Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

Stability AI Founder and CEO Emad Mostaque stepped down from his role, the company announced on Friday. COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte were appointed as interim co-CEOs, it said in a blog post.

Mostaque’s departure comes amid an ongoing struggle at the startup that was spending a reported estimate of $8 million a month as of October 2023, according to Bloomberg, which also noted that the startup had unsuccessfully attempted to raise new funding at a $4 billion valuation.

The move followed months of tensions with major investors like Coatue Management, who called for Mostaque to step down.

Emad Mostaque [in the picture above] said that he decided to resign to fix the concentration of power on his Board as he held the most number of controlling shares.

“We should have more transparent & distributed governance in AI as it becomes more and more important. It’s a hard problem, but I think we can fix it,” he added.
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As my notifications are RIP some notes:

1. My shares have majority of vote @StabilityAI
2. They have full board control

The concentration of power in AI is bad for us all

I decided to step down to fix this at Stability & elsewhere

Will be sharing more soon

Exciting times https://t.co/rknp5lCWh4

— Emad acc/acc (@EMostaque) March 23, 2024

Backed by investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Coatue Management, Stability AI, a startup known for its image generation tool Stable Diffusion, has lost more than half a dozen key talent in recent quarters.

Recently, Stability AI released Stable Video 3D (SV3D), a gen AI video tool for rendering 3D video.

SV3D is available for commercial use with a Stability AI Professional Membership ($20 per month for creators and developers with less than $1 million in annual revenue). For non-commercial purposes, users can download the model weights from Hugging Face.

IBL News | New York

Microsoft agreed to pay Inflection AI — creator of the PI chatbot — about $650 million in a licensing deal. The software giant will make Inflection’s models available for sale on its Azure cloud service through this deal.

As part of the transaction, Microsoft is hiring the co-founder of Inflection, Mustafa Suleyman, and much of the start-up staff.

It’s like an acquisition but with some other kind of clothing to avoid antitrust regulators, experts say. “Microsoft seems to be pioneering the non-acquisition acquisition,” wrote Madeline Renbarger and Eric Newcomer.

This would be the second time Microsoft ran this sort of playbook after its still largely secret partnership with OpenAI based on funneling over $10 billion and holding a 49% stake in the non-profit company.

The deal took place on the same week the Justice Department sued Apple for allegedly monopolizing the smartphone business. U.S. antitrust regulators are also going after Google, Meta, and Amazon.
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IBL News | New York

Microsoft announced this month Copilot’s plugins similar to GPTs in the OpenAI’s GPT store.

Existing plugins include Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, OpenTable, and Shop.

These plugins use the OpenAI schema to add custom functionality to the Microsoft Copilot experience. As explained in Roadmap, a plugin consists of an API, an API specification, and a plugin manifest.

These plugins provide users with general skills such as understanding, summarizing, predicting, recalling, translating, and generating content. It indexes content in the Microsoft Graph, such as the emails, chats, and documents that users have permission to access.

Microsoft Copilot uses the following process flow when the user asks a question, and it answers the question by searching for and using a plugin.
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IBL News | New York

Amazon will release an AI feature that will allow sellers by providing a URL to easily generate high-quality product detail pages, with a written description and images tailored to the store.

The goal is to help sellers reduce the time it takes to bring the product from a different website onto Amazon, said Mary Beth Westmoreland, Amazon’s VP of worldwide selling partner experience, in a blog post.

Previously, creating product pages required significant effort from sellers to develop and input accurate and comprehensive product descriptions that attract customers.

Sellers simply upload an image of their product and use generative AI to automatically generate their product title, description, and even more product attributes. 

IBL News | New York

Since the start of this year, more than 50,000 workers have been laid off from over 200 tech companies, according to tracking website Layoffs.fyi. In addition, tech salaries have largely stagnated in the last two years.

Tech is a notable outlier in a labor market that’s been largely steady over the past two years. The U.S. economy added 275,000 jobs in February, topping 200,000 for a third straight month.

These cuts follow the trend that arose in 2023 when over 260,000 workers across nearly 1,200 tech companies lost their jobs.

In fact, 2023 was the second-biggest year of cuts in the technology sector, behind only the dot-com crash in 2001.

Moreover, February’s job cut count was the highest of any February since 2009, when the financial crisis forced companies into cash preservation mode.

IBL News | New York

Apple is reportedly in talks with Google to integrate its Gemini model into iPhone’s iOS 18 later this year. It means that powerful AI-integrated phones are arriving soon.

If negotiations result in an agreement, Google would license Gemini, and this model would enable some features on the iPhone, such as its ability to create images and write text, along with other native enhancements in those devices.

Tim Cook Apple’s CEO has promised major AI announcements at WWDC in June, though some experts say that a potential deal with Google may not be finalized by then. Apple also held previous discussions with OpenAI about using its models.

