IBL News

Author: IBL News

  • Mistral, a French AI Start-Up, Was Valued at $2 Billion in Funding Round

    Mistral, a French AI Start-Up, Was Valued at $2 Billion in Funding Round

    IBL News | New York

    Mistral AI, the 22-people French start-up founded seven months ago by researchers from Google and Meta, raised $415 million (or 385 million euros) at a valuation of $2 billion.

    Investors include the Silicon Valley venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

    Also, this month, Mistral opened beta access to its platform services so people can build their own chatbots.

    The start-up also released Mixtral 8x7B, a high-quality sparse mixture of expert model (SMoE) with open weights, handling a context of 32k tokens, and licensed under Apache 2.0.

    It handles English, French, Italian, German and Spanish and shows strong performance in code generation.

    Mistral AI stated:

    “Mixtral — pre-trained on data extracted from the open Web — outperforms Llama 2 70B on most benchmarks with 6x faster inference. It is the strongest open-weight model with a permissive license and the best model overall regarding cost/performance trade-offs. In particular, it matches or outperforms GPT3.5 on most standard benchmarks.”

    Rivals like OpenAI and Google said that Mistral, which releases its technology as open-source software, can be dangerous, arguing that the raw technology could be used to spread disinformation and harmful material.

    The Mistral platform serves three endpoints: Mistral-tiny, which serves Mistral 7B Instruct v0.2; Mistral-small (Mixtral 8x7B); and Mistral-medium.

    The French Finance Minister pointed to Mistral as providing the European continent a chance to challenge U.S. tech giants.

    In the sphere of open-source, the American company Meta has been at the forefront. This year, it released an LLM called LLaMA.
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  • Google Makes ‘Gemini Pro’ Available to Developers and Enterprises

    Google Makes ‘Gemini Pro’ Available to Developers and Enterprises

    IBL News | New York

    Google announced yesterday that it was making its new AI model, Gemini Pro, available to developers and enterprises. It has been released via the Gemini API, and it’s free for now. SDKs are also available for Gemini Pro to help to build apps.

    Last week, Google started to roll out Gemini, which comes in three sizes: Ultra, Pro, and Nano.

    “The faster way to build with Gemini is with Google AI Studio, a free, web-based developer tool that enables you users to develop prompts and then get an API key to use in their app development,” said the company.

    Google intends that users migrate from AI Studio to Vertex AI. Early next year, the company plans to launch Gemini Ultra, its largest and most capable model for complex tasks.

    Yesterday, Google announced that Duet AI for Developers will be launched in Q1 of 2024. It will compete with GitHub GPT-based Copilot.

    Google’s partners adding support for coding with Duet AI for Developers include Confluent, Elastic, Grafana Labs, Hashicopr, MongoDB, Neo4j, Pinecone, Redis, and SingleStore.

    In addition, Google Cloud’s image-generation capabilities have been upgraded with Imagen 2. This feature is now generally available for Vertex AI customers on the allowlist.
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  • IBM, Meta, and 40 Top Organizations Create the ‘AI Alliance’ to Develop Open Source Technology

    IBM, Meta, and 40 Top Organizations Create the ‘AI Alliance’ to Develop Open Source Technology

    IBL News | New York

    IBM, Meta, and over 40 companies and organizations are creating the AI Alliance, an industry and academic group dedicated to open-source AI technology.

    This coalition said in a statement that it will focus on the responsible development of AI technology, including safety and security tools.

    AI Alliance will look to increase the number of open-source models rather than the proprietary systems favored by companies such as OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Microsoft.

    It will also develop new hardware and team up with academic researchers.

    The AI Alliance consists of a broad range of organizations that are working across aspects of AI education, research, development and deployment, and governance.

    Among them, there are creators of some of today’s most used open models including Llama2, Stable Diffusion, StarCoder, Bloom, as well as application developers like MLPerf, Hugging Face, LangChain, LlamaIndex, and other open-source AI toolkits will participate.

    Frameworks that drive platform software, including PyTorch, Transformers, Diffusers, Kubernetes, Ray, Hugging Face Text generation inference, and Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning, joined the initiative.

