Arrives

AI competence is now essential. The approaching AI Act reinforces this, requiring basic employee training soon. But finding the right courses in Austria's crowded, fragmented market? That remains a challenge.

To bring clarity, AI Austria presents the AI Literacy Landscape Austria 2025. It's a free, curated platform. It catalogues over 350 AI courses and workshops from numerous local providers. Developed over six months, partly using AI tools itself, the Landscape offers neutral orientation across the wide array of options. The focus is firmly on practical skills: AI tools, prompt engineering, effective management. Accessibility was also crucial. You'll find coverage for all levels, including over 200 beginner courses, with many affordable options.

Are you seeking training for yourself? Upskilling your team for the AI Act? Or perhaps you offer AI courses? Use this primary resource to explore, compare, and identify suitable programs. We invite educational providers to submit their offerings, helping this valuable directory grow.Discover relevant courses here

📝 AI Reshaping Austrian Education: Adaptation Needs Highlighted

AI's growing presence in Austrian classrooms, examined in recent reports (ORF NÖ 17.03; Ö1 Journale "Prompten statt Prüfung" 04.03), reveals both promise and urgent challenges. While pilot schools show AI tools aiding personalized math and reading feedback, this necessitates teachers shifting focus towards verifying process and critical thinking over simple output. The Ö1 Journale documentary broadened this scope, featuring AI Austria's Clemens Wasner who highlighted AI's potential to pivot education from certificates towards skills, possibly overcoming resource limits via AI tutors for truly individualized learning. Both analyses underscore a crucial message: adapting teaching, assessment, and digital literacy for students, educators, and parents is paramount as AI integration accelerates. Tune in » Ö1 Journale (04.03): & read ORF NÖ Report

🏔️ T[AI]ROL Data Science Meetup Returns: April 9th in Innsbruck

Western Austria's leading Data Science Meetup, T[AI]ROL, is back for its next round on Wednesday, April 9th, 2025. Join data scientists, engineers, and industry players from 17:00 to 21:00 at Hotel Das Innsbruck. This session dives deep into successfully implementing data-driven decision processes. Explore practical questions like boosting transport logistics with AI, the advantages of digital twins in intralogistics, and identifying key data-driven innovation potentials. Look forward to insightful talks, including from Fraunhofer Austria's Daniel Bachlechner, and valuable exchange within the data science community, organized by Alexander Thamm Austria and Fraunhofer Austria. Attendance is free, but prior online registration is required. Read more here

👩‍💻 AI Austria & Women in AI Austria Present: Agents Edition - April 14th

We are thrilled to partner with Women in AI Austria for a special evening dedicated to the rapidly evolving world of AI Agents! Join us on Monday, April 14th, 2025, from 18:00 at the impressive RBI Tower in Vienna. The event features a keynote address on AI Agents by Sarah Eschenbacher from Fraunhofer Austria, followed by ample time for networking and drinks. Hosted by AI Austria (Ruben Hetfleisch), Women in AI Austria (Jaqueline Berger & Alexandra Ciarnau), and generously sponsored by RBI, this gathering is free and open to everyone keen on exploring the future shaped by agentic AI – from enthusiasts to industry leaders. Space is limited, so secure your spot quickly here: Register

🤝 AI Stammtisch Heads to Linz: Join Us April 29th!

Mark your calendars! Our popular AI Stammtisch series, organized together with aws Austria Wirtschaftsservice AI Adoption, is coming to Upper Austria. Join us on Tuesday, April 29th, 2025, at the Nova Zone in Linz's iconic Tabakfabrik. The aim of this series is simple: to create a regular space for informal exchange about the Austrian AI ecosystem and to easily spark conversations about potential collaborations. Come connect with peers, share insights, and discuss what's moving in AI!

✨ Generative AI News ✨

👉 In March 2025, OpenAI rolled out a dazzling image generation feature for GPT-4o in ChatGPT, letting users craft vivid visuals from text. The internet lost its mind over “Ghibli madness,” with Studio Ghibli-style landscapes and characters popping up everywhere—Sam Altman even swapped his X pic to one! The frenzy pushed OpenAI’s GPUs to the brink, prompting temporary rate limits and sparking hot debates on AI art and copyright.

👉 Google made waves on March 25 with Gemini 2.5 Pro, their sharpest AI yet. Packing a 1 million token context window and stellar reasoning chops, it’s acing tough benchmarks like GPQA and AIME 2025. Available now for Gemini Advanced users and Google AI Studio, it’s poised to expand via Vertex AI, cementing Google’s lead in the AI race.

👉 Nvidia’s GTC, held March 16-21, showcased the Blackwell Ultra chips, set to turbocharge GenAI workloads. While no new models debuted, the hardware buzz—think trillion-dollar data centers—promises to power the next wave of AI creativity. It’s the backbone GenAI needs!

👉 Anthropic tweaked Claude 3.7 Sonnet in March, boosting its “extended thinking mode” for tackling tricky problems. It’s still flexing near state-of-the-art muscle in math and coding, with its raw thought process on display—though that might not last. A standout in user interaction too!

👉 Mistral, the French AI upstart, unleashed Mixtral 8x22B in March, a mixture-of-experts model that’s flexing serious muscle in text generation and translation. Open-source and lean, it’s winning fans among devs looking for power without the bloat—France’s AI scene is heating up!

👉 Runway debuted Model 4 in March, a next-level video generation engine that’s pumping out cinematic clips from text with eerie precision—think smooth transitions and lifelike motion. Creators are raving, but the compute heft has indie filmmakers begging for more accessible pricing.

👉 Stability AI shook things up in March with new leadership and a $50M investment boost. While no new models dropped, their focus on sustainable AI innovation hints at big things brewing—maybe a next-gen Stable Diffusion?

👉 Meta rolled out its AI assistant to the EU in March, adding text and simple image generation to WhatsApp and Instagram. It’s catching on with users playing around with meme-worthy outputs. A cautious step forward!

🌏 Asia spotlight

China's Zhipu AI launched AutoGLM, an autonomous AI agent for research and task execution, claiming high efficiency and planning an open-source release. (Source)
Adding to the agent trend, startup Monica unveiled Manus, another Chinese AI agent designed for tasks like scheduling and data analysis. (Source)
Baidu launched ERNIE 4.5 (foundation) and ERNIE X1 (reasoning) models, with X1 aiming to match DeepSeek R1 performance at half the cost (Mar 15). (Source)
Tencent released Hunyuan-T1, an advanced reasoning model using Hybrid-Transformer-Mamba architecture, claiming performance exceeding GPT-4.5 and DeepSeek R1 (Mar 21). (Source)
DeepSeek upgraded to DeepSeek-V3-0324 (Mar 24), enhancing its reasoning and coding capabilities. (Source: DeepSeek Announcement)
Alibaba introduced Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, a powerful open-source multimodal model handling text, images, audio, and video (Mar 26). (Source)
Japan enacted its first AI regulations, adopting a "pro-innovation" approach focused on encouraging R&D while ensuring ethical use. (Source)
Microsoft announced a major $2.9B investment in Japan to expand cloud/AI infrastructure, including Azure HPC with NVIDIA GPUs, by 2025. (Source)
South Korea passed its comprehensive "Basic Act on AI", establishing a risk-based regulatory framework similar to the EU AI Act, effective Jan 2026. (Source)
India nearly quadrupled funding for its India AI Mission (~$240M) and launched a significant push for indigenous foundation models. (Source 1, Source 2)
Malaysia intensified its bid as an AI hub, announcing a semiconductor strategy and a key $250M partnership with Arm for domestic chip production. (Source)