IBL News

Author: IBL News

  • AI Search with Cited Sources Perplexity Raises $25.6 Millions

    AI Search with Cited Sources Perplexity Raises $25.6 Millions

    IBL News | New York

    AI search startup, San Francisco–based Perplexity.ai, which was launched in December 2022 and reached two million monthly active users in four months, announced it raised $25.6 million in series A.

    The funding round was led by Peter Sonsini of New Enterprise Associates (Board member, Databricks) with participation from seed round investors Elad Gil (Founder, Color Health), Nat Friedman (Former CEO of GitHub), Jeff Dean (SVP, Google AI) and Bob Muglia (Former President of Microsoft), as well as new investors Susan Wojcicki (Former CEO of Youtube), Paul Buchheit (Creator of Gmail), Soleio (Designer of Messenger, Dropbox), and Databricks Ventures.

    Analysts saw remarkable the presence of six current and former AI researchers at Google.

    On its search results, the Perplexity platform offers up a new model by providing citations to every answer and allowing attribution for sources of information for verification. Recently, it released an iPhone iOS app with instant answers, cited sources, voice search, follow-up questions, and thread history.

    Since its launch, Perplexity has been releasing new features to users every week.

    The funding in Perplexity is one of the latest deals in the booming AI industry. Character.AI, also founded by former Googlers, recently raised $150 million. Adept, another AI startup, announced it had raised $350 million from investors including Spark Capital and General Catalyst.

     

  • Experimental AI Autonomous Agents Showcase their Capabilities

    Experimental AI Autonomous Agents Showcase their Capabilities

    IBL News | New York

    AI agents like Auto-GPT, AgentGPT, BabyAGI, and GodMore are the latest trend in the Large Language Models (LLMs) area, using OpenAI’s ChatGPT architecture to automate tasks.

    While ChatGPT requires a prompt for every new step, AI agents can take an overarching goal such as “grow my educational software business” and perform various tasks such as developing a sales strategy, identifying target clients, writing a video or podcast script, or building a website.

    However, these AI agents are still in development and may not always produce accurate or reliable results.

    • Auto-GPT
      Created by game developer Toran Bruce Richards, Auto-GPT is currently an open-source on GitHub, that requires to install a development environment like Docker, or VS Code with a Dev Container extension. Also, a paid API key from OpenAI is needed.
    • BabyAGI.
      It’s also available in a repository on GitHub. To use it, OpenAI or Pinecone API key and Docker software is required.
    • AgentGPT and GodMore.
      They are user-friendly applications for non developers.


    • Mashable: Auto-GPT, BabyAGI, and AgentGPT: How to use AI agents
    •     Ars Technica: Hype grows over “autonomous” AI agents that loop GPT-4 outputs
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  • OpenAI Releases the ChatGPT App for iPhone with Voice Support

    OpenAI Releases the ChatGPT App for iPhone with Voice Support

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI released the ChatGPT app for iOS smartphones in the U.S. today.

    Available on the Apple store, this free-to-use app supports voice input as it integrates Whisper, OpenAI’s open-source speech-recognition system.

    Paid ChatGPT Plus subscribers have access to GPT-4’s capabilities, early access to features, and faster response times, according to the company.

    OpenAI said that it will roll out in additional countries in the coming weeks. Also, the app for Android will came “soon”.

    ChatGPT provides the following, as stated by the company:

    • Instant answers: Get precise information without sifting through ads or multiple results.
    • Tailored advice: Seek guidance on cooking, travel plans, or crafting thoughtful messages.
    • Creative inspiration: Generate gift ideas, outline presentations, or write the perfect poem.
    • Professional input: Boost productivity with idea feedback, note summarization, and technical topic assistance.
    • Learning opportunities: Explore new languages, modern history, and more at your own pace.”

     

  • European Union’s AI Act Plans to Target American Open-Source Developers and API Access

    European Union’s AI Act Plans to Target American Open-Source Developers and API Access

    IBL News | New York

    The European Union amended AI Act on May 11th, 2023. If passed and enacted, it would ban U.S. companies such as OpenAI, Amazon, Google, and IBM from providing API access to generative AI models. This amended act would also sanction American open-source developers and software distributors, such as GitHub if unlicensed generative models became available in Europe.

    This means that any model that is made available in the European Union without first passing extensive and expensive licensing would be subject to massive fines of €20 million or 4% of worldwide revenue.

    Essentially, the European Union is threatening to sanction an important part of the American tech ecosystem by ordering large tech companies to put small businesses out of business.

