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Issue 25: I Learned It My Way

Issue 25: I Learned It My Way

Google Labs, Mixboard, Vector Databases, Gemini API Keys

Mike Murphy
September 26, 2025

🗞️ AI News of The Week: Learn Your Way

Google announced Learn Your Way, an AI tool that turns textbooks into interactive learning experiences.

Learn Your Way

Learn Your Way uses generative AI to convert static textbook materials into engaging, personalized guides for students. Powered by LearnLM and integrated into Gemini 2.5 Pro, the tool adapts content to different grade levels and interests, offering formats like mind maps, audio lessons, and interactive quizzes. A study found students using Learn Your Way scored 11 percentage points higher on long-term recall tests compared to those using standard digital readers.

👉 Check out Learn Your Way

🧠 AI Term of The Week: Vector Database

Vector databases are specialized data storage systems designed to efficiently store, index, and search high-dimensional vector embeddings…numerical representations of data like text, images, or audio. Vector databases essentially act as the "memory system" for RAG applications, making them crucial for building AI systems that can access and reason over large knowledge bases.

Vector Database

Role in RAG Applications:

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) relies heavily on vector databases to bridge the gap between user queries and relevant information:

Knowledge storage: Documents, articles, and data sources are converted to embeddings and stored in the vector database
Semantic search: User queries are embedded and matched against stored vectors to find contextually relevant information (not just keyword matching)
Context retrieval: The most similar documents are retrieved and fed to the language model as context
Dynamic knowledge: Enables LLMs to access up-to-date information without retraining

Popular vector databases: Pinecone, Weaviate, Chroma, Qdrant, and traditional databases with vector extensions (Neon +PostgreSQL + Pgvector).

💬 Quote of the Week:

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“Big things have small beginnings.”

– T.E. Lawrence

🧰 AI Tool of The Week: Google Mixboard

Create personalized, illustrated stories about anything with read-aloud narration. Just describe the story you want, add files and photos if you like, and Gemini will create a unique 10-page storybook.