IBL News

Author: IBL News

  • edX Launches a Career Resource Center and an AI MicroBootCamp Program

    edX Launches a Career Resource Center and an AI MicroBootCamp Program

    IBL News | New York

    2U’s edX announced this month the launch of a free online career resource center to help learners find professional opportunities, career tips, tools, and advice from industry experts and alumni.

    This Career Resource Center features career-specific skill identification, personalized course recommendations, resume-building tools, job search assistance, and access to industry events.

    The hub offers insightful articles by career and industry experts to help learners master the complexities of job searching.

    “Our aim is not just to help people thrive in their present roles but also to help them build the confidence to navigate new sectors and technologies and unlock exciting professional opportunities,” said Anant Agarwal, Founder of edX and Chief Platform Officer at 2U.

    In addition, this month, edX has announced a groundbreaking, intensive 10-week micro boot-camp program in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence MicroBootCamp, starting in July 2023.

    This program is developed in partnership with twelve leading universities: Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, Southern Methodist University, The Ohio State University College of Engineering, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, University of Denver, University of Kansas Jayhawk Global, University of Central Florida, University of New Hampshire Professional Development & Training, University of Richmond).

    “In addition to the Machine Learning and AI MicroBootCamp program, six new ChatGPT open courses are now available on edX.org, giving millions of people worldwide the opportunity to learn about utilizing one of the world’s fastest-growing applications. Courses, which are free to audit, include Prompt Engineering Advanced ChatGPT and ChatGPT for education, business, healthcare, and technology, coding, and data,” said Anant Agarwal.

    [Disclosure: These ChatGPT courses have been developed in partnership with IBL Education, the parent company of IBL News]

     

  • Educause Advises Higher Ed Institutions to Incorporate AI Tools

    Educause Advises Higher Ed Institutions to Incorporate AI Tools

    IBL News | New York

    Higher education institutions need to plan for how to leverage AI in a way that improves efficiency and promotes learning, creativity, innovation, and growth, as these tools, which are becoming mainstream, help streamline workflows, address enrollment challenges, generate content, and impact the teaching and learning experience.

    This is one of the main findings of EDUCAUSE’s recently released 2023 Teaching and Learning Edition Annual Horizon Report, which advises institutions to plan for AI.

    Kathe Pelletier, director of the Educause Teaching and Learning Program, noted: “With the new capabilities in content generation and the operational efficiencies afforded by these technologies, higher education might find AI to be not only an opportunity for more freedom and time to focus on the most important aspects of education but also a potential competitor vying for some of the same core functions and human activities that make up the foundations of higher education.”

    In its analysis of trends, technologies, and upcoming practices in higher ed, EDUCAUSE notes that it won’t be a dichotomy between online and face-to-face learning, as learning experiences often incorporate both.
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  • Fast-Moving Open-Source LangChain Became the Trendiest Framework for AI

    Fast-Moving Open-Source LangChain Became the Trendiest Framework for AI

    IBL News | New York

    LangChain, the fast-rising, open-source application for LLMs, is the trendiest web framework of 2033 and is moving fast, becoming the trendiest web framework of 2023.

    Its primary use case is to build chat-based applications on top of LLMs, especially ChatGPT, and chat over documents.

    LangChain started out as a Python tool in October 2022. In February added TypeScript support, and by April 2024, it supported multiple JavaScript environments, including Node.js, browsers, Cloudflare Workers, Vercel/Next.js, Deno, and Supabase Edge Functions.

    The creator, Harrison Chase, who was studying at Harvard University, has created his own start-up. Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer, Kevin Scott, classified LangChain as part of the orchestration layer in its “Copilot technology stack” for developers.

