IBL News

Author: IBL News

  • Perplexity AI, Valued at $520 Million After Getting Support of Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Databricks

    Perplexity AI, Valued at $520 Million After Getting Support of Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Databricks

    IBL News | New York

    Perplexity — an AI-powered search engine with one million iOS and Android users and $3 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) — announced yesterday it raised $73.6 million in funding, leading to a valuation of $520 million post-money — a multiple of around 150 times its ARR.

    Established in August 2022, this San Francisco-based start-up, with a staff of 40 employees located in a co-working space, says that it plans to go after Google’s dominant position in web search.

    The funding round was led by IVP with support from Seed and Series A investors NEA, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, and Databricks, as well as new investors NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions Fund), Tobi Lutke, Bessemer Venture Partners, Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, Guillermo Rauch, Austen Allred, Factorial Funds, and Kindred Ventures, among others.

    “The times of sifting through SEO spam, sponsored links, and multiple web pages will be replaced by a much more efficient way to consume and share information,” explained Aravind Srinivas, Co-founder & CEO of Perplexity, in a blog post.

    He presents the company’s new Copilot product this way:

    “It’s an AI research assistant that has changed how we uncover information and learn more about new topics. Copilot tailors search queries with custom follow-up questions, introducing the concept of generative user interfaces. It removes the burden of prompt engineering and does not require users to ask perfectly phrased questions to get the answers they seek. This enables users to gain more relevant and comprehensive answers than other AI chatbots, traditional search engines, or research tools. Copilot has seen strong traction, especially among academics, students, and knowledge workers who rely on frequent research for their day-to-day work and needs.”

    In other words, Perplexity says that its advantage is based on using advances in AI to provide direct answers, instead of website links, in response to search queries, without some of the limitations felt by larger companies.

    “If you can directly answer somebody’s question, nobody needs those ten blue links,” Srinivas said. Google has begun rolling out a feature that provides lengthy summaries in response to some search queries.

    Microsoft has struggled to make a dent in Google’s share of the search market since it introduced a version of its Bing search engine that can act like a chatbot.

    Neeva, a search start-up that used generative AI to provide direct answers, shut down last year after it failed to gain enough traction to compete with Google.

    Perplexity maintains its index of webpages, which it combines with a mixture of AI technology it has designed itself and purchased from outside providers such as OpenAI.

    The company, still not profitable, charges $20 a month for a more powerful version of the search engine that uses GPT-4, OpenAI’s most advanced technology.
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  • Microsoft Rebrands Bing Chat into Copilot and Makes It Available for iOS

    Microsoft Rebrands Bing Chat into Copilot and Makes It Available for iOS

    IBL News | New York

    Microsoft rolled out its Copilot app on iOS and iPadOS. It’s powered by GPT-4 — the latest LLM from OpenAI — without having to pay for a subscription.

    Copilot is a rebrand of Bing Chat and it works similarly to ChatGPT, although this one runs GPT-3.5.

    In addition to letting users ask questions, draft emails, and summarize text, they can also create images with DALL-E3.

    Microsoft has also created a web experience for Copilot that’s separate from Bing.

  • Harvard University’s President Resigned After Comments About Antisemitism

    Harvard University’s President Resigned After Comments About Antisemitism

    IBL News | New York

    Harvard University’s President, Claudine Gay, resigned Tuesday after facing allegations of plagiarism and criticism over her comments about antisemitism on campus.

    Last month, during a tense congressional hearing, Dr. Gay said calls for the killing of Jews were abhorrent. She added, however, that it would depend on the context whether such comments would constitute a violation of Harvard’s code of conduct regarding bullying and harassment.

    As a result of the comments, she faced mounting pressure to step down in recent weeks. Dozens of politicians and some high-profile alumni called for her to step down over the comments.

    But nearly 700 staff members rallied behind her in a letter, and the university said she would keep her job despite the controversy.

    Claudine Gay, 53 years old, served as President for six months and was the first black person, and only the second woman, to be appointed to lead the Ivy League university. Her tenure was the shortest in its 388-year history.

    In a letter announcing her resignation, Dr. Claudine Gay said it was in the “best interests” of the university for her to step down.

    “This is not a decision I came to easily. Indeed, it has been difficult beyond words,” Dr. Gay said. She added that her resignation would allow Harvard to “focus on the institution rather than any individual”.

    Harvard is one of several universities in the U.S. accused of failing to protect its Jewish students following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October. Jewish groups have reported an alarming rise in antisemitic incidents in the U.S. since the conflict began.

