Author: IBL News

GitHub Announced Its Copilot Enterprise Plans that Let Companies Customize Their Codebase

IBL News | New York

GitHub announced this week the availability of GitHub Copilot Chat in December 2023, as well as new plans for GitHub Copilot Enterprise, new AI-powered security features, and the GitHub Copilot Partner Program.

The Microsoft-owned company unveiled these advancements during its annual GitHub Universe developer conference.

Copilot Chat, which sits inside the developer’s integrated development environment (IDE), allows them to ask questions about the code they’re currently working on, including getting it to identify and propose fixes to bugs in a particular program and even provide inline feedback about specific lines of code.

It is powered by the latest OpenAI large language model (LLM) GPT-4 and is available as part of the standard Copilot subscription ($10/month for individuals and $19/month for businesses.)

The GitHub Copilot Enterprise subscription will cost $39/month and will be available from February 2024. It will include the ability for companies to personalize it for their codebase and fine-tune the underlying models.

“Just as GitHub was founded on Git, today we are re-founded on Copilot,” said the company in a blog post.
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November 11, 2023
Humane Introduced Its Wearable Device ‘Ai Pin’ After $240M In Funding and Much Hype

IBL News | New York

The San Francisco-based startup Humane, founded by two former Apple employees, showcased its bold sci-fi venture yesterday—a device named Ai Pin.

The unveiling followed five years of development, $240 million in funding, the acquisition of 25 patents, significant hype, and partnerships with top tech companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Salesforce.

Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, Humane’s husband-and-wife founders [in the picture below], envision a future with reduced dependence on screens, a departure from the ubiquity created by their former employer, Apple.

They promote the pin as the first artificially intelligent device. Control options include speaking aloud, tapping a touchpad, or projecting a laser display onto the palm of a hand.

In an instant, the device’s virtual assistant can send a text message, play a song, snap a photo, make a call, or translate a real-time conversation into another language. The system relies on AI to help answer questions and can summarize incoming messages.

Essentially, the device can follow a conversation from one question to the next without needing explicit context.

The technology is a step forward from Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, wrote The New York Times. “To tech insiders, it’s a moonshot. To outsiders, it’s a sci-fi fantasy.” “It’s a gadget that’s reminiscent of the badges worn in Star Trek.”

Humane plans to commence shipping the pins next year, expecting to sell approximately 100,000 units at a cost of $699 each, requiring a $24 monthly subscription in the first year. The pin comes with a new operating system called Cosmos and its own wireless plan. Users will need new phone numbers for the device.

“Users will need to dictate rather than type texts and trade a camera that zooms for wide-angle photos. They’ll need to be patient because certain features, like object recognition and videos, won’t be available initially. And the pin can sometimes be buggy, as it was during some of the company’s demos for The New York Times.”

“The tech industry has a large graveyard of wearable products that have failed to catch on.”

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, has invested in Humane, as well as another AI company, Rewind AI, which plans to create a necklace that records what people say and hear. He has also discussed teaming up with Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief designer, to create an AI gadget with ambitions similar to Humane’s.
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This is the Humane Ai Pin https://t.co/ytUSGF3y55 pic.twitter.com/Zrcoaf49u7

— Humane (@Humane) November 9, 2023

November 10, 2023
Elon Musk’s xAI Released an Early Version of Its LLM

IBL News | New York

Elon Musk’s xAI start-up announced this weekend its AI model, named Grok, and built with real-time knowledge as it accesses the X (formerly Twitter) platform.

“Grok is intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask,” according to the company.

Other characteristics of this tool are:

• “Designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!”

• “It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.”

• “Research and innovation-focused: We want Grok to serve as a powerful research assistant for anyone, helping them to quickly access relevant information, process data, and come up with new ideas.”

The LLM engine powering Grok is Grok-1, developed over the last four months. It’s built on a custom training and inference stack based on Kubernetes, Rust, and JAX.

This early model approaches LLaMA 2 (70B) capabilities on standard LM benchmarks but uses only half of its training resources,” said the developing team of xAI.

In terms of capabilities, Grok-1 surpassed ChatGPT-3.5 and Inflection-1. “It is only surpassed by models that were trained with a significantly larger amount of training data and compute resources like GPT-4. This showcases the rapid progress we are making at xAI in training LLMs with exceptional efficiency.”

xAI opened a waitlist to offer a limited number of users in the United States to try out our Grok prototype and provide feedback.

November 9, 2023
OpenAI Prepares the Opening of Its GPT Store

IBL News | San Francisco

In the coming weeks, by the end of November, OpenAI will release its GPTs, a platform accessible through the GPT Store, which will allow users without coding knowledge to create custom versions — or agents — of ChatGPT for all sorts of use cases.

Initiatives such as Character.AI, Meta, Replika, and Poe will face the competition of these GTP agents.

