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  • The New York Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft For Copyright Infringement on AI

    The New York Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft For Copyright Infringement on AI

    IBL News | New York

    The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, the paper reported.

    In its lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, The Times said OpenAI and Microsoft used unauthorized published work in the form of millions of articles to train their AI technologies.

    The suit calls for the companies to destroy any chatbot models and training data that use copyrighted material from The Times.

    The paper is the first major American media organization to sue the creators of ChatGPT.

    The lawsuit doesn’t claim an exact amount of money, but it holds OpenAI and Microsoft responsible for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages.” They both declined to comment on the case.

    The lawsuit could carry major implications for the news industry.

    OpenAI is now valued by investors at more than $80 billion. Microsoft has committed $13 billion to OpenAI and has incorporated the company’s technology into its Bing search engine.

    The lawsuit filed on Wednesday apparently follows an impasse in negotiations involving The Times, Microsoft, and OpenAI. In its complaint, The Times said that it approached Microsoft and OpenAI in April to raise concerns about the use of its intellectual property and explore “an amicable resolution” — possibly involving a commercial agreement and “technological guardrails” around generative A.I. products — but that the talks reached no resolution.

    The lawsuit also highlights the potential damage to The Times’s brand through so-called AI “hallucinations.” The complaint cites several cases in which Microsoft’s Bing Chat provided incorrect information that was said to have come from The Times, including results for “the 15 most heart-healthy foods,” 12 of which were not mentioned in an article by the paper.

    Microsoft has previously acknowledged potential copyright concerns over its AI products. In September, the company announced that if customers using its AI tools were hit with copyright complaints, it would indemnify them and cover the associated legal costs.

    The Times retained the law firm Susman Godfrey as its lead outside counsel for the litigation. Susman represented Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation case against Fox News, which resulted in a $787.5 million settlement in April. Susman also filed a proposed class action suit last month against Microsoft and OpenAI on behalf of nonfiction authors whose books and other copyrighted material were used to train the companies’ chatbots.

     

  • Salesforce Will Sell Best-Known Apps on AWS’ Marketplace

    Salesforce Will Sell Best-Known Apps on AWS’ Marketplace

    IBL News | New York

    Salesforce Inc. announced last month it will begin selling select products on AWS’ marketplace. The leading CRM company is seeking to expand “self-service” purchases and cut down on costs.

    Salesforce Executive Vice President Patrick Stokes said it will make it easier for its customers to integrate AWS data into Salesforce products and use generative AI tools more effectively.

    In addition, Salesforce will now support Amazon Bedrock, making it available through the Einstein Trust Layer to power AI-driven apps and workflows. In addition, Salesforce Data Cloud will expand to support data sharing across additional AWS technologies.

    The new product integrations will be available in 2024.
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  • Apple Discussed $50M Deals with Condé Nast, NBC News and IAC to Train Its AI Systems

    Apple Discussed $50M Deals with Condé Nast, NBC News and IAC to Train Its AI Systems

    IBL News | New York

    Apple is negotiating with major media and publishing organizations seeking permission to use their news articles to train their generative AI systems, The New York Times reported.

    The news organizations contacted by Apple include Condé Nast, publisher of Vogue and The New Yorker; NBC News; and IAC, which owns People, The Daily Beast, and Better Homes and Gardens.

    Apple has floated multiyear deals worth at least $50 million to license this material. Apple declined to elaborate.

    AI companies have been accused of taking written material from across the internet without the permission of the artists, writers, and coders who created it, leading to several copyright lawsuits.

    In a statement, an OpenAI spokesman said to The New York Times that the company respects “the rights of content creators and owners and believes they should benefit from A.I. technology,” citing its recent deals with the American Journalism Project and the German publisher Axel Springer.
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  • Leadership, Cybersecurity, and Gen AI Are the Fastest Growing Skills, Coursera Says

    Leadership, Cybersecurity, and Gen AI Are the Fastest Growing Skills, Coursera Says

    IBL News | New York

    Coursera released this month its third annual Job Skills Report, identifying the year’s fastest-growing competencies.

