IBL News

Author: IBL News

  • Synthesia Launches Avatars with Facial Expressions and Body Language

    Synthesia Launches Avatars with Facial Expressions and Body Language

    IBL News | New York

    AI video startup Synthesia announced Expressive Avatars, powered by its EXPRESS-1 model for realistic avatar performance, with an improved tone of voice, body language, and lip sync, “like a real actor would,” the company said.

    “We’re introducing digital actors. Our technology brings a level of sophistication and realism to digital avatars that blur the line between the virtual and the real,” Synthesia explained.

    The EXPRESS-1 model understands the context of whether the conversation is cheerful or somber, and avatars adjust their performance accordingly, displaying a level of empathy and understanding that was once the sole domain of human actors.

    According to the company, 200,000 people have used Synthesia’s 225 avatars to create over 18 million video presentations and published them in over 130 languages.
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  • Anthropic Launches a Free iOS App for Its Claude Chatbot

    Anthropic Launches a Free iOS App for Its Claude Chatbot

    IBL News | New York

    Amazon, Google, and Salesforce-backed Anthropic announced a free iOS app as well as its first enterprise offering called Team, which offers access to its Claude 3 Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku models for $30 per user per month.

    The new Team plan features a 200K context window, enabling businesses to process long documents (e.g., research papers, legal contracts), discuss complex topics (e.g., financial forecasting, product road mapping), and maintain multi-step conversations (e.g., customer support inquiries, project planning discussions), helping individuals and teams gain deeper insights from their data.

    The Claude iOS app offers the same experience on mobile web, including syncing chat history, and support for taking and uploading photos and files from a smartphone.

    “Early testers report that the Claude app is exceptional for brainstorming ideas on the go, getting quick answers to questions, or analyzing scenes and images from the real world,” said the start-up firm.

    Anthropic, the company behind the chatbot Claude, founded by ex-OpenAI research executives, has closed five different funding deals totaling about $7.3 billion.

    The company has said the most capable of the new models, Claude 3 Opus, outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini Ultra on industry benchmark tests, such as undergraduate-level knowledge, graduate-level reasoning, and basic mathematics.

    This is also the first time Anthropic has offered multimodal support: users can upload photos, charts, documents, and other types of unstructured data for analysis and answers.
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  • Police Seized Building at Columbia University and Arrest Dozens of Pro-Palestinian Protesters

    Police Seized Building at Columbia University and Arrest Dozens of Pro-Palestinian Protesters

    IBL News | New York

    N.Y.P.D. officers in riot gear arrested dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Columbia University in New York City on Tuesday night and cleared the Hamilton Hall building that protesters had seized 20 hours earlier.

    The police arrested more than 100 protesters who had set up tents on Columbia’s campus two weeks ago.

    Also, yesterday, demonstrators and agitators were arrested at City College of New York in Harlem.

    Other arrests were made on campuses nationwide. Over 1,000 protesters have been taken into custody on U.S. campuses since the original roundup at Columbia on April 18.

    Meanwhile, the University of California, Los Angeles, declared a pro-Palestinian encampment illegal for the first time.

    The Columbia University occupation escalated a crisis that has ignited protests on dozens of campuses nationwide.

    Columbia University’s administrators said it had called the police to campus after the Hamilton Hall building was vandalized and blockaded.

    The university’s president, Nemat Shafik, asked the N.Y.P.D. to maintain a presence on campus through at least May 17 to prevent further encampments or occupations.
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  • OpenAI Introduces the “Memory” for ChatGPT Plus Users

    OpenAI Introduces the “Memory” for ChatGPT Plus Users

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI enabled this week in the U.S. the “Memory” feature for all ChatGPT Plus users, the company announced via X.

    “Memory”, which can be turned on or off in settings, allows users to tell ChatGPT anything they’d like to remember across chats.

    This feature extends ChatGPT capabilities by allowing the model to retain the context of previous conversations. It’s part of OpenAI’s strategy to evolve ChatGPT into a personal assistant.

