Author: IBL News

With more than 6 years of experience in building open source and Generative AI in education at scale, ibleducation.com continues to evolve its approach and services. More recently, the company became an education-focused Vertex AI integrator. They provide enterprises and academic institutions with a platform to build, train and securely customize large language models (LLMs) for interactive mentors using Google’s Vertex AI.

“The education industry only recently began understanding the value of Generative AI with open source and the opportunities it presents,” says Miguel Amigot II, Chief Technology Officer at ibleducation.com. “We’re providing the chance to build a new type of learning, mentoring, and analytics platform that gives organizations total control over their training methods, data, and more, without locking into one vendor.”

Organizations large and small, including Fortune 500 companies and leading universities institutions, use ibleducation.com to support their learners, allow educators to develop coursework, and provide engineers with a solid platform to build on.rely on it to power their learning strategies.

Recently, ibleducation.com chose to partner with Google Cloud to improve its platform and scale beyond its base of millions of users.

Harnessing the power of GenAI in education and training

ibleducation.com initially began working with Google Cloud to unify its education data strategy to drive real-time and predictive analytics.

“Google Cloud outperforms others when it comes to maintaining control over algorithms and general data governance,” says Amigot.  “We’re fortunate to be able to maintain ownership of our models while maintaining a pay-per-use pricing model. This is critical for our business. It allows our clients to avoid lower-value maintenance tasks, focus on innovation and user experience, and not worry about excessive costs.”

In the past, because of the high costs and need for AI and engineering talent to produce large language models, schools have been unable to take full advantage of open-source education technologies. Together, ibleducation.com and Google Cloud democratize access to AI-enabled tools for educators worldwide.

With a strong analytics and AI foundation, ibleducation.com has been able to personalize, translate, and create education content faster than before. This has been especially effective in improving accessibility, as automated translation and repurposing ensures those with visual and hearing impairments can interact with the content.

“Google Cloud enables us to reduce the total cost of building, running, and maintaining large language models by more than 70%,” says Amigot. “We’ve seen language model hosting costs decrease before, but nothing like this.”

Bringing AI-powered content creation to educators

Vertex AI has been especially useful in creating content, helping ibleducation.com to dramatically scale out its learning materials. Usage-based pricing mixed with an open-source model gives ibleducation.com the resources to support its users in developing evolving, valuable learning experiences to serve people worldwide.

Additionally, Google Cloud powers ibleducation.com’s Generative AI-based mentors, which provides a one-to-one learning experience to students and professionals looking for tailored skills development.

“The mission is to provide educators with a centralized system wherein they can manage everything from indexing data about customer courses to designing and facilitating UI/UX for users’ digital mentors,” says Amigot. “Google Cloud has helped us cover all of these bases.”

ibleducation.com allows users to create virtual mentors that provide personalized teaching, assess student knowledge, guide students through skills and learning paths, and offer robust learning analytics. Text-to-text and speech-to-speech interfaces can be offered over Slack, Discord, text message-based bots, web scripts, and LTI integrations.

“AI Mentor has been a very effective tool for our users because it adapts to the needs of educators and organizations very quickly,” says Amigot. “We’re seeing people use it for teaching assistance, marketing and administration, and a lot more. Vertex AI allows us to have many models for any variety of purposes.”

Looking forward, ibleducation.com is looking to continue taking personalized learning to new heights.

“From a mission standpoint, we want to expand to reach all the organizations not currently served by online education through our platform, analytics, and other AI-powered services,” says Amigot. “Our relationship with Google Cloud is instrumental in achieving our goal to democratize access to next-generation educational capabilities to more communities and organizations around the globe.”

Ready to take the next step? Join our upcoming GenAI workshop for higher education to learn how Google’s AI tools can help education institutions or explore our EdTech solutions to see how you can make education more personal, safe, and accessible with 100+ cutting-edge products.

IBL News | New York

A new wave of uncensored and unmoderated chatbots is coming online without many ethical guardrails against misinformation, false and hate content, and pornography, The New York Times described in an article.

Names like GPT4All, FreedomGPT, and WizardLM-Uncensored were created for little or no money by independent programmers or teams of volunteers.

Users can download an unrestricted chatbot on their own computers, and train it on private messages, personal emails, or secret documents without risking a privacy breach.

Volunteer programmers can develop clever new add-ons, moving faster than large companies.

IBL News | New York

AWS launched a free course about Generative AI aimed at executives this month. It’s available on the AWS Skill Builder platform and its YouTube channel.

The course includes five videos that cover the foundational elements, historical context, and use cases of the technology.

It also offers executives insights into training and reskilling needed for successful implementation.

As the vendor AI push continues, some of the top tech giants are providing courses to help address a key adoption roadblock: in-house skills.

In May and June, Google and Microsoft released no-cost AI training courses

According to a Gartner survey, seven in ten companies are investigating or exploring generative AI, while 19% are advancing pilots or are in production.

IBL News | New York

This month, accounting giant KPMG said it plans to invest $2 billion in AI and cloud services across its business lines, automatizing aspects of its tax, audit, and consultancy services over the next five years.

The investment will be conducted through an expanded partnership with Microsoft, which KPMG expects will bring in over $12 billion in revenue over five years, as the firm helps companies integrate AI into their operations.

This amount would represent about 7% of the company’s global revenue, which totaled about $34.64 billion in the year.