    Partners and collaborators include:

    • Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)
    • Aitomatic
    • AMD
    • Anyscale
    • Cerebras
    • CERN
    • Cleveland Clinic
    • Cornell University
    • Dartmouth
    • Dell Technologies
    • Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
    • ETH Zurich
    • Fast.ai
    • Fenrir, Inc.
    • FPT Software
    • Hebrew University of Jerusalem
    • Hugging Face
    • IBM
    • Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)
    • Imperial College London
    • Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
    • Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
    • Intel
    • Keio University
    • LangChain
    • LlamaIndex
    • Linux Foundation
    • Mass Open Cloud (MOC) Alliance, operated by Boston University and Harvard
    • Meta
    • Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
    • MLCommons
    • National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
    • National Science Foundation (NSF)
    • New York University
    • NumFOCUS
    • OpenTeams
    • Oracle
    • Partnership on AI
    • Quansight
    • Red Hat
    • Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
    • Roadzen
    • Sakana AI
    • SB Intuitions
    • ServiceNow
    • Silo AI
    • Simons Foundation
    • Sony Group
    • Stability AI
    • Together AI
    • TU Munich
    • UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society
    • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
    • The University of Notre Dame
    • The University of Texas at Austin
    • The University of Tokyo
    • Yale University

    In addition to bringing together leading developers, scientists, academics, students, and business leaders in the field of artificial intelligence, the AI Alliance will plan to partner with initiatives from governments, non-profit and civil society organizations working in the AI space.



  • Google’s Promotional Video of Gemini Was Fabricated

    Google’s Promotional Video of Gemini Was Fabricated

    IBL News | New York

    Google’s main Gemini AI demo video released — see it below — last week was fabricated, misrepresenting the model’s capabilities. The company admitted it in a report issued by Bloomberg.

    “Google’s video made it look like you could show different things to Gemini Ultra in real time and talk to it. You can’t,” Bloomberg’s reported wrote in a tweet.

    Google researchers interacted with Gemini through text, not voice, then picked the best interactions and edited them together with voice synthesis to make the video.

    As a result, the Internet giant is now facing controversy among AI experts.

    Running still images and text through LLM is computationally intensive and makes real-time video largely impractical. That was one of the clues that led experts to detect that the video was misleading.

    As Ars Technica reports, “OpenAI has embarrassed Google in generative AI over the last year.”

    On December 6th, Gemini was introduced as the first true rival to OpenAI’s GPT-4.

    The stock of the company went up 5% amidst comments about Google’s model “sophisticated reasoning capabilities,” supported by multiple benchmarks.

    The contested video, titled “Hands-on with Gemini: Interacting with multimodal AI,” shows that the AI model sees, accompanied by the AI model’s responses on the right side of the screen. The viewer hears a voice, apparently of Gemini Ultra, responding to the questions.

    Additionally, on the next day, TechCrunch reported that users were very disappointed with Gemini Pro’s performance on Bard.

    ArsTechnica‘s tests showed that Google’s AI system improved in the eight months but “ChatGPT is still the winner”.
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  • What Happened at OpenAI: Board Members Believed that Altman Was Dishonest

    What Happened at OpenAI: Board Members Believed that Altman Was Dishonest

    IBL News | New York

    Before firing Sam Altman on November 17, Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist of OpenAI, and three board members had been whispering behind his back for months, The New York Times revealed in an insightful story this Saturday.

    They believed Sam Altman had been dishonest and should no longer lead the company.

    They were worried that ChatGPT’s success was antithetical to creating safe AI.

    In September, Altman met investors in the Middle East to discuss an AI chip project. The board was concerned that he wasn’t sharing all his plans with it.

    He also believed that Mr. Altman was bad-mouthing the board to OpenAI executives. Other employees have also complained to the board about Mr. Altman’s behavior.

    The ouster was the culmination of years of tensions and divisions at OpenAI.

    Microsoft, which had committed $13 billion to OpenAI, weighed in to protect its investment. Many top Silicon Valley executives and investors, including the CEO of Airbnb, also mobilized to support Altman.