    Until now, each new chat started a new conversation without any prior knowledge.

    Plans for wider availability will be announced at a later date.

    OpenAI is reportedly working on two agents for different use cases, as well as on networked GPTs.

    According to OpenAI, the memory feature allows ChatGPT to learn the user’s preferences and style, which should further increase efficiency at work.

    For example, ChatGPT can now remember users’ preferred general tone, language, or format for blog posts; the preferred programming language and frameworks for coding; or the preferred charts for monthly business meetings.

    OpenAI didn’t specify how ChatGPT’s memory works. According to experts, it might use text mining to create a database of facts from previous conversations, which are automatically extracted and incorporated into new responses that match the user’s prompts. This would make it like an extended, automated form of the already available “Custom Instructions”.
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  • Pro-Palestinian Protests Continue at Colleges With Over 800 Arrests

    Pro-Palestinian Protests Continue at Colleges With Over 800 Arrests

    IBL News | New York

    The protests, which started at Columbia University last week, spread to universities and colleges across over eight states in the U.S., with more than 800 arrests.

    Police officers and university administrators clashed with pro-Palestinian protesters, arresting students, removing encampments, and threatening academic consequences.

    The wave of student activism against the war in Gaza was sparked by the arrests at Columbia University.

    The protests, nearly seven months after the Israel-Hamas war began, emerged as the latest flashpoint in the internal Democratic debate over the war.

    These demonstrations are exposing political tensions over how to balance free speech protections and support for Gazans with concerns that some Jewish Americans are raising about antisemitism.

    The New York Times made a list of where arrests have been reported as the authorities attempt to break up protests or encampments:

    • Columbia University: The New York City Police Department arrested 108 demonstrators while clearing an encampment at the Manhattan campus on April 18.

    • Yale University in New Haven, Conn.: The police arrested 60 people on Monday, including 47 Yale students, after they refused to leave an encampment on campus.

    • New York University in Manhattan: Officers made dozens of arrests late Monday after students occupied a plaza on campus.

    • University of Minnesota in Minneapolis: Nine people were taken into custody after they erected an encampment on Tuesday. All of those affiliated with the university were allowed back on campus and civil trespass warnings were “set aside.”

    • University of South Carolina in Columbia: Two students were arrested after a protest on Tuesday, according to a police report.

    • University of Southern California in Los Angeles: The police arrested 93 people at a demonstration on Wednesday afternoon.

    • University of Texas at Austin: The police arrested 57 protesters on Wednesday. A spokeswoman for the county attorney’s office said charges against many had been dropped after the office found legal “deficiencies” in their arrests.

    • Emerson College in Boston: The police arrested 118 people as an encampment was cleared on Wednesday night, the authorities said.

    • Ohio State University in Columbus: A university official said that 36 people, including 16 students, were arrested on Thursday. Earlier in the week, two students were arrested during an on-campus demonstration, university officials said.

    • Emory University in Atlanta: At least 28 people were arrested on Thursday morning, an Emory official said; 20 had ties to the school.

    • Indiana University Bloomington: On Thursday, the university police said 33 people were removed from an encampment and taken to jail. There were 23 more arrests on Saturday, the police said.

    • Princeton University in New Jersey: Two graduate students were arrested after pitching tents on Thursday.

    • University of Connecticut in Storrs: Campus police officers removed at least one tent from a rally on Thursday and took at least one person into custody, a university official said.

    • California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt: Protesters have occupied two buildings on the campus in Arcata, Calif., university officials said. Three people were arrested there this week.

    • Auraria Campus in Denver: About 40 people were arrested on Friday at a campus that houses facilities for the University of Colorado Denver, the Metropolitan State University of Denver and the Community College of Denver, the campus police said.

    • University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign: Social media posts on Friday showed police officers detaining at least one person and taking down an encampment.

    • Arizona State University in Tempe: A university official said 69 people were arrested early Saturday after protesters set up an encampment. Three people were also arrested on Friday.

