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  • Open-Source Initiatives Challenge Closed, Proprietary AI Systems With New LLMs

    Open-Source Initiatives Challenge Closed, Proprietary AI Systems With New LLMs

    IBL News | New York

    Several startups, collectives, and academics have released a wave of new large language models (LLMs) as open source, trying to challenge the closed, proprietary AI systems such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

    These private organizations, knowing that state-of-the-art LLMs require huge compute budgets — OpenAI reportedly used 10,000 Nvidia GPUs to train ChatGPT — and deep ML expertise have refused to open up their models. They rely on API distribution instead.

    The data, source code, or deep learning programming, of the model weights, remain hidden from public scrutiny.

    Open-source initiatives state that they are seeking to democratize access to LLMs.

    Two weeks ago, Databricks announced the ChatGPT-type Dolly, which was inspired by Alpaca, another open-source LLM released by Stanford in mid-March.

    Stanford’s Alpaca used the weights from Meta’s LLaMA model that was released in late February.

    LLaMA was hailed for its superior performance over models such as GPT–3, despite having ten times fewer parameters.

    Other open-source LLaMA-inspired models have been released in recent weeks, such as:

    – Vicuna, a fine-tuned version of LLaMA that apparently matches GPT-4 performance;

    – Koala, a model from Berkeley AI Research Institute;

    – ColossalChat, a ChatGPT-type model part of the Colossal-AI project from UC Berkeley.

    Some of these open-source models have even been optimized to run on the lowest-powered devices, from a MacBook Pro down to a Raspberry Pi and an old iPhone.

    However, none of these open-source LLMs are available yet for commercial use, as the LLaMA model is not released for commercial use.

    In addition, the OpenAI GPT-3.5 terms of use prohibit using the model to develop AI models that compete with OpenAI.

    In March, the free-software community Mozilla announced an open-source initiative for developing AI, saying they “intend to create a decentralized AI community that can serve as a ‘counterweight’ against the large profit-focused companies.”

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  • Elon Musk Creates His Own Generative AI Company Joining the Race for the LLMs

    Elon Musk Creates His Own Generative AI Company Joining the Race for the LLMs

    IBL News | New York

    Elon Musk has created through his family office a new company named X.AI, intended to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, Adept, and StabilityAI, and other startups in the artificial intelligence generative space.

    The billionaire entrepreneur owner of Tesla, Space X, and Twitter now plans to attract investors while seeking to recruit a team of top AI researchers and engineers.

    According to Financial Times, for the new project, Musk has secured thousands of high-powered Nvidia’s GPU processors, the high-end chips required for building a large language model.

    Elon Musk is, for now, the company’s only director. The private firm, incorporated in Nevada on March 9, lists as secretary Jared Birchall, the ex-Morgan Stanley banker who manages Musk’s wealth.

    Musk left the board of OpenAI in 2018 amid clashes with its management, including over attitudes to AI safety.

    Since then, Musk became increasingly vocal in his fears of broader existential threats from AI systems.

    He also criticized OpenAI for becoming, in his view, less transparent and too focused on commercialization in its pursuit of advanced AI.

    Musk could use Twitter content as data to train its language model and tap Tesla for computing resources. Its homegrown supercomputer, Dojo, is used to train Tesla’s Autopilot self-driving system.
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  • In the Battle of the Chatbots, Who Is More Efficient GPT-4 or Google’s Bard?

    In the Battle of the Chatbots, Who Is More Efficient GPT-4 or Google’s Bard?

    IBL News | New York

    In the battle of the chatbots between Microsoft-backed Open AI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Bard, these conversational engines are trained on websites, books, documents, and Wikipedia, to generate responses to predict the likely next word in a sentence mimicking human speech.

    Bard is trained to engage in natural-sounding dialogue while GPT-4 seeks to generate in-depth replies on a broad range of topics and has knowledge of events until September 2021, according to an analysis by Financial Times, that tested both.

    Both companies have been opaque about how their models were built.

     

  • Generative AI NOLEJ Releases Its Instructional Design Content Creator

    Generative AI NOLEJ Releases Its Instructional Design Content Creator

    IBL News | New York

    French generative AI startup NOLEJ has made its OpenAI-based instructional content generator available for educators as a free trial, with five packages.