    Microsoft has its own tool, Semantic Kernel, that does a similar thing to LangChain. It also announced a new tool called Prompt Flow, which Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said was “another orchestration mechanism that actually unifies LangChain and Semantic Kernel.”
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  • JPMorgan Chase Is Developing ‘IndexGPT,’ an AI Stock Picker and Financial Advisor

    JPMorgan Chase Is Developing ‘IndexGPT,’ an AI Stock Picker and Financial Advisor

    IBL News | New York

    JPMorgan Chase is creating a ChatGPT-like tool to help investors pick stocks that can displace financial advisors’ roles in the markets.

    Last month, the bank applied to trademark a product called IndexGPT that will use AI for “analyzing and selecting securities tailored to customer needs,” according to the filing.

    IndexGPT might also be used for insurance and financial services, funds investment, and in everything from advertising to marketing services to clerical and administrative tasks.

    Wealth management firms, including Morgan Stanley and Bank of America’s Merrill, offer simple Robo-advisor services, but that hasn’t stopped their human advisors from gathering billions of dollars more in assets.

    JPMorgan Chase, which employs 1,500 data scientists and machine-learning engineers, is testing “a number of use cases” for GPT technology, said global tech chief Lori Beer.

    “We’re already using it to do risk, fraud, marketing, prospecting—and it’s the tip of the iceberg. To me this is extraordinary,” CEO Jamie Dimon said.

    IndexGPT isn’t JPMorgan’s first move into AI. In April, the company’s economists began using an AI model that analyzes Federal Reserve communications to help predict the central bank’s next moves.

    Other big investment banks have also begun testing AI products recently. In March, Morgan Stanley announced that it was developing tools to help its wealth managers sift through and better understand the investment bank’s mountain of research on the economy and markets.

    In a similar move, in April, Goldman Sachs indicated it was creating its own “ChatGS” to help financial advisors sort through data and better serve clients.

     

    https://youtu.be/9wmsHSX51SU

  • Morgan Stanley Will Use Generative AI to Allow Personnel Locating Relevant Information on Wealth Management

    Morgan Stanley Will Use Generative AI to Allow Personnel Locating Relevant Information on Wealth Management

    IBL News | New York

    Wealth management bank Morgan Stanley disclosed that it has implemented OpenAI’s GPT-4 model into an internal chatbot, which uses embeddings and retrieval capabilities.

    Over 200 employees are querying the system on a daily basis to obtain the insight they need and enable them to assist clients more quickly.

    Morgan Stanley currently maintains a content library and papers, largely in PDF form, across many internal sites, with hundreds of thousands of pages of knowledge and insights. This vast amount of information, largely in PDF form, spans investment strategies, market research and commentary, and analyst insights.

    Its personnel is required to scan through this library to find answers to specific questions in a time-consuming and cumbersome search.

    “The model effectively unlocks the cumulative knowledge of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management,” says Jeff McMillan, Head of Analytics, Data & Innovation, whose team is leading the initiative.

    “Think of it as having our Chief Investment Strategist, Chief Global Economist, Global Equities Strategist, and every other analyst around the globe on call for every advisor, every day. We believe that is a transformative capability for our company,” he added.

    GPT4 accesses, processes, and synthesizes the info. It’s being trained on vast amounts of text on the internet and builds relationships between words, sentences, concepts, and ideas.

    In addition to having trained GPT-4 for its internal chatbot, the wealth management firm is also evaluating additional OpenAI technology to enhance and streamline follow-up client communications.
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  • OpenAI Releases New GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4 Versions and Reduces Pricing by 25%

    OpenAI Releases New GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4 Versions and Reduces Pricing by 25%

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI released yesterday the new GPT-3.5 turbo and GPT-4 versions that include a new “function calling” feature.

    The San Francisco – based startup also reduced the pricing of the original GPT-3.5-turbo by 25%, as the competition in the generative AI space is growing fierce.

    “All of these models come with the same data privacy and security guarantees we introduced on March 1 — customers own all outputs generated from their requests, and their API data will not be used for training,” said the company.