    • Northeastern University in Boston: The Massachusetts State Police said that 102 protesters were arrested on Saturday. Earlier in the day, the university said that among those who were detained, students who showed their university IDs were released.

    • Washington University in St. Louis: On Saturday, 100 arrests were made and the campus was locked down, according to a university statement. The presidential candidate Jill Stein was among the arrests.

    • University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va.: The university president’s office said that 12 people, including nine students, were arrested on Saturday evening.

    Some media outlets reported that Jewish left-leaning billionaire George Soros and associations funded by him were reportedly funding the anti-Israel protests at college campuses across the US.

    At Columbia University, three groups set up the tent city last Wednesday. These groups are Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and Within Our Lifetime.

    Tent cities called the ‘Liberated Zones’, also set in Harvard, Yale, and Berkeley in California as well as the Ohio State University and Emory in Georgia, have reportedly been organized by the student branches of the Soros-backed SJP.
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  • Google Will Release an AI-Powered Video Creation and Editing Tool for Its Workspace

    Google Will Release an AI-Powered Video Creation and Editing Tool for Its Workspace

    IBL News | New York

    Google will release in June a new Workspace AI-powered app for video creation that generates easily-editable storyboards.

    The user chooses then a style from a variety of templates in Google Vids and pieces together a draft with suggested scenes from stock videos, images, background music, and voice-over —the user’s own or one from a pre-set catalog.

    “Google Vids is your video, writing, production, and editing assistant all in one,” said the company.

    However, Google Vids, which sits alongside Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, is meant more for things people do at work like making a pitch, updating the team, and explaining a complicated concept.

    This is not a Hollywood production, it’s a work product, to use at work.

    It’s a kind of tool that transforms Google Slides into a video app after collecting files from Drive and elsewhere, or by prompting on Gemini AI. Then the finished product in Slides gets converted into a video.

    There are lots of tools aiming for videos from messaging tools like Loom, Descript, ClickUp, or even Vimeo.
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  • OpenAI Creates a Voice Cloning AI Tool, Not Available for the Public Yet

    OpenAI Creates a Voice Cloning AI Tool, Not Available for the Public Yet

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI shared a preview of a model called Voice Engine, which allows users to upload a 15-second voice sample to generate a synthetic copy.

    There is no date for public availability yet, as OpenAI says “it is taking a cautious and informed approach to a broader release due to the potential for synthetic voice misuse.”

    “Any broad deployment of synthetic voice technology should be accompanied by voice authentication experiences that verify that the original speaker is knowingly adding their voice to the service and a no-go voice list that detects and prevents the creation of voices that are too similar to prominent figures,” stated the company.

    Under development for about two years, this tool works like an expansion of the company’s existing text-to-speech API.

    OpenAI has been testing this tool with a small group of partners, thinking about how it can be used for good across various industries.

    The San Francisco-based research lab shared a few early examples, including providing real-time, personalized responses and reading assistance to non-readers and children through natural-sounding.

    Another use is helping patients who suffer from sudden or degenerative speech conditions to recover their voice. The Norman Prince Neurosciences Institute at Lifespan was exploring the use of AI in clinical contexts.

    One early adopter is HeyGen. It uses Voice Engine to translate a video speaker’s voice into multiple languages, preserving the native accent of the original user.
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  • College Pro-Palestinian Protests Intensify; Mike Johnson Visited the Columbia Campus

    College Pro-Palestinian Protests Intensify; Mike Johnson Visited the Columbia Campus

    IBL News | New York

    Clashes between police and students protesting the Israel-Hamas war on campuses nationwide intensified yesterday across campuses in the U.S.

    Students gathered on campuses in Austin, Los Angeles, Boston, Rhode Island, Pittsburgh, San Antonio, and New York, in some cases, facing off with the police.

    Meanwhile, as new protests were emerging, college administrators moved to prevent pro-Palestinian encampments from taking hold as they had at Columbia University. They called for police deployment in tense new confrontations that have already led to dozens of arrests.

    • At the University of Texas at Austin, police violently took two dozen demonstrators into custody after refusing to disperse.

