Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

Elon Musk-owned xAI released Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini in beta this week. Both models, with increased capabilities in chat, coding, and reasoning, were released to Grok users on the X platform. Later this month, xAI will make them available through enterprise API.

Grok-2 is a step forward from the previous model, Grok-1.5, and, according to the company, it outperforms Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4-Turbo.

“Grok-2 has shown significant improvements in reasoning with retrieved content and its tool use capabilities, such as correctly identifying missing information, reasoning through sequences of events, and discarding irrelevant posts,” said Musk’s AI company.

Grok-2 integrates real-time information from the x platform, and it’s accessible through the Grok tab in the x app.

Meanwhile, Grok-mini is a small sibling of Grok-2.

IBL News | New York

A global survey with 4,000 respondents in 16 countries conducted by the Digital Education Council (DEC) this week revealed that 86% of students already use AI in their studies, with 54% of them on a weekly basis.

These are the main outcomes of the survey.

• ChatGPT, Grammarly, and Microsoft Copilot are the most used tools.

• In addition, many AI applications now operate seamlessly in the background and are perceived as standard features rather than distinct AI tools.

• Students expect their institutions to get more involved in using AI in teaching and learning, especially in addressing the gaps in AI knowledge and skills.

• They anticipate far more potential around career exploration and learning support. They are especially worried about AI in assessment.

• Faculty members are expected to increase their use of AI in teaching, research, and administration, given that many have lost many opportunities.

IBL News | New York

NVIDIA started this month to provide free access to its containerized AI NIM microservices for development, testing, and research to over 5 million program members.

The latest downloadable NIM microservices include open-sourced Meta’s Llama 3.1 8B and Mistral AI’s compact Mistral 7B Instruct.

Developer program members can use NIM microservices on up to two nodes or 16 GPUs. Organizations must sign up for a free 90-day NVIDIA AI Enterprise license to use NIM in production.

The ability to use simple APIs to integrate pre-trained LLMs into products has significantly increased developer usage of endpoints and application development frameworks. NVIDIA NIM enables developers to deploy their AI model endpoints rapidly.

In the NVIDIA API Catalog, these developers select a microservice, download a NIM microservice, and get an API key for the container.

Nvidia’s NIM aims to create an ecosystem of AI-ready containers. It includes support for models from NVIDIA, A121, Adept, Cohere, Getty Images, and Shutterstock, as well as open models from Google, Hugging Face, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Stability AI.

Nvidia is already working with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to make these NIM microservices available on SageMaker, Kubernetes Engine, and Azure AI. They’ll also be integrated into frameworks like Deepset, LangChain, and LlamaIndex.

The company plans to add additional capabilities, such as making the Nvidia RAG LLM operator available as an NIM.

[Disclosure: ibl.ai, the parent company of iblnews.org, has NVIDIA as a client]

 

IBL News | New York

Microsoft announced it is exploring AI-powered math tutoring with Khan Academy using a new open-source small language model.

The model is a fine-tuned version of Phi-3, Microsoft’s family of small language models (SLMs). It has been trained on data from Accelerate Learning and UPchieve, including synthetic math tutoring chats.

In this initiative, Khan Academy provides explanatory educational content, including high-quality math problem questions and step-by-step answer sets, ongoing feedback, and benchmarking data to evaluate performance.

This tutoring tool can generate problems for specific grade levels and math topics, help students learn through guided explanations, and provide customized summaries of tutoring sessions for students and teachers with initial functionality supporting middle-school math.

“Phi-3 models not only outperform models of the same size and next size up across language, reasoning, coding, and math benchmarks, but they also do so in more cost-effective ways,” said Microsoft.

• Preview of phi-3-vision-128k-instruct with NVIDIA

IBL News | New York

In May this year, NASA named its first AI officer, David Salvagnini. This role expanded Salvagnini’s current role as chief data officer. “AI can accelerate the pace of discovery,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

The chief AI Officer is a new role within companies intended to keep up with everything related to AI and implement it in certain operations.

In addition to NASA, other brands such as Dell, LVMH, Morgan Stanley, and the Dubai government recently hired managers for this role.

Experts say that major organizations are trying to fall behind when using AI tools more effectively.