    The AI tool can turn video, audio, and text content into micro-learning interactive videos, quizzes, and flashcards. Users can download the package as SCORM or HTML5 code, or copy the associated embed code and paste it into most websites or LMSs.

    The company reported successful testing of its GPT-3.5 version with 2,500 educators and announced a strategic collaboration with OpenAI.

    “This collaboration aims to create new tools that will enhance the learning experience even further and open up new possibilities for educators,” said Bodo Hoenen, CEO and co-founder of NOLEJ.

    Other educational companies collaborating with OpenAI include Shutterstock, Duolingo, and Khan Academy.

    Nolej AI was tested by Campus Technology’s sister publication, The Journal, for its report.
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    https://youtu.be/z7dTwxKE-v0

     

  • Coursera Will Release Its AI Chatbot Over the Coming Months

    Coursera Will Release Its AI Chatbot Over the Coming Months

    IBL News | New York

    Coursera announced this week that new generative AI features will be implemented “over the coming months.”

    “These innovations, intended to build a personalized learner experience, mark a new chapter for teaching and learning on Coursera,” said Shravan Goli, Chief Operating Officer of Coursera in a blog post. [Update: June 19, 2023] 

    • Coursera Coach: Virtual coach that answers questions and shares personalized feedback. It also provides quick video lecture summaries and resources, such as a recommended clip, to help learners better understand a specific concept. Coursera said that a pilot will be launched “in the coming months.”
    • Coursera Author: AI-powered course building features to auto-generate content, such as, overall structure, readings, assignments, and glossaries. It will help educators reduce the time and cost of producing high-quality content. A pilot launch is scheduled for “later this year.”
    • Massive translation from English into Spanish, French, German, Arabic, Portuguese, Thai, and Indonesian of 2,000+ courses, including its readings, lecture video subtitles, quizzes, assessments, peer review instructions, and discussion prompts.
    • In addition to AI features, Coursera announced that educators will be able to incorporate virtual reality (VR) components into their courses, “whether that’s practicing a speech in front of a simulated audience or touring the interior of a blood vessel.” Learners will access these immersive experiences via desktop or most VR headsets. [More about new VR capabilities for educators.]
    • Coursera for Campus plagiarism portal. Educators will be able to examine plagiarism metrics and handle learner appeals, ID verification to confirm learners are who they say they are, and enhanced plagiarism detection capabilities on course assessments. “In the coming months, we’ll also be rolling out the ability to improve assessment robustness with hybrid-live proctoring capabilities.”
    • A new grading process, now in Beta, called Quick Grader will enable educators to seamlessly render uploaded assignments to review alongside grading rubrics.
    • Coursera Hiring Solutions, in beta, is a skills-first recruitment platform that matches industry-trained, job-ready talent with companies filling entry-level digital roles.

  • Open edX & Learning Platforms Newsletter | January – April 2023: Axim Collaborative, 2U edX, Coursera, Canvas LMS, Top Hat…

    Open edX & Learning Platforms Newsletter | January – April 2023: Axim Collaborative, 2U edX, Coursera, Canvas LMS, Top Hat…

    [ Newsletter format  |  Click here to subscribe ]

    JANUARY – APRIL 2023 – NEWSLETTER #48  |  Breaking news at IBL News  |  Noticias en Español

     

    Open edX 

    • The Open edX Platform Reaches 4,5K Deployments, with 70K Courses, and 77M Users

    • TCRIL Changes Its Name To Axim Collaborative and Names a CEO

    • Open edX Released the Fifteenth Version of Its Software Platform

    • Open edX Introduced Improvements to Its Maple and Nutmeg Releases

     

    2U edX 

    • 2U Sues U.S. Department of Education Over “New Regulation that Overreaches Its Authority”

    • 2U  Secures New Capital and Refinances Its Debt

    • Selected the Ten Top Educators and Courses in MOOCs According to the edX Platform

     

    Learning Platforms

    • Canvas LMS Expands Its Ecosystem by Acquiring LearnPlatform

    • Course Hero Appoints New CEO; Co-Founder Becomes CEO of New Parent Company, Learneo