    From his $27 million mansion in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood, Sam Altman, driven by a hunger for power more than by money, lobbied through social media and voice their displeasure in private text threads, according to the NYT, who interviewed more than 25 people with knowledge of the events.

    On Nov. 21, Sam Altman returned as CEO of OpenAI.

    The San Francisco OpenAI lab was founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and nine others. Its goal was to build AI systems to benefit all of humanity.

    Unlike most tech start-ups, it was established as a nonprofit with a board that was responsible for making sure it fulfilled that mission.

  • Quora Creates a Revenue Program for Chatbot Creators

    Quora Creates a Revenue Program for Chatbot Creators

    IBL News | New York

    Quora, the company behind the Poe.com chatbot, said it intends to create a new market allowing bot creators in areas such as tutoring, knowledge, therapy, entertainment, analysis, storytelling, roleplay, image, video, and music to generate revenue.

    With this stated goal, this month, Poe.com launched this month a Creator monetization program to support both prompt bots and server bots created by developers who write code and integrate with the platform API.

    “For anyone training their own models and running their own inference, or using a third-party AI service through an API, operating a bot can entail significant infrastructure costs, and we want them to be able to operate sustainably and profitably,” said Adam D’Angelo, CEO at Quora, the company behind Poe.com.

    Poe.com’s monetization structure, currently available only in the US, has two components:

    • If a bot causes a user to subscribe to Poe (measured a few ways), the company will share a cut of the revenue they pay.
    • The bot generator can set a per-message fee and Poe will pay that on every message.

    Users can get started at poe.com/creators, or learn about creating a bot at developer.poe.com.

     

     

  • The ChatGPT App Gets Nearly $30 Million in Revenue

    The ChatGPT App Gets Nearly $30 Million in Revenue

    IBL News | New York

    The ChatGPT app topped 110 million installs, and its paid version of $20 per month reached $28.6 million in revenue, according to TechCrunch and data.ai.

    Competitor AI chatbot Anthropic’s Claude had 1.18 million monthly active users as of September 2023, according to Apptoppia.

    The top chatbot by revenue was Ask AI, which ranges from one week up to one year, as well as multiple tiers, like “premium” and “elite.”

    Other successful generative AI apps with lots of downloads, as shown in the graphics, are Character AI, Chai, Open Chat, Nova, ChatBot, AI Mirror, Imagine, Artimind, and ChatBox.
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  • Google Introduced Its Multimodal Technology ‘Gemini’ and Added It to Bard

    Google Introduced Its Multimodal Technology ‘Gemini’ and Added It to Bard

    IBL News | New York

    Google introduced yesterday its long-awaited answer to ChatGPT, a multimodal, natively designed, and pre-trained AI technology with reasoning capabilities named Gemini.  

    While other multimodal offerings — meaning it can analyze text, audio, video, images, and code —  exist, Gemini was described by Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai as the company’s “most capable and general model yet.”

    “Our first version, Gemini 1.0, is optimized for different sizes: Ultra, Pro, and Nano.”

    Demis Hassabis, CEO and Co-Founder of Google DeepMind, explained that “Gemini Ultra’s performance exceeds current state-of-the-art results on 30 of the 32 widely-used academic benchmarks used in large language model (LLM) research and development.”

    “This makes it especially good at explaining reasoning in complex subjects like math and physics.”

    Gemini can understand, explain, and generate high-quality code in Python, Java, C++, and Go. “Its ability to work across languages and reason about complex information makes it one of the leading foundation models for coding in the world,” said Demis Hassabis.

    Google said that Gemini 1.0 was now rolling out across a range of its products and platforms.

    For example, the chatbot Bard was upgraded with Gemini Pro, while Gemini Ultra will applied early next year in a new experience called Bard Advanced.

    Google was also bringing Gemini to Pixel. Pixel 8 Pro will be engineered to run Gemini Nano, powering new features like Summarize in the Recorder app and rolling out in Smart Reply in Gboard, starting with WhatsApp.

    In the coming months, Gemini will be available in more of our products and services like Search, Ads, Chrome, and Duet AI.

    Starting on December 13, developers and enterprise customers will be able to access Gemini Pro via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio or Google Cloud Vertex AI.