    It highlights that leadership, AI, and cybersecurity are the skill areas that have witnessed the most remarkable surge in the Coursera platform.

    The report is based on insights from five million enterprise learners affiliated with 3,000 businesses, 3,600 higher education institutions, and governments in over 100 countries.

    Many of Coursera’s fastest-growing skills align with WEF’s fastest-growing global jobs, including AI and machine learning specialists, business intelligence specialists, information security analysts, and data analysts. Fastest growing skills for 2024 were:

    1. ChatGPT
    2. Cybersecurity
    3. HTML/CSS
    4. UX design
    5. Front-end development
    6. Bookkeeping
    7. Data integrity and governance
    8. React Native
    9. Database management
    10. Generative AI modeling and development

    The Job Skills Report of 2024 identifies eight trends:

    #1: All leadership skills for supporting teams are a growing priority, particularly those on empathy, strategic leadership, and employee development. Managers are encouraged to increase their focus on leading teams with empathy, team building, and team management.

    #2: AI-related skills drove record-breaking course enrollment. Coursera’s 800 AI-related courses attracted 6.8 million total enrollments this year. The course Generative AI for Everyone from DeepLearning.AI was the fastest-growing course in 2023.

    Over 450,000+ learners are enrolled in AI-translated content.

    The other top genAI courses published on Coursera in 2023 were:

    1. Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT (Vanderbilt University)
    2. Generative AI with Large Language Models (AWS; DeepLearning.AI)
    3. Introduction to Generative AI (Google Cloud)
    4. Generative AI for Everyone (DeepLearning.AI)
    5. ChatGPT Advanced Data Analysis (Vanderbilt University)

    #3: The demand is surging for cybersecurity and information security skills. There’s an estimated shortfall of nearly 3.5 million cybersecurity workers.

    #4: The fastest-growing skills are business skills, particularly in digital marketing and customer experience.

    #5: Data visualizations and overall skills to read, understand, analyze, work with, and communicate with data continue to be among the fastest growing. Data literacy and storytelling to achieve organizational goals are in huge market demand.

    #6: Web development and cloud computing skills remain high. Investments in these skills can help meet ongoing skill shortages and the need for technical employees to stay current with emerging technologies.

    #7: Audit, copyright, and data skills for providing oversight and compliance are increasingly essential, particularly among learners affiliated with government programs.

    #8: Curated learning paths, like Professional Certifications and Specializations, are driving the largest skill rank changes. These curated learning paths can improve business productivity, boost student employability, and improve internal mobility.

    The most popular courses in Coursera in 2023 were:

    1. Foundations: Data, Data, Everywhere (Google)
    2. Foundations of Project Management (Google)
    3. Foundations of Cybersecurity (Google)
    4. Foundations of Digital Marketing and E-commerce (Google)
    5. The Science of Well-Being (Yale University)
    6. Ask Questions to Make Data-Driven Decisions (Google)
    7. Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design (Google)
    8. Financial Markets (Yale University)
    9. English for Career Development (University of Pennsylvania)
    10. Technical Support Fundamentals (Google)
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  • 2U / edX Deals with Financial Distress, Although It Might Avoid Bankruptcy

    2U / edX Deals with Financial Distress, Although It Might Avoid Bankruptcy

    IBL News | New York

    2U, owner of edX.org, is running out of cash and is facing an existential change in 2024, wrote educational analyst Phil Hill in a report issued after the company’s long-time CEO and Co-Founder, Christopher “Chip” Paucek, stepped down and was replaced by the existing CFO, Paul Lalljie [in the picture].

    “There is no apparent way for 2U to meet its debt obligations by 2025,” Phil Hill stated.