    • Communication Skills Remain Vital, Says Coursera’s Job Skills Report

    • Top Hat Acquired New York-based STEM Education Startup Aktiv Learning

    • YouTube Will Launch a Feature Bringing Structured Learning Experiences into Its Channels

     

    Higher Ed

    • Many Private Colleges React to the Decline in Enrollment by Cutting Tuition in Half

    • The SUNY System Saw a Huge Success with Its Two-Week Fee-Waiver Initiative

    • NYU Will Invest $1 Billion Into Its Engineering School in Brooklyn, NY

    • John King, Former Education Secretary Named SUNY’s 15th Chancellor

     

    2023 Events | All of the Key Conferences Listed!

    • GSV Venture Capital Firm Presents Its Selection of 150 Top Learning Start-Ups for 2023

    • Education Calendar 2023  – APRIL | MAY | JUNE | Conferences in Latin America & Spain

     

    This newsletter was created in collaboration with IBL Education, a New York City-based company specializing in AI-driven analytics and skills-learning platforms. We also film and produce courses for universities and business organizations. Read the latest IBL Newsletter   |  Archive of Open edX Newsletters

  • Language Models that Run Themselves Accelerate the Advent of AGI

    Language Models that Run Themselves Accelerate the Advent of AGI

    IBL News | New York

    Language models that speed up and automate tasks with text or code, also called “autonomous AI,” “self-prompting,” or “auto-prompting” have become the latest trend in generative AI.

    These models develop and execute prompts that can lead to new prompts, becoming truly powerful.

    OpenAI developer Andrej Karpathy said, “Stringing them together in loops creates agents that can perceive, think, and act, their goals defined in English in prompts.”

    At the moment, the most popular self-prompting example is the experimental open-source application “Auto-GPT”.

    According to its coding team, this Python application is designed to independently develop and manage business ideas and generate income.

    The program plans step-by-step, justifies decisions, and develops plans, which it documents.

    The system integrates GPT-4 for text generation, accesses the Internet for data retrieval, stores data, and generates speech via the Elevenlabs API. It’s even capable of self-improvement and bug-fixing by generating Python scripts via GPT-4.

    Projects like Baby-AGI or Jarvis (HuggingGPT) work with the same idea as Auto-GPT by automating complex tasks autonomously.

    The team behind HuggingGPT explained, “By leveraging the strong language capability of ChatGPT and abundant AI models in Hugging Face, HuggingGPT is able to cover numerous sophisticated AI tasks in different modalities and domains and achieve impressive results in language, vision, speech, and other challenging tasks, which paves a new way towards advanced artificial intelligence.”

    Experts agree that GPT-4 is going a little AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) with autonomous AI. “Models that apply self-improvement of language models could get rapidly more powerful as we approach the possibility of real-life AGIs, experts say.
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  • GSV Venture Capital Firm Presents Its Selection of 150 Top Learning Start-Ups for 2023

    GSV Venture Capital Firm Presents Its Selection of 150 Top Learning Start-Ups for 2023

    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.

  • Special Report: The AI Revolution, A Wild 2023 | Newsletter #54 | January – April 2023

    Special Report: The AI Revolution, A Wild 2023 | Newsletter #54 | January – April 2023

    [ Newsletter format  |  Click here to subscribe ]

    AI’s WILD YEAR | DECEMBER 2022 – APRIL 2023 – NEWSLETTER #54

     

    April 2023

    • AWS Will Sell Access to Multiple LLMs Through a New Service Called ‘Amazon Bedrock’

    • Databrick Releases an Improved Open Source LLM Licensed For Reuse and Commercial Use

    • The AI Apps Associated Themselves with ChatGPT Generated Hefty Revenue

    • Cerebras Releases as Open Source Seven Large LLMs with 13 Billion Parameters

    • International Baccalaureate Assessment System Allows Students to Use ChatGPT

    • Bloomberg Introduces a 50-Billion Parameter LLM Built For Finance

    • The OpenAI’s CEO Envisions a Universal Income Society to Compensate for Jobs Replaced by AI