Meanwhile, OpenAI now is also reportedly in talks with Samsung.

The consensus in the tech industry is that Gemini on iOS would be a massive power play as Apple has over two billion active Apple devices.

It could also help allay investor fears about the slow roll-out of AI apps by Apple, which has lost its position as the world’s most valuable firm after a 10% decline in its shares this year.

Apple has a years-long partnership that makes Google the default search engine on Apple’s Safari web browser.

A Generative AI tie-up may help Google to navigate fears that services like ChatGPT could threaten its search dominance.

OpenAI with Samsung would be an equally compelling counter.
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IBL News | New York

Elon Musk’s xAI.com was finally released as open-source under the Apache 2.0 license — which permits commercial use — the base code of its LLM ‘Grok-1’ yesterday.

Grok-1 was released without any training code; only with the base model weights and network architecture.

According to its description, it’s “a 314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Expert model trained from scratch by xAI”, and “not fine-tuned for any specific application, such as dialogue.”

This release doesn’t include connections to the X social network.

Other large companies such as Meta and Google have also released their open-source versions. LLaMA, from Meta; Gemma2B, and Gemma7B, from Google; along with Mistral, Falcon, and A12, are some of the most popular.

Perplexity CEO Arvind Srinivas posted on X that the company will fine-tune Grok for conversational search and make it available to Pro users.
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Yep, thanks to @elonmusk and xAI team for open-sourcing the base model for Grok. We will fine-tune it for conversational search and optimize the inference, and bring it up for all Pro users! https://t.co/CGn6cIoivT

— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) March 17, 2024

IBL News | New York

Civitai.com, an online community platform where members can post their own Stable Diffusion-based AI models, reached 4 million registered users, with over 12 million unique visitors per month and 10,000 unique creators.

“We became the de facto standard for sharing your model and various AI resources and the images that you’d made,” stated the founder of the startup in an interview with TechCrunch.

As a result of its growth, Civitai raised a $5.1 million round in June led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) at a $20 million valuation.

For now, the site is free to use — it uses Cloudflare’s R2 to keep costs down around downloads.

The company plans to allow users to monetize their work and companies to expand their brands and products.
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Monthly active users on top AI sites:

ChatGPT — 200M
Gemini — 20M
CharacterAI — 13M
Poe — 11M
Perplexity — 10M
HuggingFace — 6.4M
ElevenLabs — 6.3M
Leonardo — 4.7M
CivitAI — 4.1M

Plenty of surprises here (Poe!) but its also so clear how far AI tools are from mainstream!

— Deedy (@deedydas) March 18, 2024

IBL News | New York

Coursera, which provides learning pathways to upskill users, introduced this month a business guide for acquiring skills in Generative AI. [PDF download]

This guide, titled “The Business Leader’s Playbook to Generative AI Skills Training”, features insights from leaders at Microsoft, Vanderbilt University, and Coursera.

“GenAI is a top priority for business leaders, as it promises to transform workforce productivity,” states the report.

“GenAI isn’t just a learning initiative. It’s a company and culture initiative that can supercharge talent and productivity.”

Elisa Graceffo, General Manager, Technical Content, Worldwide Learning at Microsoft, said: “AI is coming to your job; it’s not coming for your job.”

“If we can do our work more productively and focus on higher-level tasks that drive more value, then we have happier employees and more successful teams. We can reach company goals faster,” explained Trena Minudri, VP & Chief Learning Officer at Coursera.

“Employees might feel empowered to experiment and bring innovation to their discipline.”

Currently, Coursera hosts more than 35 GenAI-related courses from institutions like Microsoft, Stanford, Google Cloud, IBM, AWS, and Vanderbilt University, which have accumulated more than 570,000 enrollments.

In an effort to improve productivity, Coursera’s own employees are actively learning with the company’s GenAI Academy how to use GenAI for their roles.

According to Coursera, 89% of executives listed AI and GenAI as one of their top three tech priorities for 2024—yet two out of three (66%) executives are ambivalent or outright dissatisfied with their organization’s progress on AI/GenAI so far, citing a lack of talent and skills (62%) as their primary reason for dissatisfaction.

“This dissonance makes sense because only 19% of HR and L&D leaders are ranking AI as a top priority for them. Mindset shifts and individual AI upskilling need to happen—and fast—so that they can meet this major inflection point in the history of technology.”

“At the company level, when infused into the culture at large, GenAI can unify a company. It’s something everyone in the organization can learn, at the same time, whether it’s your financial analysts, marketing reps, sales leaders, C-suite, or software engineers. Everyone can benefit from prompt engineering and other foundational GenAI skills.”

“Move too fast, and you can hit ethical and regulatory hurdles. Move too slow, and you’ll find yourself outpaced by your competitors,” added Coursera.