Details about how the GPT Store will look and work are scarce, though OpenAI is promising to eventually pay creators based on how much their GPTs are used. GPTs will be classified into categories like productivity, education, and “just for fun”.

GPTs will be available to paying ChatGPT Plus subscribers and OpenAI enterprise customers, who can make internal-only GPTs for their employees.

These developments were announced Monday at OpenAI’s DevDay conference in San Francisco.

There, the company also announced a cheaper, turbocharged GTP-4.

GPT creators’ apps will be monitored by OpenAI to ensure that fraud, hate speech, and adult themes are blocked.

ChatGPT has reached 100 million weekly users.

Today, OpenAI announced they are releasing the ChatGPT Store, an App Store for ChatGPT

Shopify Apps: 33,000 apps, $561M of revenue
App Store: 1.8M apps, $910B of revenue
ChatGPT Store: 0 “agents”, $0 revenue

Probably millions of agents, billions revenue soon

I wish I had… pic.twitter.com/zgwf2w07Zw

— GREG ISENBERG (@gregisenberg) November 6, 2023

🦜🤖OpenGPTs

OpenAI just announced “GPTs” – chatbots augmented with custom tools and custom instructions that anyone can create

We’re excited to announce OpenGPTs – a open source GitHub repo enabling similar functionality. This will allow:

🛠️Easier tool definition
🧠Usage of… pic.twitter.com/jgrn0boBVI

— LangChain (@LangChainAI) November 6, 2023

Advanced Data Analysis (formerly Code Interpreter) support has been added to the ChatGPT iOS app.

You now have a data scientist or data analyst in your pocket. pic.twitter.com/IjTjcb1J1k

— Adam.GPT (@TheRealAdamG) November 8, 2023

November 8, 2023
OpenAI Announced GPT-4 Turbo, GPTs, and Assistants API, Among Other Improvements [Video]
IBL News | San Francisco

OpenAI shared yesterday several new additions and improvements, including GPT-4 Turbo, an improved version of its flagship model, during its first DevDay conference in San Francisco. [OpenAI’s CEO in the picture above].

The company also introduced GPTs, which allow developers to create custom versions of ChatGPT that combine instructions, extra knowledge, and any combination of skills.

“Anyone can easily build their own GPT — no coding is required. Creating one is as easy as starting a conversation, giving it instructions and extra knowledge, and picking what it can do, like searching the web, making images, or analyzing data,” explained OpenAI.

Example GPTs are available today for ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise users, including Canva and Zapier AI Actions.

More innovations announced at DevDay included:
- New GPT-4 Turbo with a 128k context window, equivalent to more than 300 pages in text in a single prompt.GPT-4 Turbo has knowledge of world events up to April 2023.OpenAI is offering it at a 3x cheaper price for input tokens and a 2x cheaper price for output tokens compared to GPT-4.It will be a stable, production-ready model in the coming weeks.
- New Assistants API, which is intended to make it easier for developers to build their own assistive AI apps.
- New multimodal capabilities in the platform, including vision and image creation (DALL·E 3). Developers can now generate human-quality speech from text via the text-to-speech API.
- Release of Whisper large-v3, the next version of OpenAI’s open-source automatic speech recognition model (ASR)
- Open-sourcing the Consistency Decoder, a drop-in replacement for the Stable Diffusion VAE decoder.
BOOM OpenAI changes the world of app economy.

Meet GPTs user developed agents that ANYONE can make and sell in the GPTs Store. pic.twitter.com/yGRDfR6WT6

— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) November 6, 2023

OpenAI announces Assistant API, which lets developers build “assistants” in their apps that can call OpenAI generative AI models and tools to perform tasks (@kyle_l_wiggers / TechCrunch)https://t.co/z1OKEfofD4

📫 Subscribe: https://t.co/OyWeKSRpIM https://t.co/xC4vB8BidL

— Techmeme (@Techmeme) November 6, 2023

OpenAI introduces a no-code way for ChatGPT Plus subscribers to create custom AI agents for a wide range of tasks and then share them via the GPT Store (@alexeheath / The Verge)https://t.co/A58zaiecL9

📫 Subscribe: https://t.co/OyWeKSRpIM https://t.co/Fwntqmfz6z

— Techmeme (@Techmeme) November 6, 2023

A new version of ChatGPT will allow you to create your own “bot” allowing you to:

Name it.
Share it.
Produce a simple welcome message.
Samples of useful prompts.
Upload related reference files.
Define plugins and actions like web browsing, DALL-E, code interpreter. pic.twitter.com/3m33eLVJU4

— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) November 5, 2023

Official Press Release to the Media from OpenAI:

A few key stats we announced on stage as it’s been a big year for OpenAI:
- We have more than 2 million developers building on our API for a wide range of use cases.
- Over 92% of Fortune 500 are building on our products.
- And we have about 100M weekly active users on ChatGPT.
Introducing GPTs:

We’re introducing GPTs – custom versions of ChatGPT. Anyone can easily build GPTs to help with specific tasks, at work, or at home. We think GPTs take a first step towards an agent-like future. For third-party developers, we’re showing them how to build these agent-like experiences into their own apps as well. Example GPTs are available today for ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise users to try out including Canva and Zapier AI Actions.

