IBL News | New York

“AI could have societal consequences that rival the printing press, the internet, and electricity,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told shareholders this week.

JPMorgan Chase, the largest U.S. bank, now includes more than 2,000 AI/machine learning (ML) experts and data scientists.

“We have been actively using predictive AI and ML for years – and now have over 400 use cases in production in areas such as marketing, fraud, and risk – and they are increasingly driving real business value across our businesses and functions,” he explained.

“We’re also exploring the potential that generative AI (GenAI) can unlock across a range of domains, most notably in software engineering, customer service, and operations, as well as in general employee productivity,” Dimon explained.

“In the future, we envision GenAI helping us reimagine entire business workflows. We will continue to experiment with these AI and ML capabilities and implement solutions in a safe, responsible way.”

In terms of the creation or elimination of jobs, Dimon stated, “Over time, we anticipate that our use of AI has the potential to augment virtually every job, as well as impact our workforce composition. It may reduce certain job categories or roles, but it may create others as well. As we have in the past, we will aggressively retrain and redeploy our talent to make sure we are taking care of our employees if they are affected by this trend.”

Dimon said the company is working to “proactively stay in front of AI-related risks, particularly as the regulatory landscape evolves” and that AI is part of JPMorgan Chase’s toolset to stop “bad actors using AI to try to infiltrate companies’ systems to steal money and intellectual property or simply to cause disruption and damage.”

Currently, JPMorgan Chase is using AI to analyze vast troves of data to prevent fraud, risk management, provide financial insights, and assess security risks.
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• Dimon’s letter to Shareholders

Jamie Dimon @jpmorgan Annual Shareholder Letter – as always, great read on pulse of economy

AI, AI, AI

>2,000 AI/ML experts/data scientists
>400 use cases in production

$15B IT Budget

Still early days…https://t.co/kkAEL2iICp pic.twitter.com/DpdGCSdcVS

— Ed Sim (@edsim) April 8, 2024

IBL News | New York

Indeed.com now allows individuals to use AI-powered writing to fill their work experience. It also launched a suite of AI products for recruiters, such as candidate summaries and custom messages.

These generative AI features, called Smart Sourcing, will revamp Recruiter Holdings-owned hiring platform Indeed to better compete with rivals like LinkedIn, Talent.com, and ZipRecruiter.

IBL News | New York

2U said in a blog post last Friday that it had $140 million in cash to support its operations and is not considering ceasing operations or ending programs for students.

The company said that it is encountering “unfounded attacks from special interest groups seeking to harm our business and scare our partners and students.”

“Currently, these groups are citing our efforts to manage our balance sheet challenges as a pretext to amplify their attacks.”

2U argues that its commitment to continue operations is supported by the “high graduation and completion rates” of its partners’ programs.

The stock of 2U has been below $1 since January 10, 2024, signaling to the markets that the company was in huge distress. The stock price has lost 93% in the last year. Currently, the market capitalization is $31 million.

IBL News | New York

The Internet is replete with prompt engineering guides, cheat sheets, and advice threads to help you get the most out of an LLM.

However, new research suggests that prompt engineering is best done by the model itself, and not by a human engineer, wrote Dina Genkin at IEEE Spectrum.

As a consequence, many prompt-engineering jobs may disappear.

Some researchers found how unpredictable LLM performance is in response to prompting techniques.

For example, asking models to explain their reasoning step-by-step—a technique called chain-of-thought—improves their performance on a range of math and logic questions. There is a surprising lack of consistency.

Recently, new tools have been developed to automate this process.

Given a few examples and a quantitative success metric, these tools will iteratively find the optimal phrase to feed into the LLM.

Researchers found that in almost every case, this automatically generated prompt did better than the best prompt found through trial and error, and, the process was much faster, a couple of hours rather than several days of searching.
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IBL News | New York

Adobe this week announced Firefly Services, a set of over 20 new generative and creative APIs, tools, and services.  It allows developers to speed up content creation in custom workflows.

In addition, the company launched Custom Models, which allows businesses to fine-tune Firefly models based on their assets. Custom Models is already built into Adobe’s new GenStudio.

Firefly Services includes APIs for removing backgrounds, cropping images, and automatically leveling the horizon in a photo, as well as, access to core AI-driven Photoshop features like Generative Fill and Expand.

In addition to these AI features, Firefly Services also exposes tools for editing text layers, tagging content, and applying presets from Lightroom, for example.
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IBL News | New York

Amazon put another $2.75 billion into San Francisco-based Anthropic AI last month, its largest outside investment in its three-decade history.

The deal was struck at the AI startup’s last valuation, which was $18.4 billion. In September, the e-commerce giant invested $1.25 billion.

Amazon will maintain a minority stake in this startup and won’t have an Anthropic board seat.

IBL News | New York

OpenAI eliminated yesterday the requirement of opening an account in its flagship conversational chat.openai.com to use its conversational AI tool. This feature will be gradually rolled out to every country.

Those who opt for no logging in will see their chats going into OpenAI’s data training unless they opt out.

These non-logged users won’t be able to save or share chats, use custom instructions, or unlock features like voice conversations and custom instructions, which are capabilities associated with a persistent account.

In addition, this extra-free version of ChatGPT will have “slightly more restrictive content policies,” the company said.
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IBL News | New York

The University of South Florida (USF) plans to launch a college of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and computing in Fall 2025, seeking to position itself as a national leader in AI.

The college would offer undergraduate and graduate programs to prepare students for in-demand careers in AI.

This college will be located in the Tampa Bay area, already a hub for the tech industry.

With this initiative, the university wants to respond to the shortage of qualified talent in AI skills. “The demand for professionals skilled in these areas continues to grow, along with the need for more research to better understand how to utilize powerful new technologies in ways that improve our society,” USF President Rhea Law says.

In 2023, it established an AI graduate certificate while urging its faculty to incorporate the subject in the classroom.

Today, about 200 USF faculty members are already researching related subjects.

Last year, the National Science Foundation reportedly awarded more than $800 million for AI-related research.
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IBL News | New York

Apple researchers presented in a paper new methods for training multimodal LLM on both text and images in what seems to be a significant advance for Generative AI and future Apple products.

The research, posted this month, was described in a paper titled “MM1: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Multimodal LLM Pre-training”.

The largest 30B parameter model showed a strong ability to learn from only a handful of examples and reason over multiple images.

This multimodal model benchmarks compete with GPT-4V and Gemini Pro.

The model was trained on a carefully curated mix of image captions, image-text data, and text-only data.

Experts say that Apple’s level of detail is a big departure for the brand, and represents a massive win for the open-source community.