    The AI Act has extraterritorial jurisdiction. If enacted, enforcement would be out of the hands of EU member states. A European government could be compelled by third parties to seek conflict with American developers and businesses.

    Open-source developers, including open-source LLMs, would have to register their “high-risk” AI project or foundational model with the government and expensive risk testing would be required. Registration will also require disclosure of data sources used, computing resources (including time spent training), performance benchmarks, and red teaming.

    APIs — meaning, third parties implementing an AI model without running it on their own hardware — would be essentially banned. That would include implementation examples like AutoGPT and LangChain.

    However, European small businesses are exempt from undergoing a stringent permitting review project before launch.

    Third parties would have the ability to file lawsuits to force a national AI regulator to impose fines.

    American experts said that “this is a deeply corrupt piece of legislation; the most likely effect of such a policy is to create a society where the elite have access to R&D models, and nobody else – including small entrepreneurs.”

     

  • Sam Altman Called on U.S. Congress to Regulate Generative AI Technology [Video]

    Sam Altman Called on U.S. Congress to Regulate Generative AI Technology [Video]

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI’s Founder and CEO, Sam Altman, testified before Congress for the first time on Tuesday, calling on U.S. lawmakers to regulate fast-advancing AI technology.

    During his hearing before the U.S. Senate subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law on Tuesday, he welcomed regulation, including independent audits, a licensing regime and system of warnings similar to nutritional labels on food.

    When asked by senators about AI’s ability to predict and influence public opinion in relation to the upcoming election, Altman [in the picture above] outlined his fears over the potential for misuse of AI spreading “interactive disinformation.”

    “These models are getting better in their ability to manipulate, persuade, provide sort of one-on-one interactive disinformation, and this is a significant area of concern,” he said.

    The hearing comes as regulators and governments around the world step up their examination of the technology, amid growing concerns about its potential abuses and crimes performed by bad actors.

    EU lawmakers last week agreed on a tough set of rules over the use of AI, including restrictions on chatbots such as ChatGPT.

    Earlier this month, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the UK competition watchdog fired warning shots at the industry.

    The FTC said it was “focusing intensely on how companies may choose to use AI technology”, while the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority plans to launch a review of the AI market.

    The US Congress is also looking into how to craft regulations to govern the technology, and plans to speak to more sources from the industry in the coming months.

    “If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong. And we want to be vocal about that. We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening,” Altman said.

    Christina Montgomery, vice-president and chief privacy and trust officer at IBM, and Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus at New York University, also testified at the hearing.

    More specifically on how the Federal Government should regulate companies like his, the CEO of OpenAI — the startup behind ChatGPT — laid out a three-point plan:

    • Form a new government agency charged with licensing large AI models, and empower it to revoke that license for companies whose models don’t comply with government standards.
    • Create a set of safety standards for AI models, including evaluations of their dangerous capabilities. For instance, models would have to pass certain tests for safety, such as whether they could “self-replicate” and “exfiltrate into the wild” — that is, to go rogue and start acting on their own.
    • Require independent audits, by independent experts, of the models’ performance on various metrics.

    Notably absent from Altman’s proposals: requiring AI models to offer transparency into their training data, as the expert witness Gary Marcus called for, or prohibiting them from being trained on artists’ copyrighted works.

    • Reuters: OpenAI chief concerned about AI being used to compromise elections

  • edX Announced Two AI Learning Assistants Built on ChatGPT

    edX Announced Two AI Learning Assistants Built on ChatGPT

    IBL News | New York

    2U’s edX.org platform announced the launch of a new edX plugin for ChatGPT Plus’ store that enables users to discover courses and programs across a library of 4,200 classes and resources — beginning with Circuits and Electronics.

    The plugin provides course recommendations, content, videos, quizzes, and links to courses.

    In addition, edX.org issued an AI-powered learning assistant called Xpert, currently in pilot. It will provide learners with real-time, personalized academic, friendly and intelligent conversational support for student success.

    “Working alongside edX’s career coaches, student success managers, tutors, and 24/7 live technical support specialists, Xpert will provide learners with an added layer of real-time, interactive guidance to support great student outcomes,” said 2U in a press release.