New models and developer products announced at DevDay, including:
- ChatGPT gets a new UI.
- GPT-4 Turbo: a new model that includes longer context length, better world knowledge because we’re updating the cutoff to April 2023, and other improvements.
- New Assistants API makes it easier for developers to build their own GPT-like experiences into their own apps and services.
- New modalities to the API, including vision, DALL·E 3, and text-to-speech with six preset voices to choose from.
- Dropping the price of all of our models across the board so it’s easier for developers to build and scale on our platform.
See details in our blog posts, GPTs, and new models/products, for more info. Press images are here, and we’ll add more throughout the day.
November 7, 2023
Legal and Compliance Risks that ChatGPT Presents to Organizations, According to Gartner
IBL News | New York

The output generated by ChatGPT and other LLMs presents legal and compliance risks that every organization has to face or face dire consequences, according to the consultancy firm Gartner, Inc, which has identified six areas.

“Failure to do so could expose enterprises to legal, reputational, and financial consequences,” said Ron Friedmann, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner Legal & Compliance Practice.
- Risk 1: Fabricated and Inaccurate Answers
ChatGPT is also prone to ‘hallucinations,’ including fabricated answers that are wrong, and nonexistent legal or scientific citations,” said Friedmann.

Only accurate training of the robot with limited sources will mitigate this tendency to provide incorrect information.
- Risk 2. Data Privacy and Confidentiality
Sensitive, proprietary, or confidential information used in prompts may become a part of its training dataset and incorporated into responses for users outside the enterprise if chat history is not disabled,

“Legal and compliance need to establish a compliance framework and clearly prohibit entering sensitive organizational or personal data into public LLM tools,” said Friedmann.
- Risk 3. Model and Output Bias
“Complete elimination of bias is likely impossible, but legal and compliance need to stay on top of laws governing AI bias and make sure their guidance is compliant,” said Friedmann.

“This may involve working with subject matter experts to ensure output is reliable and with audit and technology functions to set data quality controls,” he added.
- Risk 4. Intellectual Property (IP) and Copyright risks
As ChatGPT is trained on a large amount of internet data that likely includes copyrighted material, its outputs – which do not offer source references – have the potential to violate copyright or IP protection.

“Legal and compliance leaders should keep a keen eye on any changes to copyright law that apply to ChatGPT output and require users to scrutinize any output they generate to ensure it doesn’t infringe on copyright or IP rights.”
- Risk 5. Cyber Fraud Risks
Bad actors are already using ChatGPT to generate false information at scale, like fake reviews, for instance.

Moreover, applications that use LLM models, including ChatGPT, are also susceptible to prompt injection, a hacking technique in which

A hacking technique known as “prompt injection” brings criminals to write malware codes or develop phishing sites that resemble well-known sites.

“Legal and compliance leaders should coordinate with owners of cyber risks to explore whether or when to issue memos to company cybersecurity personnel on this issue,” said Friedmann.
- Risk 6. Consumer Protection Risks
Businesses that fail to disclose that they are using ChatGPT as a customer support chatbot run the risk of being charged with unfair practices under various laws and face the risk of losing their customers’ trust.

For instance, the California chatbot law mandates that in certain consumer interactions, organizations must disclose that a consumer is communicating with a bot.

Legal and compliance leaders need to ensure their organization’s use complies with regulations and laws.
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November 6, 2023
Brave Launches ‘Leo’, Its AI Assistant Based in Llama 2 and Claude

IBL News | New York

The Brave web browser released its AI-powered assistant, Leo, to all desktop users with version 1.60.

The chatbot is intended to get questions answered, summarize pages or videos, translate text, and rewrite phrases, among other uses. The Android and iOS app is expected in the coming months.

The company is also releasing a $15 per month paid version called Leo Premium “with features like access to faster and better large language models (LLMs) and higher-rate limits.”

Users can access the Leo assistant by clicking the Leo icon in the sidebar or by typing a question in the address bar and clicking the Leo icon to get a direct answer.

Leo is based on Llama 2 and Anthropic’s Claude LLMs. While free users get the basic version of these models, paying users will get access to models like Llama 2 70B, Code Llama 70B, and Anthropic Claude Instant. These models enable faster and more accurate responses.