    Just hours before she resigned on Tuesday, claims that Dr. Gay had failed to properly cite academic sources emerged and were published anonymously in the conservative Washington Free Beacon newspaper.

    Harvard’s board investigated the allegations of plagiarism and found two published papers that required additional citations. The board, however, said that she did not violate standards for research misconduct.

    Provost Alan M. Garber ’76, Harvard’s Chief Academic Officer, will serve as interim president effective immediately, The Harvard Gazette reported.

  • You.com Enables APIs for LLMs to Access the Internet in Real-Time

    You.com Enables APIs for LLMs to Access the Internet in Real-Time

    IBL News | New York

    You.com launched this month a set of APIs aimed to give Llama 2 and every other LLM real-time access to the internet, obtain up-to-date context, and augment questions from users.

    Most LLMs are trained on publicly available, static data scraped from public web pages, e-books, and elsewhere. That’s sufficient to get them to perform tasks from writing emails to drafting letters and essays. However, it limits the LLMs’ knowledge to the data’s time range.

    “When you ask about a recent event, like a Super Bowl score on the day of the Super Bowl, our API will search for those scores on the web, and then you can add that information, in that moment, to the LLM, and it can then use it to answer your question more accurately,” You.com CEO and founder Richard Socher told TechCrunch.

    LlamaIndex, Anthropic, and Cohere have already integrated it with their models.

    Starting at $100 per month for 14,200 API calls, You.com provides three “flavors” of API at launch: Web search, news results, and RAG (retrieval-augmented generation).
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  • Canva Will Provide Its AI-powered ‘Magic Studio’ to the Ten Campuses at UC For Free

    Canva Will Provide Its AI-powered ‘Magic Studio’ to the Ten Campuses at UC For Free

    IBL News | New York

    The University of California (UC) announced it partnered with Canva to provide all ten campuses with its new AI-powered Magic Studio for free as part of its package of Canva for Campus.

    In addition, Canva’s premium suite of visual communication and design tools will be free to students.

    The Canva for Campus Visual Suite includes documents, websites, whiteboards, data visualization tools, and Magic Studio. The company said its visual safety tools suite, Canva Shield, addresses using AI responsibly and safely.

    The rollout will be conducted in stages, starting in January 2024.

    Canva said the partnership highlights its commitment to visual tools as a learning method. Citing its 2023 Visual Economy Report that showed 94% of business leaders across every profession expect employees to have visual design skills. The company said 50 million K–12 teachers and students worldwide use Canva to teach visual literacy.

    “Our world today is a visual one. We communicate through presentations, reports, and social media,” said Van Williams, vice president of IT services at UC.
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  • OpenAI Held Talks with Major News Publishers About Licensing Their Content

    OpenAI Held Talks with Major News Publishers About Licensing Their Content

    IBL News | New York

    Major media outlets and publishers, including Gannett, News Corp, and IAC, in the U.S. have been in confidential talks with OpenAI to license their content, The New York Times reported yesterday. However, agreement on the price and terms has been elusive.

    For months, some of the biggest players in the U.S. media industry have been in confidential talks with OpenAI on a tricky issue: the price and terms of licensing their content to the artificial intelligence company.

    The curtain on those negotiations was pulled back this week when The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, alleging that the companies used its content without permission to build artificial intelligence products.

    The Times said that before suing, it had been talking with the companies for months about a deal. And it was not alone. Other news organizations — including Gannett, the largest U.S. newspaper company; News Corp, the owner of The Wall Street Journal; and IAC, the digital colossus behind The Daily Beast and the magazine publisher Dotdash Meredith — have been in talks with OpenAI, said three people familiar with the negotiations, who requested anonymity to discuss the confidential talks.

    The News/Media Alliance, which represents more than 2,200 news organizations in North America, has also been talking with OpenAI about coming up with a framework for a deal that would suit its members, a person familiar with the talks said.

  • Saudi Arabia Sets a Framework to Promote AI in Digital Education

    Saudi Arabia Sets a Framework to Promote AI in Digital Education

    IBL News | New York

    Saudi Arabia’s National eLearning Center (NeLC) launched this week a national framework to boost AI in digital education and training and foster innovation.

    This initiative aims to establish a set of guidelines, standards, and best practices for implementing AI in all educational sectors, including general, higher, vocational, and lifelong learning.