    • At Brown University in Rhode Island, scores of students pitched tents on the campus’s Main Green, promising to stay until they were forced off.

    • Two students were arrested at Ohio State University, school officials said, during an on-campus protest that had since dispersed.

    • At the University of Southern California (U.S.C.), protestors started being detained as helicopters buzzed overhead.

    Protesters formed a circle with locked arms in the center of campus, in defiance of an earlier warning that they would be arrested by the Los Angeles Police Department. Police in riot gear, holding batons, surrounded the group before arresting individuals one by one.

    Many U.S.C. students were angered at the cancellation of a commencement address by the valedictorian Asna Tabassum, who is Muslim.

    Also, yesterday, the speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, visited the Columbia campus in New York, where university officials were seeking to negotiate with protest leaders to end the encampment of around 80 tents on a central campus lawn.

    Mike Johnson said the school’s president, Nemat Shafik, should resign if she could not immediately get the situation under control, calling her an “inept leader” who had failed to guarantee the safety of Jewish students.

    The speaker said there could be an appropriate time for the National Guard to be called in, and that Congress should consider revoking federal funding if universities could not keep the protests under control.

    Republican lawmakers have accused university administrators for months of not doing enough to protect Jewish students on college campuses, seizing on an issue that has sharply divided Democrats.

    The demonstrations spread overseas as well, with students on campuses in Cairo, Paris and Sydney, Australia, gathering to voice support for Palestinians and opposition to the war.
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  • Anthropic Releases a Library of Optimized Prompts

    Anthropic Releases a Library of Optimized Prompts

    IBL News | New York

    Anthropic, the creator of the Claude chatbot, launched a complete library of optimized prompts for business and personal purposes.

    This free library contains hundreds of ready-to-use Claude and AWS Bedrock prompts.

    The most popular include Website Wizard, Excel Expert, Storytelling Sidekick, and Lesson Planner.

    This system prompt in Claude is similar to custom instructions for ChatGPT.

    These prompts work best when used with both a System and User prompt.

    To access System Prompts, users need to copy and paste the prompts from the library to the Claude API Console.
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  • Pro-Palestinian Protests Sweep U.S. College Campuses Following Arrests at Columbia, NYU, and Yale

    Pro-Palestinian Protests Sweep U.S. College Campuses Following Arrests at Columbia, NYU, and Yale

    IBL News | New York

    Pro-Palestinian protests sweep U.S. college campuses following dozens of students arrested at Columbia, NYU, and Yale on Monday night due to alleged antisemitic messages. Meanwhile, Columbia University canceled in-person classes. [Photos: See scenes of protests.]

    Protests over the war in Gaza at a handful of elite American universities had officials scramble to defuse demonstrations.

    In addition to rallies, encampments have been set up at the University of California at Berkeley, MIT, the University of Michigan, Emerson College, and Tufts.

    “We stand with Palestine and we stand with the liberation of all people,” one protester said. Others were likening the rallies to historic demonstrations over the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa.

    Recent videos posted online have appeared to show some protesters near Columbia expressing support for the unprecedented Hamas attack on Israel. Democratic Congresswoman Kathy Manning, who toured Columbia on Monday, said she had seen protesters there calling for Israel’s destruction.

    The wave of demos has been marred by alleged antisemitic incidents, which the White House has condemned.

    When asked about the rallies on Monday, President Joe Biden said he condemned both “the antisemitic protests” as well as “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians”.

    Students on both sides say there has been a rise in both antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents since Israel’s campaign in Gaza.

    The NYU protesters were calling on their institution to disclose and divest its “finances and endowments from weapons manufacturers and companies with an interest in the Israeli occupation”.

    The attack on southern Israel on 7 October saw about 1,200 Israelis and foreigners, mostly civilians, killed and 253 others taken back to Gaza as hostages. Israel responded by launching its most intense-ever war in Gaza, intending to destroy Hamas and free the hostages. More than 34,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them children and women, have been killed in the conflict.
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