“For example, this person might find a ChatGPT prompt that makes the Finance team work 10% faster, get the Marketing team using Midjourney to work 25% faster, or implement AI tools to streamline HR processes and save teams hours a day,” wrote Rowan Cheung, founder of the popular newsletter “The Rundown AI.”

It’s this new role where someone is hired to specifically keep up with everything happening in AI and implement it into certain operations within the company.

For example, this person might:

– Find a ChatGPT… pic.twitter.com/qoHU7MP4PB

— Rowan Cheung (@rowancheung) July 2, 2024

IBL News | New York

Google is rolling out new Gemini-powered features for Chrome, such as Lens for desktop, tab compare for shopping, and AI-powered history search, as an opt-in feature for U.S. users this month.

IBL News | New York

The U.S. Department of Education released this month “Designing for Education with Artificial Intelligence: An Essential Guide for Developers.”

This 49-page guide describes how developers and educators can work together to strengthen trust.

It also provides insights into how educational organizations or development teams can strengthen their approach to responsible AI in education.

The guide builds on the Department’s prior report, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Teaching and Learning: Insights and Recommendations (2023 AI Report).

• PDF Download

• Webinar: The Power of a Clean Slate – Removing Barriers to Career-Connected Education

IBL News | New York

Groq Inc. — a startup based in Mountain View, California, that designs semiconductors and software for AI systems — raised $640 million in new funding at a valuation of $2.8 billion.

The founding round was led by BlackRock Inc. funds and included backing from the investment arms of Cisco Systems and Samsung Electronics.

This Series D round almost triples its valuation from $1 billion in a funding round in 2021.

The company has entered into competition against incumbents such as the leader Nvidia, as well as Intel Corp., Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Ross said in an interview on Bloomberg Television that Groq plans to use the funding to build about 108,000 language processing units, hire significantly, and consider some acquisitions.

The company said that former Intel executive Stuart Pann is joining Groq as its chief operating officer.

Additionally, Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, will become an adviser to the startup. Ross said LeCun’s push for open-source models, such as Meta’s Llama, allowed Groq to grow.

“Groq would not exist today if not for open source,” Ross said. We built the best chips, but if we didn’t also have the software, we would not be able to demonstrate that.”

Open-source models allow people to get into the AI business without having to train models.

What are we doing with this capital? Originally we intended to raise $300M which was going to allow us to deploy 108,000 LPUs into production by end of Q1 2025. We raised 2x that, so we’re also expanding our cloud and core engineering teams.

We’re hiring! https://t.co/rnk6PGzfXy

— Jonathan Ross (@JonathanRoss321) August 5, 2024

Check out this new app powered by Groq! 🤩 https://t.co/7YXL3OvUH9

— Groq Inc (@GroqInc) August 5, 2024

Very, very fast voice bots. Llama 3.1 running on @GroqInc.

🚀 500ms voice-to-voice response times pic.twitter.com/l9u5GNPhCo

— kwindla (@kwindla) July 23, 2024

IBL News | New York

IBL News | New York

Khan Academy partnered with Microsoft to provide all U.S. educators free access to its chatbot Khanmigo for Teachers.

Powered with Azure OpenAI Service, this tool has an intuitive interface that includes 20+ teacher activities without prompting.

Khanmigo for Teachers is designed to reduce the time educators spend on burdensome preparatory tasks, such as delivering standards-aligned differentiated lesson plans, developing rubrics for expository essays, creating lesson hooks, suggesting student groupings, providing insights on student performance, recommending assignments, and refreshing instructors’ knowledge.

These class prep tasks might consume over 50% of teachers’ time. The goal is to give them more time and focus with students.

Microsoft also announced that it will integrate Khan Academy content into its free school communication app Microsoft Teams for Education, which, according to the company, is designed to support the needs of students, educators, staff, and guardians.

Khan Academy’s content library covers math PreK-12 through early college, grammar, science, history, AP, SAT prep, and more.

As part of this deal, Khan Academy added a new “Share to Teams” feature to its platform, enabling sharing of its content in student assignments.

 

• Khanmigo for Teachers
• Khanmigo for Teachers Quick Guide
• Microsoft Copilot as an AI assistant for educators
• Khanmigo in CBS’ 60 Minutes