    • Artificial Intelligence Enters a New Phase of Corporate Dominance

    • Udacity Incorporates an OpenAI Provided Chatbot

    • Italy Bans ChatGPT While Elon Musk and 1,100 Signatories Call to a Pause on AI [Open Letter]


    March 2023

    • Generative AI Will Impact Labor Market and Have Notable Economic, Social, and Policy Implications

    • Adobe Unveils Firefly, a Family of Creative Generative AI Models Coming to Its Products

    • Quora Released its Poe Chatbot, A Tool That Includes GPT-4, Claude and ChatGPT

    • Databricks Launches Dolly, an Open Sourced LLM Clone of Stanford’s Alpaca Model

    • Microsoft Search Engine Bing Adds DALL-E’s Image AI Creator

    • Google Provides Limited Access to Bard, Its “Early Experiment Chatbot”

    • OpenAI Starts to Roll Out Plugins in ChatGPT

    • Canva Unveils New AI-Powered Design Tools

    • GitHub Launches an Upgraded AI Assistant for Developers, Copilot X, With GPT-4

    • Anthropic Launched ‘Claude’ A More Ethical Bot That Competes With ChatGPT

    • Google Shows What AI-Embedded Writing Will Look Like in Gmail and Google Docs

    • Microsoft Corp Embeds Generative AI Into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams

    • Duolingo and Khan Academy Are Integrating the GPT-4 Model Into Their Offer

    • Bing, Microsoft’s Search Engine, Crossed 100 Million Daily Active Users

    • Stripe Integrates OpenAI’s New GPT-4 AI Into Its Digital Payment Process

    • OpenAI Introduced Its GPT-4 Model That Accepts Image and Text Inputs

    • OpenAI Positions Itself as a Corporate, Closed-Source, and For-Profit Business

    • Microsoft Made ChatGPT Available On Its Azure OpenAI Service

    • DuckDuckGo Unveils a Feature that Summarizes Information Using Generative AI

    • Grammarly Announces a Generative AI Writing Assistant

    • Microsoft Releases an AI Chatbot for Marketers, Customer Reps, and Sales People

    • Salesforce Issues a ChatGPT-Style AI Agent For Writing Marketing Content

    • Israeli Start-Up D-ID’s API Enables Face-to-Face Chats with AI

    • OpenAI Expects Revenue of $200M In 2023, After Making $30M Last Year

    • Character.ai, an Alternative to ChatGPT, Valued at $1 Billion

    • OpenAI Will Offer A Dedicated ChatGPT Platform for Businesses

    • OpenAI launches an API for ChatGPT. Quizlet and Shopify, Among the Early Adopters

    • Microsoft Releases a Windows 11 Update that Includes AI-Powered Bing Chatbot


    February 2023

    • Snapchat Introduces My AI, a ChatGPT-Powered Artificial Intelligence Bot Into Its App

    • JPMorgan Chase, Verizon, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs Block Access to ChatGPT

    • Microsoft Released the Bing and Edge Mobile Apps Powered by ChatGPT

    • Meta Released LLaMA, an Open Large Language Model with 65-Billion-Parameters

    • AWS Partners With Hugging Face, an AI Startup Rival to ChatGPT Working on Open Source Models

    • The Most Expensive School in the World, Swiss Rosenberg, Teaches How to Use ChatGPT

    • GitHub Copilot, which Suggests Code in Real-Time through Generative AI, Launches Its Business Offer

    • A Rush of Early Adopters In the Corporate World to Avoid Falling Behind on Generative AI

    • The Domain AI.com Now Takes Users to ChatGPT

    • Open AI: “Aligning AI Systems with Human Values Is a Top Priority for Our Company”

    • Opera Will Release a New Browser with Built-In Access to ChatGPT and Other AI Services

    • “Students Need to Learn How to Prompt an AI, and Evaluate Its Accuracy and Originality”

    • Over 1 Million People Signed Up for the Bing Waitlist; Microsoft Shows Viva Sales Emails

