Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

GSV Ventures, the venture capital that organizes with ASU (Arizona State University) the ASU+GSV annual summit, announced its 2023 selection of the growth companies in the learning and workforce skills arena.

“The list recognizes the top 150 private companies across Pre-K to Gray digital learning and workforce skills driving growth, innovation, and impact in the industry,” stated a press release.

GSV said it evaluated over 4,000 venture capital and private equity-backed private to determine this year’s list. Several factors were evaluated — revenue scale, revenue growth, user reach, geographic diversification, and margins profile.

The top 150 companies reach roughly 3 billion people and generate approximately $25 billion in revenue.

The ASU+GSV annual summit, scheduled in San Diego on April 17-19, 2023, will host a welcoming party for those 150 companies and CEOs. Over 5,300 people attended in April the 2022 summit.

IBL News | New York

Amazon’s AWS, the largest provider of cloud computing services, will sell access to multiple large language models, allowing companies to pick their own software and models.

Among the pre-trained models AWS is making available through its program are ones made by Anthropic, Stability AI, and AI21 Labs.

Also, AWS’s language model, called Titan FM, is included.

Amazon Bedrock is the name of this service which is aimed at large enterprise customers. No formal pricing has been announced yet.

The company says it wants to act as a neutral platform for businesses that want to incorporate generative AI features.

By not being tied to any one AI startup, as Microsoft and Google are doing, AWS is marketing itself as the Switzerland of the cloud giants.

AWS‘s path seems will be avoiding a major investment in an outside AI company or consumer-facing tools.

AWS said its AI would be more suited for businesses because it can be trained only on a customer’s data and internal documents rather than the set of webpages from other models.

“That could make it a safer choice for businesses that are nervous their private data could end up shared and mixed up with other companies, Adam Selipsky, chief executive of Amazon Web Services,” said in an interview at The Wall Street Journal today.

Another feature the company is pushing is CodeWhisperer, which generates and fixes computer code. It will compete directly with Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, which uses generative AI. Previously Amazon had made CodeWhisperer available only to a small number of users.

IBL News | New York

Databricks released yesterday an improved version of its open-source, free-to-commercialize, large language model (LLM) with 12 billion parameters, called Dolly 2.0.

Based on the EleutherAI pythia model family, Dolly 2.0 has been “fine-tuned exclusively on a new, high-quality human-generated instruction following dataset, crowdsourced among Databricks 5,000 employees during March and April of 2023.,” according to the company.

“We are open-sourcing the entirety of Dolly 2.0, including the training code, the dataset, and the model weights, all suitable for commercial use. This means that any organization can create, own, and customize powerful LLMs that can talk to people, without paying for API access or sharing data with third parties.”

Under the licensing terms (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License), anyone can use, modify, or extend this dataset for any purpose, including commercial applications.

IBL News | New York

The top 10 AI mobile apps have already pulled in over $14 million to date, according to analytics provider data.ai.

These apps are mostly dubious ChatGPT apps claiming to be associated with OpenAI in order to charge hefty subscription prices for accessing ChatGPT — a service that’s been free via the web.

This phenomenon is an indication of how much ground OpenAI has ceded in the mobile app market by not having its own official mobile app available.

For the most part, none of this group of apps are trying to establish their own brand and identity. Instead, they’re keyword-stuffing their apps’ titles to match the search terms of people who are looking for ChatGPT or similar, which are mostly “AI,” “Chat,” or “Chatbot” and “Assistant” will help drive.

The majority of the top 10 apps saw little consumer spending before ChatGTP’s addition, in December 2022.

The only exception is the app Pixelcut AI Photo Editor, a “magic writer” copywriter tool that uses GPT. Its creator AI Photo Editor generated $19.8 million in 2022.

In addition to Pixelcut, the other nine earning apps are: Genie – AI Chatbot; AI Chat – Chatbot AI Assistant; AI Chatbot – Open Chat Writer; Apo – AI Personal Assistant; Chat AI Bot – Writing Assistant; ChatOn – AI Chatbot Assistant; AI Chat – Ask Anything; Chat AI – Ask Anything; and GoatChat.

Of these, Genie has generated the most revenue this year, with $3.2 million in global consumer spending so far in 2023.

IBL News | New York

AI PowerPoint-style storytelling startup Tome recently raised $43 million in Series B funding.

Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round while individual investors included Coatue, Greylock, Stability.ai CEO Emad Mostaque, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

While still in a pre-revenue stage, the company is now valued at $300 million post-investment, up from $175 million at its 2021 Series A round, according to an article in Forbes.

San Francisco-based Tome says it’s the fastest productivity software maker to ever reach one million users since its September release.

Tome’s AI software rethinks the PowerPoint system organizing almost real-time presentations in PowerPoint or Google Slides, with slides organized by a table of contents.

“We set out to build a company that can help anyone tell a compelling story,” the Cofounders of the company, Keith Peiris and Henri Liriani, said. “Storytelling is the elementary building block of productivity for humanity, from cave drawings to stories around the fire to PowerPoint.”

Tome uses large-language models to make queries behind the scenes to fulfill a user’s presentation prompt. First, its software generates an output framework; next, smaller queries fill out images and text. Users can then fine-tune the results or ask the AI to generate more pages via additional prompts.