    The framework acts as a comprehensive resource for decision-makers and educational practitioners to maximize the benefits of AI.

    It emphasizes the importance of ongoing assessment and improvement while encompassing nine key dimensions: leadership, curriculum design, and content development, teaching and learning methodologies, evaluation and performance, ethical considerations and responsible use, adherence to technology standards, security and data privacy, student support mechanisms, and professional development opportunities.

    The National eLearning Center (NeLC) was established by the Council of Ministers in Saudi Arabia to enhance trust in online learning, facilitate equitable access to relevant lifelong online learning, and lead sustainable innovation in online learning to provide trusted online learning.

  • Researchers from Apple and Columbia Released an Open-Source Multimodal LLM

    Researchers from Apple and Columbia Released an Open-Source Multimodal LLM

    IBL News | New York

    In October 2023, researchers from Apple and Columbia University released the code and weights of an open-source, for research use only, multimodal LLM (MLLM). It was called Ferret and it did not receive much attention then.

    Also, recently Apple announced it made a breakthrough in deploying LLMs on iPhone and iPad, including new techniques for 3D avatars and more immersive visual experiences.

    Ferret includes the curation of “GRIT, a comprehensive refer-and-ground instruction tuning dataset including 1.1M samples that contain rich hierarchical spatial knowledge, with 95K hard negative data to promote model robustness.”

    “The resulting model not only achieves superior performance in classical referring and grounding tasks but also greatly outperforms existing MLLMs in region-based and localization-demanded multimodal chatting,” wrote the creators of Ferret.

    Interestingly, the news about Apple’s open source and local ML developments comes as both Anthropic and OpenAI are negotiating massive new funding raises for their proprietary LLM development efforts.

  • The New York Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft For Copyright Infringement on AI

    The New York Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft For Copyright Infringement on AI

    IBL News | New York

    The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, the paper reported.

    In its lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, The Times said OpenAI and Microsoft used unauthorized published work in the form of millions of articles to train their AI technologies.

    The suit calls for the companies to destroy any chatbot models and training data that use copyrighted material from The Times.

    The paper is the first major American media organization to sue the creators of ChatGPT.

    The lawsuit doesn’t claim an exact amount of money, but it holds OpenAI and Microsoft responsible for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages.” They both declined to comment on the case.

    The lawsuit could carry major implications for the news industry.

    OpenAI is now valued by investors at more than $80 billion. Microsoft has committed $13 billion to OpenAI and has incorporated the company’s technology into its Bing search engine.

    The lawsuit filed on Wednesday apparently follows an impasse in negotiations involving The Times, Microsoft, and OpenAI. In its complaint, The Times said that it approached Microsoft and OpenAI in April to raise concerns about the use of its intellectual property and explore “an amicable resolution” — possibly involving a commercial agreement and “technological guardrails” around generative A.I. products — but that the talks reached no resolution.

    The lawsuit also highlights the potential damage to The Times’s brand through so-called AI “hallucinations.” The complaint cites several cases in which Microsoft’s Bing Chat provided incorrect information that was said to have come from The Times, including results for “the 15 most heart-healthy foods,” 12 of which were not mentioned in an article by the paper.

    Microsoft has previously acknowledged potential copyright concerns over its AI products. In September, the company announced that if customers using its AI tools were hit with copyright complaints, it would indemnify them and cover the associated legal costs.

    The Times retained the law firm Susman Godfrey as its lead outside counsel for the litigation. Susman represented Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation case against Fox News, which resulted in a $787.5 million settlement in April. Susman also filed a proposed class action suit last month against Microsoft and OpenAI on behalf of nonfiction authors whose books and other copyrighted material were used to train the companies’ chatbots.

     

  • Salesforce Will Sell Best-Known Apps on AWS’ Marketplace

    Salesforce Will Sell Best-Known Apps on AWS’ Marketplace

    IBL News | New York

    Salesforce Inc. announced last month it will begin selling select products on AWS’ marketplace. The leading CRM company is seeking to expand “self-service” purchases and cut down on costs.

    Salesforce Executive Vice President Patrick Stokes said it will make it easier for its customers to integrate AWS data into Salesforce products and use generative AI tools more effectively.

    In addition, Salesforce will now support Amazon Bedrock, making it available through the Einstein Trust Layer to power AI-driven apps and workflows. In addition, Salesforce Data Cloud will expand to support data sharing across additional AWS technologies.

    The new product integrations will be available in 2024.
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