    • “ChatGPT is High Tech Plagiarism; It Undermines Education,” Says Noam Chomsky

    • Microsoft Reaches a $2 Trillion Market Cap Helped with the Rise of ChatGPT

    • Microsoft Presented Its New Bing Search, Powered by ChatGPT

    • Google Announces ‘Bard’, a Testing, ChatGPT-Style AI Service

    • ChatGPT and Upcoming AI Bots Will Make Jobs Obsolete in Several Industries

    • Top Contenders Challenge ChatGPT. Google Invests $300M In Anthropic

    • ChatGPT Surpasses 100 Million Users in January, with 13 Million Daily Visitors

    • Microsoft Launches Teams Premium with Features Powered by ChatGPT

    • OpenAI Announces ChatGPT Plus, a $20/Month Premium Service

    • OpenAI Issues a Free Tool to Help Determine If Any Text Is Written by ChatGPT


    January 2023

    • China’s Baidu Will Soon Launch an AI Platform Similar to ChatGPT

    • MusicML, a Research Project by Google, Generates Songs From Text Descriptions

    • An AI Application Allows Asking Questions and Gain Insights About Documents

    • BuzzFeed Will Use ChatGPT to Help Generate Online Content and Quizzes

    • “Everybody is Cheating,” Says a Wharton Professor; He Has Adopted an AI Policy

    • ChatGPT Passes Law School Exam Signaling the Risk of Widespread Cheating

    • ChatGPT Alternatives Start to Emerge Throughout the Internet

    • Microsoft Announces an Investment of $10 Billion in OpenAI to Advance ChatGPT Technology

    • ChatGPT Passes an MBA Exam at UPenn’s Wharton

    • Augmenting GTP-3 with Additional Information Prompts New Coding Businesses

    • ChatGPT and Its Consequences on Work and Life Are the Talk of the Business Leaders in Davos This Year

    • OpenAI CEO Refuses to Confirm If Chat GPT—4 Will Be Released This Year [Video]

    • Coursera Will Integrate ChatGPT into Its Course Catalog This Year [Video]

    • Microsoft CEO Says at Davos that the Company Plans to Flood its Products with Chat GPT [Video]

    • Microsoft Starts Offering Access to Azure OpenAI [Video]

    • Microsoft Will Make OpenAI’s Language Models Available on Its Azure Cloud Services

    • Chat GPT ‘At Capacity’ Due to Its Massive Popularity

    • ChatGPT Prepares a Paid Version to Monetize Its Wildly Successful Tool

    • Language Models – Based Tools Will Radically Change Education

    • Microsoft Might Invest $10 Billion in OpenAI’s ChatGPT

    • Quora Tests Its Own Chatbot, Which Will Be Connected to More AI Agents

    • Princeton Student Launches an App that Detects Plagiarism from ChatGPT

    • Microsoft Works to Incorporate ChatGPT Into Its Bing Search Service

    • An AI Chatbot Promises to Help You to Become the Best Version of Yourself

    • ChatGPT-4, the Fined Tuned Version of ChatGPT-3, Might Prompt a Major Shift


    December 2022

    • Cheating on Essays in Higher Education through ChatGPT Alarms Academia

    • The University of Phoenix Makes Its Chatbot More Engaging After Three Years of Experience

    • The Year of ChatGPT and the Large Language Models

    • Image Generator Lensa AI App Goes Viral with Its Magic Selfies Feature

    • AI Adoption Plateaus and Talent Shortages Threaten the Shift

    • The Release of OpenAI Keeps Educators and Professionals Processing the Implications

    • Cutting-Edge AI Chatbot Attracts Over a Million People In One Week

    • OpenAI Releases ChatGPT, an Advanced Text-Generating AI


    2023 Events | All of the Key Conferences Listed!

    • Education Calendar 2023  – APRIL | MAY | JUNE | Conferences in Latin America & Spain

    This newsletter was created in collaboration with IBL Education, a New York City-based company specializing in AI-driven, skills open source learning platforms, and predictive analytics. We also film and produce courses for universities and business organizations. Read the latest IBL Newsletter   |  Archive of Open edX Newsletters

  • AWS Will Sell Access to Multiple LLMs Through a New Service Called ‘Amazon Bedrock’

    AWS Will Sell Access to Multiple LLMs Through a New Service Called ‘Amazon Bedrock’

    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.