Tome plans to charge about $10 per user for a monthly subscription when it rolls out its enterprise version this year.

Three decades after its debut, PowerPoint is still a force. Microsoft has invested heavily in OpenAI with a plan to integrate its models across its products. Collaboration software unicorns like Canva, Coda, and Notion are currently announcing AI features on their products.

It was fun showing @alexrkonrad what @magicaltome will be able to do in the (not far) future, like generating proposals based on learning your internal material, and offering increasingly insightful advice on how to craft a powerful story.

Check it out:https://t.co/h1PkRm5N5o

— Henri Liriani (@hliriani) February 22, 2023

The most valuable skill in business is about to become obsolete.

Designing a killer slide deck used to take days. Now AI can do it in seconds for anyone.

Introducing Gamma: your AI design partner for presenting ideas beautifully.

Launching today at https://t.co/HrkL4w2vG7 pic.twitter.com/eYpNyn0zpu

— Grant Lee (@thisisgrantlee) March 28, 2023

IBL News | New York

AI startup Anthropic aims to raise $5 billion over the next two years to take on rival OpenAI and enter over a dozen major industries, according to TechCrunch.

Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers as a public benefit corporation, Anthropic says in a pitch for Series C fundraising says that it requires a billion dollars in spending over the next 18 months to build a model with tens of thousands of GPUs, ten times more capable than today’s most powerful AI.

This model — which would be a successor to Claude, Anthropic’s current chatbot — is described as a “next-gen algorithm for AI self-teaching,” making reference to an AI training technique it developed called “constitutional AI,” which aligns with human intentions.

“These models could begin to automate large portions of the economy,” the pitch deck reads.

Other competing startups are Cohere and AI21 Labs in the AI systems space.

Google is also among Anthropic’s investors, having pledged $300 million in Anthropic for a 10% stake.

Other Anthropic backers include James McClave, Facebook and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and founding Skype engineer Jaan Tallinn.

IBL News | New York

Silicon Valley–based maker of a dedicated AI computer and the world’s largest computer chip, Cerebras Systems released a series of seven GPT large language models (LLMs), methodology, training weights, and a recipe for open use via the permissive industry-standard Apache 2.0 license. This solution, called Cerebras-GPT, means that these models can be used for research or commercial ventures without royalties.

The company used non-Nvidia GPU-based systems to train LLMs up to 13 billion parameters. All seven models were trained on the sixteen CS-2 systems in the Cerebras Andromeda AI supercomputer using the Chinchilla formula.

“These are the highest accuracy models for a computing budget and are available today open-source,” said the company.

In a first among AI hardware companies, Cerebras researchers trained a series of seven GPT models with 111M, 256M, 590M, 1.3B, 2.7B, 6.7B, and 13B parameters.

“Typically a multi-month undertaking, this work was completed in a few weeks thanks to the incredible speed of the Cerebras CS-2 systems that make up Andromeda, and the ability of Cerebras’ weight streaming architecture to eliminate the pain of distributed computing. These results demonstrate that Cerebras’ systems can train the largest and most complex AI workloads today.”

• “The training weights provide a highly accurate pre-trained model for fine-tuning. By applying a modest amount of custom data, anyone can create powerful, industry-specific applications with minimal work.”

• “The models’ various sizes and their accompanying checkpoints allow AI researchers to create and test new optimizations and workflows that broadly benefit the community.”

Traditional LLM training on GPUs requires a complex amalgam of pipeline, model, and data parallelism techniques. Cerebras’ weight streaming architecture is a data-parallel-only model that requires no code or model modification to scale to arbitrarily large models.

“We’ve worked to make this task easier with releases such as the Pile and the Eval Harness, and we are very excited to see Cerebras build on our work to produce a family of open models that will be useful to researchers around the world,” said Stella Biderman, Executive Director at EleutherAI.

All seven Cerebras-GPT models are available on Hugging Face and Cerebras Model Zoo on GitHub. The Andromeda AI supercomputer used to train these models is available on-demand in this URL.

Cerebras published a technical blog post with the details of the seven models and the scaling laws that they produce. A research paper will be released shortly.

The company posted not just the programs’ source, in Python and TensorFlow format, but also the details of the training regimen by which the programs were brought to a developed state of functionality.

Currently, a handful of companies hold the keys to LLMs. OpenAI is closed, with GTP-4 operating as a black box for the public. Meta’s LLAMA is closed to for-profit organizations, and Google is closed to a varying degree.

Cerebras, echoing the researchers’ community, says that AI needs to be open and reproducible for it to broadly benefit humanity.

🎉 Exciting news! Today we are releasing Cerebras-GPT, a family of 7 GPT models from 111M to 13B parameters trained using the Chinchilla formula. These are the highest accuracy models for a compute budget and are available today open-source! (1/5)

Press: https://t.co/Ltw02PjDQF

— Cerebras (@CerebrasSystems) March 28, 2023

• ZDNet: AI pioneer Cerebras opens up generative AI where OpenAI goes dark

You can now clone ChatGPT!

OpenAI didn’t open-source its models, so we don’t know much behind the scenes.

But the first complete end-to-end model pipeline was just released, and it’s the most practical open-source project resembling ChatGPT.

Here are the details:

— Santiago (@svpino) March 29, 2023

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