Brave said that all requests to Leo use an anonymous server as a proxy, so they can’t be linked back to a particular IP. Additionally, the company specified that responses are immediately discarded after generation, and not stored on any server or used to train models. Brave noted that all subscriptions are validated by unlinkable tokens, so the company can’t know about your activity or your email.

Other browsers like Opera, Microsoft Edge, SigmaOS, and Browser Company’s Arc have also introduced AI assistants in the sidebar.

Brave, which laid off 9% of its staff in October, launched in May its own search API for clients, with prices starting from $3 per 1,000 queries.

November 4, 2023
Israeli Start-Up D-ID Releases Its App that Creates Talking Video Avatars

IBL News | New York

The Israeli start-up D-ID.com launched its iOS and Android apps, which allow users to upload a still image and script and turn it into an AI-generated video.

Originally available as a web platform, this technology, a mix of proprietary and open-source software, is being used to create digital representations of people, including fictional characters, presenters, or brand ambassadors.

Like the web version, the app features premade digital characters that D-ID provides or uploads an image from the user’s phone’s photo library. The videos can be up to 10 minutes in length.

This mobile service is subscription-based, with plans starting at $5.99 per month.

“At its core lies a foundational model capable of generating video frames based on audio input. All its products are powered by its robust API with the ability to render video at an industry-leading 100 FPS, four times faster than real-time rendering,” Gil Perry, CEO of D-ID, said to TechCrunch.

D-ID, which raised a $25 million Series B last year, claims that over 150 million videos have been made using the platform.
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November 3, 2023
The Poe Chatbot Platform Offers Developers The Ability To Generate Revenue with Bots

IBL News | New York

Poe.com launched this week a revenue generation program for developers who create prompt and server bots on this chatbot platform. The service is currently available to US residents.

Developers can write code and integrate it with Poe’s API to benefit from Poe’s monetization structure.

When a bot causes a user to subscribe to Poe, the company shares a cut of the revenue they pay.

In the near future, the user will be able to set a per-message fee.

“With this latest launch, we believe we are fulfilling our goals for Poe to greatly reduce the amount of work needed for any AI developer to reach a large audience of users,” said the company.

Since last February, Poe has delivered the ability to build on top of other bots without needing to pay for access. It has also offered a variety of features, such as threading, file uploading, and image generation.

“With this, we hope Poe unlocks a thriving economy with a wide diversity of AI products. We expect all kinds of bots to do well, across areas like tutoring, knowledge, therapy, entertainment, assistants, analysis, storytelling, roleplay, and image, video, music, and other media generation. Since this is the beginning of a new market, there are lots of opportunities to provide a valuable service for the world and make money at the same time.”

Poe will host a hackathon at AGI house on 11/4 for people in the San Francisco Bay Area “to experiment with creating bots that will be monetized.”

• Poe’s Discord.

November 2, 2023
Gradient Raised $10 Million to Compete in the Custom-Tailored LLMs Segment

IBL News | New York

Gradient, a Burlingame, California – based start-up that allows developers to build and customize AI apps using LLMs, announced last month it raised $10 million in seed funding led by Wing VC, with participation from Mango Capital, Tokyo Black, The New Normal Fund, Secure Octane, and Global Founders Capital.

The Gradient platform hosts a number of open-source LLMs — including Meta’s Llama 2, which users can scale and fine-tune to their needs — and tools, such as Hugging Face, LangChain, LlamaIndex, and Pinecone.

Gradient also offers proprietary healthcare, finance, and law LLMs that customers can use to solve domain-specific problems, like data reconciliation, context-gathering, and paperwork processing.

With a workforce of 20 employees, Gradient can host and serve models through an API à la Hugging Face, CoreWeave, and other AI infrastructure providers. Or it can deploy AI systems in an organization’s public cloud environment, whether Google Cloud Platform, Azure, or AWS.

In either case, customers maintain full ownership and control over their data and trained models. Its solution is SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR compliant.

“We’ve seen that the vast majority of businesses understand the value AI can bring to their business, but struggle to realize the value due to the complexity of adoption. Our platform radically simplifies harnessing AI for a business, which is a tremendous value-add,” said the company.

Other companies that have emerged in the space of building custom-tailored LLM-powered apps that benefit from the massive influx of capital are Reka, Writer, Contextual AI, Fixie, Cohere, and LlamaIndex.

Nearly a fifth of total global VC funding this year has come from the AI sector alone. PitchBook expects the generative AI market to reach $42.6 billion in 2023.

Beyond these start-ups, OpenAI offers a range of model fine-tuning tools, as do incumbents like Google (via Vertex AI), Amazon (via Bedrock), and Microsoft (via the Azure OpenAI Service).
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Training custom GPT-4 for your organization costs around $2-3 millions and take several months 😱

Worth it? pic.twitter.com/PykduP7GZR

— Shubham Saboo (@Saboo_Shubham_) November 7, 2023

November 1, 2023