Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

Axim Collaborative, the organization behind the Open edX platform, announced the launch of its latest release called Redwood.

This new version includes a new data and analytics system called Aspects Reports, which is not currently installed by default. As data visualization tool, it uses Superset.

It provides access to near real-time course and instance data, tracking progress and success metrics. The course-level dashboard displays enrollment, engagement, and performance information for all learners in a course. There is also an at-risk learner dashboard for students who might not complete the course.

The new Content Tagging feature on Redwood allows course authors to add tags, such as skills or competencies, to their course content.

Authors can tag individual course components like videos and problems or full units, sections, and subsections.

It also supports any third-party taxonomy.

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The Studio authoring environment got a facelift with a redesigned, sleeker, modernized UI. Every page in Studio has been converted to the Paragon design system.
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This release has reintroduced the in-course navigation sidebar, which displays the user’s current course section, subsection, and unit.

 

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Redwood now includes a Course Search to find content, making it easier for authors to find content they wish to edit or reuse. Results appear at the block, unit, subsection, and section level and can be filtered by tags and content type.

When used together, content tagging, course search, and content copy/paste allow course teams to easily find, manage, and reuse content.

The copy/paste feature enables authors to copy any part of the course and paste it into any other course. Authors can copy individual course components like videos and problems or full units, subsections, and sections.

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IBL News | New York

OpenAI released GPT-4o mini yesterday, its latest cost-effective small model. It hosts text and vision in the API, supporting text, image, video, and audio inputs and outputs.

GPT-4o mini will replace GPT-3.5 Turbo, OpenAI’s smallest model. The model has a context window of 128,000 tokens, roughly the length of a book, supports up to 16K output tokens per request, and a knowledge cutoff of October 2023.

It is priced over 60% cheaper than GPT-3.5 Turbo, at 15 cents per 1M input tokens and 60 cents per 1M output tokens (roughly the equivalent of 2500 pages in a standard book).

The company claims that GPT-4o mini outperforms industry-leading small AI models, such as Llama 3 8b, Claude Haiku, and Gemini 1.5 Flash, on text and vision reasoning tasks.

Small AI models are becoming more popular for developers due to their speed and cost efficiencies compared to larger models, such as GPT-4 Omni or Claude 3.5 Sonnet. They’re a useful option for developers’ high-volume tasks.

IBL News | New York

Groq AI, a startup that develops high-speed processing and low-latency performance chips, released an app called Groqbook this month that generates entire books in seconds from a one-line prompt.

It works well on nonfiction books and generates each chapter within seconds.

It uses Llama3 on Groq. Specifically, it mixes Llama3-8b and Llama3-70b, utilizing the larger model to generate the structure and the smaller of the two to create the content.

Currently, the model only uses the context of the section title to generate the chapter content.

Groq said that “in the future, this will be expanded to the fuller context of the book to allow Groqbook to generate quality fiction books as well.”

Groq’s CTO demoed this app last week at New York’s Imagine AI Live Event, which IBL News covered.

 

IBL News | New York

OpenAI set up a five-tiered classification system to track its progress towards AGI, that is, AI software capable of outperforming humans.

An OpenAI spokesperson told Bloomberg that the San Francisco–based research lab shared this new classification system with employees this month. Later, it will be shared with investors and others outside the organization.

These are the tiers:

Level 1: Chatbots, AI that can interact in conversational language with people

Level 2: Reasoners, human-level problem solving

Level 3: Agents, systems that can take actions like basic problem-solving tasks and humans with a doctorate-level education

Level 4: Innovators, AI that can aid in innovation

Level 5: Organizations, AI that can do the work of an organization

OpenAI executives told employees that the company believes it is currently on the first level but on the cusp of reaching the second.

 

IBL News | New York

Anthropic’s assistant Claude 3.5 Sonnet is having a significant impact on the enterprise AI market.

It’s currently enhancing workflows across industries by improving team collaboration and productivity.

Essentially, it centralizes knowledge and AI interactions in one accessible space.

Gen AI practitioners are sharing use cases developed with Claude 3.5’s Sonnet chatbot that weren’t possible with GPT-4o.

Also Claude 3.5’s artifacts can help teach.

Ethan Mollick, author and professor, showed how in a startup financing class created a compelling interactive simulation.

Claude 3.5’s artifacts, now shareable, can help teach.