    New features of Xpert will be released in stages, including:

    • Academic Assistance: Learners will receive personalized assistance with coursework and assignments. They will ask the AI assistant to break down complex concepts from course material, recommend additional modules, and answer follow up questions and quizzes.
    • Course Content Summaries: Xpert will be able to generate brief summaries of video lectures and text materials, helping to maximize the time spent learning. Currently, this feature is available in MITx’s Circuits and Electronics, edX’s first MOOC.
    • Customer Service functionality: Xpert will provide clear advice and step-by-step solutions to help eliminate any technical barriers on the platform.
    • Course Discovery: As a guide and partner, Xpert will help connect learners with the best-fit program to learn the needed skills, factoring their career goals, prior experience, knowledge, and educational background.

    “By leveraging the intelligence and adaptability of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, we are creating more personalized and engaging experiences that further enable learners to achieve great academic and career outcomes,” said 2U Co-Founder and CEO Christopher “Chip” Paucek.

    “Our announcements today are just the first of many innovations edX is developing to harness the power and potential of generative AI,” he added.

     

  • OpenAI Releases a New ChatGPT Plus that Allows Web Browsing and the Use of 70+ Plugins

    OpenAI Releases a New ChatGPT Plus that Allows Web Browsing and the Use of 70+ Plugins

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI has released a new beta version of ChatGPT that allows Plus users to access the Internet and use over 70 third-party plugins. These features can be accessed through settings in the user panel.

    The addition of web browsing and plugins enhances users’ chat interface, enabling them to engage in various activities such as shopping, job searches, and checking the weather forecast.

    With the new web browsing capability, users can obtain answers related to recent topics and events.

  • Jupyter Incorporates Generative AI Into Notebooks

    Jupyter Incorporates Generative AI Into Notebooks

    IBL News | New York

    The Project Jupyter introduced its generative AI model in notebooks during the 2023 JupyterCon conference last week, in Paris, France.

    Jupyter AI provides a user-friendly way to incorporate generative models, improving productivity in JupyterLab, Jupyter Notebook, Google Colab, VSCode, and any environment where the IPython kernel runs.

    Jupyter AI also includes a conversational assistant for developers.

    In addition, it offers support for a wide range of providers and models of generative models, including AI21, Anthropic, Cohere, Hugging Face, OpenAI, SageMaker, and more.

  • Google’s Bard Unavailable in the European Union and Canada

    Google’s Bard Unavailable in the European Union and Canada

    IBL News | New York

    Google made its Bard chatbot available in 180 countries this week but noticeably not in any country of the European Union.

    At Google I/O 2023 conference, the search giant announced a massive global expansion but it avoided mentioning the EU.

    Experts speculated that it was related to the restrictive European GDPR law.

    Last month, Italy briefly banned ChatGPT over concerns that the AI couldn’t comply with the regulations.

    Google only hinted that further Bard expansions will be made “consistent with local regulations.”

    Another notable omission is Canada, which is not listed as supported at this time.

    For users in a supported region, Google Bard is now available in English with no waitlist.

  • Four Solutions to Integrate ChatGPT Bots on Websites

    Four Solutions to Integrate ChatGPT Bots on Websites

    IBL News | New York

    A WordPress free plugin, AI Engine, allows for the creation of ChatGPT-like chatbots on websites by adding a shortcode.

    An English developer living in Japan, Jordy Meow, launched this tool through its website.

    Users would need to host a WordPress-based website and an account with OpenAI.

    The Chatbot builder allows the user to provide the AI assistant with a name and a starting message.

    It also allows fine-tuning the robot as the plugin comes with a Dataset Builder used to generate a large number of questions and answers based on the website content. Data is gathered in a Google Sheet with two columns, with a minimum of 500 rows. (According to the OpenAI documentation, numbers of 3,000 and 5,000 rows are recommended. But it ultimately depends on what you’re trying to achieve.)

    Once you have your dataset, you can import it into AI Engine using the “Import File” button. You can export a CSV file from Google Sheets and use it here, but it also supports JSON and JSONL formats if you prefer. Alternatively, you can type the data manually.

    The developer has added a paid Pro version, starting at $49 per site. This functionality allows the chat to read the WordPress page that’s hosted. This way, customers can ask questions about the webpage.

    This plugin is free, although getting access to OpenAI’s server has a cost for heavily trafficked sites.

    Another approach is offered by Chatbase.co. This start-up offers an API to create chatbots trained on your data.

    In terms of productivity, Chatbot UI offers an open-source clone of OpenAI’s ChatGPT user interface. Developers can plug in their API key to use this UI with their API.


    Chatshape.com allows the implementation of an AI customer support agent from the user’s website content and adds it as a chat bubble.


    Finally, the website espanol.love uses GPT-4 to accurately translate anything into Spanish with an accent.

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