    “The company will likely survive, but it will undergo some significant changes from bankruptcy, from selling off assets, from additional layoffs, or more likely from some combination.” 

    2U market capitalization was $107 million yesterday. In the last year, the company lost

    “Bankruptcy is increasingly likely. 2U could pursue a structured bankruptcy in 2024 to alleviate its debt obligations while continuing to operate the company. Keep in mind that we have seen EdTech companies successfully manage bankruptcy, such as Cengage from 2013 / 14. There are signs that the markets already understand 2U’s situation.”

    The probability of bankruptcy is over 58%, according to an analysis mentioned by Phill Hill.

    • “The basic issue at hand is that 2U holds nearly $1 billion of debt with a significant portion ($380 million minimum) that must be paid off in early 2025, and the company does not have the cash or ability to generate profits to be able to cover the debt maturity.”

    • “2U had roughly $41 million in cash & equivalents as of September 30th, and it generated roughly $32 million in cash (adjusted unlevered free cash flow) in the past 12 months – that level of operations is not going to work.”

    • “2U’s ‘portfolio management’ efforts to ‘transition out of certain degree programs’ are also intended to generate short-term cash, mostly to deal with the debt problem. But the combination of cash and likely cash flow (augmented by portfolio management) is in the neighborhood of $150 million, not nearly enough to handle the debt obligations. This means that the only way 2U survives is if it can renegotiate or refinance the debt.”
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  • AI Image-Generators Are Being Trained on Child Abuse Materials, an Study from Stanford Shows

    AI Image-Generators Are Being Trained on Child Abuse Materials, an Study from Stanford Shows

    IBL News | New York

    A massive public dataset named ‘LAION-5B’ that served as training data for popular AI image generators such as Stable Diffusion was found to contain thousands of instances of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), stated a study published yesterday by Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), a watchdog group based at the Californian university.

    This organization urged companies to take action to address a harmful flaw in the technology they build. Removal of the identified source material was currently in progress.

    The report found more than 3,200 images of suspected child sexual abuse in the giant AI database LAION, an index of online images and captions that’s been used to train leading AI image-makers,

    The Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) worked with the Canadian Centre for Child Protection and other anti-abuse charities to identify the illegal material and report the original photo links to law enforcement.

    These entities examined the LAION-5B dataset using a combination of PhotoDNA perceptual hash matching, cryptographic hash matching, k-nearest neighbors queries, and ML classifiers.

    “This methodology detected many hundreds of instances of known CSAM in the training set, as well as many new candidates that were subsequently verified by outside parties. We also provide recommendations for mitigating this issue for those that need to maintain copies of this training set, building future training sets, altering existing models, and the hosting of models trained on LAION-5B.”

    LAION-5B doesn’t include the images themselves and is instead a collection of metadata including a hash of the image identifier, a description, language data, whether it may be unsafe, and a URL pointing to the image. A number of the CSAM photos found linked in LAION-5B were hosted on websites like Reddit, Twitter, Blogspot, and WordPress, as well as adult websites like XHamster and XVideos.

    The German non-profit LAION said that “it has a zero-tolerance policy for illegal content,” and announced that their public datasets would be temporarily taken down, to return back after update filtering in the second half of January.
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  • Many Start-Ups Are Being Forced by VCs to Shut Down As They Run Out of Cash

    Many Start-Ups Are Being Forced by VCs to Shut Down As They Run Out of Cash

    IBL News | New York

    Over 3,200 private venture-backed U.S. companies, which raised $27.2 billion, have gone out of business this year, according to The New York Times.

    Moreover, investors fear that the failure and collapse of once-promising tech start-ups will increase in the coming months.

    VC firms are deciding which young companies are worth saving and urging others to shut down or sell.

    Many companies are being forced to shut down before they run out of cash, returning what remains to investors. Others are stuck in “zombie” mode — surviving but unable to grow.

    In the last six weeks, high-profile companies have filed for bankruptcy or shut down.