KPMG’s Chief Executive, Bill Thomas, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that the company isn’t looking to use technology to eliminate jobs, but rather to reskill and enhance its workforce of 265,000 employees with AI skills—for example, by moving people to new roles or offering them training.

Its U.S. unit in June laid off almost 2,000 employees, four months after cutting nearly 700 in its consulting division.

Accenture earlier this year pledged to invest $3 billion in AI over the next three years, with the bulk to be put toward staffing. The company plans to double its AI-focused army of consultants to 80,000 through a mix of hiring, acquisitions, and training.

IBL News | New York

Seven top companies on AI —Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI — voluntarily agreed to a series of asks from the White House to protect users from the risks posed by the artificial intelligence technology.

The promises, adopted after a meeting at the White House last week, consist of investments in cybersecurity, discrimination research, and a new watermarking system informing users when content is AI-generated.

Companies are expected to work on implementing these commitments immediately, although there are no consequences if they fail to live up to their promises.

However, the Biden administration is currently working on an executive order to address some of the risks posed by AI, which would take action across federal agencies and departments.

Over the last few months, the Biden administration has met with tech executives and labor and civil rights leaders to discuss AI.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have introduced legislation to regulate the tech. Some new rules limit how the Defense Department could use generative AI.

“AI could be our most spectacular innovation yet, a force that could ignite a new era of technological advancement, scientific discovery, and industrial might,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said.
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IBL News | New York

Adobe’s Firefly web service has generated a billion images and text effects on the web and in Photoshop since its launch in March, the company claimed.

The company, which is making this AI art creation tool available in twenty languages, said it was one of its most successful betas ever.

With Firefly, Adobe got into the generative AI lucrative market.

One of the key factors of the success is the fact that Adobe ensures that the images businesses create with Firefly are commercially safe because it’s trained on a corpus of images that are part of its stock imagery service.

Adobe even wrote an indemnity clause stating it will pay any copyright claims related to works generated in Adobe Firefly.

In a statement about the clause, the company specifically refers to these enterprise customers:

“With Firefly, Adobe will also be offering enterprise customers an IP indemnity, which means that Adobe would protect customers from third-party IP claims about Firefly-generated outputs.”

That means the company is prepared to pay out any claims should a customer lose a lawsuit over the use of Firefly-generated content.
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IBL News  | New York

Apple Inc. is quietly testing AI tools that could challenge OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft.

According to a report from Bloomberg, Apple has built its own framework, named “Ajax”, to create large language models that include a chatbot service that some engineers call “Apple GPT.”

Apple has yet to determine a strategy for releasing the technology to consumers but is reportedly aiming to make a significant AI-related announcement next year.

Apple’s Ajax runs on Google Cloud and was built with Google JAX, the search giant’s machine learning framework, according to Bloomberg.

Apple is leveraging Ajax to create large language models and serve as the foundation for the internal ChatGPT-style tool.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 

IBL News | New York

OpenAI started to roll out the ability for paid ChatGPT users to add preferences or requirements they’d like the chatbot to consider when generating its responses. This way, users won’t have to repeat their preferences or information in every conversation.

For example, a teacher crafting a lesson plan no longer has to repeat that they’re teaching 3rd-grade science.

Or a developer preferring efficient code in a language that’s not Python – they can say it once, and it’s understood.

“Through our conversations with users across 22 countries, we’ve deepened our understanding of the essential role steerability plays in enabling our models to effectively reflect the diverse contexts and unique needs of each person,” said OpenAI in a blog post.

IBL News | New York

This week, Microsoft announced a business-friendly version of Bing Chat with built-in privacy and security features.

It means that, according to Microsoft, chat data within Bing won’t be saved nor used to train its models.

In its announcement, Microsoft also disclosed the pricing for Copilot — its AI-powered tool that’s integrated across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams — for commercial customers, at $30 a month per user.

That’s on top of the existing Microsoft 365 subscription.

Copilot can summarize meetings, create presentations, and help tackle the email inbox, among other functionalities.

In addition, Microsoft announced that it is rolling out multimodal capabilities via Visual Search in Chat by leveraging OpenAI’s GPT-4 model.

It means that users can upload images and prompt to search the web for related content.

Bing can understand the context of an image, interpret it, and answer questions about it.

IBL News | New York

Meta announced last week a Generative AI model named CM3LEON that the company claims achieves state-of-the-art performance for text-to-image generation in high resolution. The company didn’t say whether — or when — it plans to release CM3Leon.

CM3LEON is also one of the first image generators capable of generating captions for images, laying the groundwork for more capable image-understanding models going forward, Meta says.

“What sets CM3LEON apart is its robust multimodal architecture and training. By leveraging large-scale datasets that encompass diverse textual and visual data, CM3LEON has acquired a deep understanding of the intricate relationship between words and images. This comprehensive training enables CM3LEON to generate and manipulate images with remarkable coherence and fidelity,” added the company.

Image generators like OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, Google’s Imagen, and Stable Diffusion rely on a process called diffusion to create art. In diffusion, a model learns how to gradually subtract noise from a starting image made entirely of noise — moving it closer step by step to the target prompt.

Beyond image generation and editing, CM3LEON has the ability in text tasks of summarization, translation, and sentiment analysis for a given image.

Experts forecast a near future where AI systems will seamlessly navigate the realms of comprehension, editing, and generation across various mediums, including images, videos, and text.