In class, startup financing can be hard to explain, now I just asked “create an interactive simulation that visually explains payoff differences for a startup and VC with liquidation preferences…” https://t.co/4dF1CZNVxu pic.twitter.com/riS2TyHRh7

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) July 9, 2024

These are some other cases beyond the classroom:

• Website creation
• Sound effects generation
• Building Google Calendars
• Creating interactive books for children
• Simulations and visual demonstrations
• Creating learning dashboards

10. Making a website in 2 minutes by @NickADobos pic.twitter.com/YHVnM7RN6z

— Robin Delta (@heyrobinai) July 5, 2024

7. How to rank your website number 1 in 24 hours by @JulianGoldieSEO pic.twitter.com/Mdu5chBHLX

— Robin Delta (@heyrobinai) July 5, 2024

Claude 3.5 Sonnet is insane.

And people are cooking up incredible use-cases that weren’t possible with GPT-4o.

10 examples you don’t want to miss: pic.twitter.com/L6tYZyELuc

— Robin Delta (@heyrobinai) July 5, 2024

Claude Sonnet 3.5 Opensource artifacts UI that you can use with ChatGPT, Gemini, Llama-3 or any other LLMs. pic.twitter.com/KsnH1ATG5W

— Shubham Saboo (@Saboo_Shubham_) July 8, 2024

Yes. And now we can go from doc to design to prototype at 100X speed. https://t.co/mrmm1jDZR3 pic.twitter.com/FsVcA4dCJJ

— Balaji (@balajis) July 8, 2024

IBL News | New York

ElevenLabs.io has launched an iOS app that narrates text content, including books, PDFs, ePub, and docs, for users on the go.

The ElevenLabs Reader App allows the user to choose a voice.

This text-to-speech tool is available in English for the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. residents. The company has set a waiting list for Android users.

Available voices include deceased actors like Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds, and Sir Laurence Olivier.

“Adding them to our growing list of narrators marks a major step forward in our mission of making content accessible in any language and voice,” said the start-up.

The partnership with the stars’ estates comes two months after ChatGPT-maker OpenAI was criticized for introducing a synthetic voice eerily similar to Scarlett Johansson’s character in “Her.”

Johansson said she was “shocked, angered and in disbelief” that the company would use her likeliness likeness after she turned down a partnership opportunity with OpenAI.

Today we’re launching the ElevenLabs iOS app!

It lets you listen to any article, book, or doc using our AI generated voices.

Check it out 🚀 pic.twitter.com/zQ9ISG8NUn

— Ammaar Reshi (@ammaar) June 25, 2024

IBL News | New York

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced several product developments during its annual summit in New York, including an App Studio that enables enterprise non-technical users to build internal applications with simple prompts.

Available under a limited preview, AWS App Studio “opens up application development to an entirely new set of builders,” said Dilip Kumar, vice president of applications at AWS.

The company claims App Studio is better than most low-code development tools, which do the job but fail to produce fully secure apps that comply with enterprise privacy and security policies.

It competes with other app creation platforms such as Creatio’s Quantum and Salesforce Platform.

Currently, enterprise operations depend on data-heavy internal processes and workflows.

Announcing @awscloud App Studio, the fastest and easiest way to build applications! Start with a prompt, and end with a real AWS application – fully managed by AWS. It’s been an amazing journey and working on this! pic.twitter.com/lhIC12Y7dN

— Adam Seligman (@adamse) July 10, 2024

IBL News | New York

Microsoft Research announced this month that it open-sourced GraphRAG, a valuable Python library that extracts insights from text.

It uses LLMs to automate the extraction of knowledge graphs from datasets and text documents.

“GraphRAG is a structured, hierarchical approach to Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), as opposed to naive semantic-search approaches using plain text snippets,” explained the company in a blog post.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a technique to improve LLM outputs using real-world information.

RAG searches for information based on a user query on private datasets, data that the LLM is not trained on and has never seen before, such as an enterprise’s proprietary research, business documents, or communications.

Microsoft just open-sourced GraphRAG.

It might be the best Python library to extract insights from text. Much more powerful than vanilla RAG.

It uses LLMs to automate the extraction of knowledge graphs from your datasets and text documents.

!pip install graphrag pic.twitter.com/BhVrPkhZCs

— Lior⚡ (@AlphaSignalAI) July 9, 2024