    (Google AI Studio is a free, web-based developer tool to prototype and launch apps quickly with an API key.)
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    A chart showing Gemini Ultra’s performance on common text benchmarks, compared to GPT-4 (API numbers calculated where reported numbers were missing).

    A chart showing Gemini Ultra’s performance on multimodal benchmarks compared to GPT-4V, with previous SOTA models listed in places where capabilities are not supported in GPT-4V.

     

    • The New York Times: Google Updates Bard Chatbot With ‘Gemini’ A.I. as It Chases ChatGPT

  • Hollywood Studios Will Request Consent Before Making Digital Replicas of Actors

    Hollywood Studios Will Request Consent Before Making Digital Replicas of Actors

    IBL News | New York

    After its tentative agreement with Hollywood studios, the SAG-AFTRA union revealed how studios will handle AI replicas of living and dead actors and how this generative technology will impact the industry for decades.

    According to the deal, companies must request consent before making digital replicas of actors, disclosing what those replicas will be used for. Actors will also receive compensation for the digital replicas.

    The rules will also apply to deceased actors. Heirs or beneficiaries must consent first.

    Regarding synthetic fakes, or fake performers who are based on the image and likeness of an actor, SAG-AFTRA will be notified, having the right to bargain for fair pay.

    It’s expected that Hollywood film and TV production will resume in January 2024, following months of disruption with a 118-day strike.

    “It allows the industry to go forward. It does not block AI, but it makes sure that performers are protected, the rights of consent are protected, the rights to pay compensation, and the rights of employment are protected,” said the Union, which hosts 160,000 members.

    In October, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) also officially ended its strike after ratifying a three-year deal with AI terms approved.

    It was agreed that AI cannot be considered a writer within TV and film projects, and AI-generated material is not considered literary material or assigned material.

    On the other hand, writers were given the option to choose to use AI if they pleased, but could not be forced to use AI software by a company.

    The deal also stipulated that if anything is written by AI, then the company must notify the writer in advance.
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  • Amazon Will Train on AI Skills 2 Million Workers by 2025

    Amazon Will Train on AI Skills 2 Million Workers by 2025

    IBL News | New York

    Amazon announced “AI Ready”, a new program to train two million workers globally by 2025 in artificial intelligent skills as the company is falling behind rivals on generative AI.

    The “AI Ready” initiative is in addition to AWS’s commitment to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to provide free cloud computing skills training to 29 million people by 2025, which has already trained more than 21 million people.

    The giant said that workers with AI skills to earn up to 47% more in salaries.

    Currently, hiring AI-skilled talent is a priority among 73% of employers but three out of four who consider it a priority can’t find the AI talent they need.

    The three new initiatives are:

    • Eight new and free AI and generative AI courses, ranging from foundational to advanced.
    • Amazon Web Services (AWS) Generative AI Scholarship, providing $12 million in  scholarships to 50,000 high school and university students globally with access to a new generative AI course on Udacity.
    • New Hour of Code Dance Party: AI Edition collaboration with Code.org designed to help students learn about generative AI.During this hour-long introduction to coding and AI, students will create their own virtual music video set to hit songs from artists including Miley Cyrus, and Harry Styles.

      “Students will code their virtual dancer’s choreography and use emojis as AI prompts to generate animated backgrounds. The activity will give participants an introduction to generative AI, including learning about large language models and how they are used to power the predictive analytics responsible for creating new images, text, and more,” said Amazon.

      Hour of Code will take place globally during Computer Science Education Week, December 4–10, engaging students and teachers in kindergarten through 12th grade.

      Additionally, AWS is providing up to $8 million in AWS Cloud computing credits to Code.org, which runs on AWS, to further support Hour of Code.

    The above mentioned courses for business and nontechnical audiences are available on AWS Educate and AWS Skill Builder. Participants can also learn how to use CodeWhisperer, Amazon’s AI code generator, which produces whole lines of code.

    Courses for developers and technical audiences are:

    A photo of a laptop device on a table that shows part of the tool for Hour of Code Dance Party: AI Edition.