    The “function calling” feature allows for a more reliable connection to GPT’s capabilities with external tools and APIs. It’s basically like ChatGPT Plugings but for your own code.

    Developers can now describe functions to gpt-4-0613 and gpt-3.5-turbo-0613 and have the model intelligently choose to output a JSON object containing arguments to call those functions.

    For example, developers will be able to:

    • Create chatbots that answer questions by calling external tools (e.g., ChatGPT Plugins)
    • Convert natural language into API calls or database queries
    • Extract structured data from text

     

  • Cohere, which Creates Cloud-Agnostic LLMs, Raised $270M, with Nvidia and Oracle as Investors

    Cohere, which Creates Cloud-Agnostic LLMs, Raised $270M, with Nvidia and Oracle as Investors

    IBL News | New York

    Generative AI startup Cohere, which is developing a model ecosystem for the enterprise, raised $270 million as part of its series C round. A mix of VC and strategic investors, including Nvidia, Oracle, and Salesforce Ventures, among others, participated in the round.

    This Toronto – based company has raised a total of $445 million to date. Only OpenAI ($11.3 billion) and Anthropic ($450 million) have raised more, ahead of rivals Inflection AI ($225 million) and Adept ($415 million). This influx of money has resulted in a valuation of around $2.1 billion, according to Bloomberg.

    Founded in 2019 and with a workforce of 180 employees, Cohere builds, trains, and customizes large language models for enterprise customers. Corporations can use their proprietary data models — which can be expensive to train — to do things like summarize customer emails or help write website copy.

    Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said of Cohere, “Their service will help enterprises around the world harness these capabilities to automate and accelerate.”

    Cohere’s platform is cloud agnostic, allowing companies to use their preferred cloud provider to increase data privacy and make implementation simpler.

    The platform can be deployed inside public clouds (e.g., Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services), a customer’s existing cloud, virtual private clouds, or on-site.

    The startup works with companies like Jasper and HyperWrite for copywriting generation tasks like creating marketing content, drafting emails, and developing product descriptions. Also, it collaborates with LivePerson, the conversational marketing company, to build fine-tuned LLMs to improve explainability, as well as with several news outlets.

    Cohere said it sees “search and retrieval” as the next core area of growth, so models or chatbots have the ability to expand on their knowledge base and search the web for information that’s relevant to a query.

    The President and COO, Martin Kon, told TechCrunch: “Today, chatbots don’t have access to the world. They don’t know about what happened ten minutes ago. They have to memorize everything within themselves, and they only have a memory of what they saw during training. With search and retrieval, you can require a model to cite sources, so users don’t need to blindly trust a model; everything links out to a site that you can verify and fact-check.”

    Cohere plans to build additional models that can take action and work for customers, like booking a flight, scheduling a meeting, or filing an expense report on a person’s behalf. In that way, it’s chasing after competitors like Adept, Inflection, and OpenAI, all of which are building systems to connect AI with third-party apps, services, and products.

  • A Virtual Romantic Partner Chatbot Named CarynAI Attracts Thousands of Users

    A Virtual Romantic Partner Chatbot Named CarynAI Attracts Thousands of Users

    IBL News | New York

    CarynAI, an AI clone of a 23-years-old Snapchat influencer named Caryn Marjorie, has become a profitable voice-based chatbot that bills itself as “the first influencer transformed into AI: your virtual girlfriend.” People pay $1 per minute for a relationship with the chatbot. In one week, the project has already generated $71,610 in revenue.

    CarynAI was launched as a private, invite-only test on the Telegram app. Today, it claims to have 20,534 members, accepting new users at random. The bot — “just an extension of me an extension of my consciousness,” says Caryn Marjorie — engages through secure and private messaging.

    “Whether you need somebody to be comforting or loving, or you just want to rant about something that happened at school or at work, CarynAI will always be there for you,” said the real Marjorie to Fortune magazine.