    Among them is WeWork, which raised over $11 billion, the health care firm Olive AI ($852 million raised), the freight start-up Convoy ($900 million raised), and home construction start-up Veev ($647 million).

    In August, Hopin, a start-up that raised more than $1.6 billion and was once valued at $7.6 billion, sold its main business for just $15 million.

    Last month, Zeus Living, a real estate start-up that raised $150 million, said it was shutting down. Plastiq, a financial technology start-up that raised $226 million, went bankrupt in May. In September, Bird, a scooter company that raised $776 million, was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange because of its low stock price.

    From 2012 to 2022, investment in private U.S. start-ups ballooned to $344 billion. The flood of money was driven by low-interest rates and successes in social media and mobile apps.
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  • Nvidia Became The Most Active Investor in Generative AI Start-Ups

    Nvidia Became The Most Active Investor in Generative AI Start-Ups

    IBL News | New York

    Nvidia invested in 35 AI start-ups in 2023, almost six times more than last year,  according to estimates by Dealroom. It both leads rounds itself and invests alongside VC firms.

    These investments made Nvidia the most active large-scale investor in AI, outstripping iconic VCs in Silicon Valley, such as Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia.

    All of the invested companies are Nvidia customers, whether using its GPU chips or its software.

    The company’s portfolio includes Inflection AI, Cohere, Hugging Face, CoreWeave, and Mistral.

    “For Nvidia, the number one criteria for making start-up investments is relevancy,” Mohamed Siddeek, Head of NVentures (Nvidia’s venture arm), told the Financial Times.

    “NVentures looks to generate healthy returns from its investments, while its corporate development team could invest for more strategic purposes,” Mohamed Siddeek said.
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  • Training a Custom Model with OpenAI’s GPT-4 Takes $2-$3 Million

    Training a Custom Model with OpenAI’s GPT-4 Takes $2-$3 Million

    IBL News | New York

    Training a custom model from scratch using OpenAI’s GPT-4 may take several months, with pricing starting at $2 to $3 million, according to the company.

    This high price sparked a discussion among practitioners on Twitter, now known as X. Many users agreed that a much smaller pre-trained base model with fine-tuning on top of it would cost ten times less.

    OpenAI justifies the price by stating:

    “The Custom Models program gives selected organizations an opportunity to work with a dedicated group of OpenAI researchers to train custom GPT-4 models to their specific domain.”

    “This includes modifying every step of the model training process, from doing additional domain-specific pre-training to running a custom RL post-training process tailored for the specific domain.”

    “Organizations will have exclusive access to their custom models. This program is particularly applicable to domains with extremely large proprietary datasets—billions of tokens at minimum.”

    On the other hand, OpenAI announced Data Partnerships, an initiative intended to work with organizations to produce public and private datasets for training AI models as a way to combat models that contain toxic language and biases.

    To work with data and PDFs in those large-scale datasets, OpenAI says that it uses world-class OCR technology and automatic speech recognition (ASR) to transcribe spoken words.
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  • Grok, Elon Musk’s Chatbot, Tries to Raise $1 Billion

    Grok, Elon Musk’s Chatbot, Tries to Raise $1 Billion

    IBL News | New York

    X.AI, the AI start-up launched by Elon Musk in July, filed with the SEC to raise up to $1 billion in an equity offering.

    The company, which released a chatbot called Grok, already brought in $135 million from investors.

    “Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!” X.AI wrote on its website, adding, “It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.”

    Grok, X.AI has real-time knowledge of the internet, including access to all of X, giving it a leg up on all other chatbots.

    It aims to compete directly with ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude. However, Musk said that Grok has been designed to be anti-woke and lacks the political correctness built into other chatbots.

    Grok started rolling out to X Premium Plus users this month at $16 a month, per month.

    “We are a separate company from X Corp, but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission,” X.AI says on its website.

    People working on X.AI include alumni of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Twitter, and Tesla.
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