    CarynAI is the first romantic companion avatar from AI company Forever Voices, which has made chatbot versions of Steve Jobs, Taylor Swift and Donald Trump, among others, that are similarly available for pay-per-minute conversations on Telegram.

    CarynAI promises to create a real emotional bond with users as a romantic partner, raising all sorts of ethical questions.

    Forever Voices developers’ built CarynAI by analyzing 2,000 hours of Marjorie’s now-deleted YouTube content to build her speech and personality engine.

    CarynAI could bring in $5 million per month, assuming that 20,000 members of Marjorie’s 1.8 million-person Snapchat following will become paying and regular subscribers. Today, Marjorie makes around $1 million annually from the Snapchat’s revenue sharing program.

    Forever Voices hopes to raise venture capital funding to expand the AI companions concept to more social media influencers and to adult film stars.

    CarynAI brings to mind the 2013 movie Her, in which  the male protagonist falls in love with his virtual assistant.

  • Adobe Brings Firefly to Enterprise Ensuring that Generated Images Are Commercially Safe

    Adobe Brings Firefly to Enterprise Ensuring that Generated Images Are Commercially Safe

    IBL News | New York

    Adobe announced this week that it is bringing its Firefly image generator and Adobe Express design app—previously called Adobe Spark—to its enterprise customers.

    The announcement comes two weeks after Adobe integrated Firefly into Photoshop. Adobe is moving quickly to integrate the new generative AI capabilities across its product portfolio.

    The software giant has bet on the fact that Firefly is producing commercially safe images  from its stock marketplace.

    Adobe is so confident in Firefly’s ability to respect creators’ copyrighted images that it’ll legally compensate businesses if they’re sued for copyright infringement over any images its tool creates. This is what Claude Alexandre, VP of Digital Media at Adobe, said at the company’s flagship summit event.

    The Firefly model is trained on stock images for which Adobe already holds the rights, as well as on openly licensed content (for example, Creative Commons images) and public-domain content.

    In addition to these Firefly announcements, Adobe has also launched a number of other generative AI-powered services as part of its Sensei GenAI platform, which focuses on text and data-centric models.

    In this regard, Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Journey Optimized include a generative AI-based marketing copy generator (currently in beta) that will allow brands to edit, rephrase, and summarize their text while producing SEO-ready content. Brands can tune the model with their own data.

    Users of Customer Journey Analytics will now be able to use natural language queries to analyze their data, and the service can automatically caption charts and graphs.

    Adobe says it’s already working with hundreds of brands, including Mattel, IBM, and Dentsu, to help them adopt these AI-powered tools.

  • Bard, Google’s AI model, Improves by 30% in Answering Math and Coding Prompts

    Bard, Google’s AI model, Improves by 30% in Answering Math and Coding Prompts

    IBL News | New York

    Google’s Bard included this week an improvement in math and programming and added export action to Google Sheets, the company in a blog-post.

    “Bard is getting better at mathematical tasks, coding questions and string manipulation,”
    due to a new technique called “implicit code execution”, which helps the AI assistant detect computational prompts and run code in the background.

    “So far, we’ve seen this method improve the accuracy of Bard’s responses to computation-based word and math problems in our internal challenge datasets by approximately 30%,” said Jack Krawczyk, Product Lead at Bard. However, “Bard won’t always get it right.”

    Google explained that LLMs are like prediction engines. When given a prompt, they generate a response by predicting what words are likely to come next in a sentence. That makes them extremely capable on language and creative tasks, but weaker in areas like reasoning and math. “In order to help solve more complex problems with advanced reasoning and logic capabilities, relying solely on LLM output isn’t enough.”

    When given a prompt, they generate a response by anticipating what words are likely to come next in a sentence. That makes them exceptionally good email and essay writers, but somewhat error-prone software developers.

    Google also recently added support for new languages, multimodal queries and image generation.

    A GIF showing the Bard interface. Bard is asked to “reverse the word ‘Lollipop’ for me” and provides a response.