Category: Top News

IBL News | New York

OpenAI rolled out a feature named “Tasks” this week, which allows the AI assistant to do reminders or recurring tasks by following up with a push notification on whatever platform is enabled.

This new feature, in beta, is for paying users of ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Pro around the globe this week.

Examples of tasks include “Every Friday, give me a weekend plan based on my location and the weather forecast” or “Give me a news briefing every day at 7 a.m.”

The new task feature appears to be OpenAI’s first step into AI agents or advanced agentic systems that can act somewhat independently.

Users can access tasks by selecting “4o with scheduled tasks” from a dropdown menu in ChatGPT.

Today we’re rolling out a beta version of tasks—a new way to ask ChatGPT to do things for you at a future time.

Whether it’s one-time reminders or recurring actions, tell ChatGPT what you need and when, and it will automatically take care of it. pic.twitter.com/7lgvsPehHv

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) January 14, 2025

IBL News | New York

Colorado Springs-based ACI Learning announced the addition of a marketplace functionality to its workforce development and training platform.

Along with this feature, the company introduced 18,000 new training modules, allowing organizations to customize their learning ecosystems.

The new myACI Marketplace offers access to new content in application development, leadership training, and productivity, thanks to partnerships with BizLibrary, Clip Training, Scrimba, Net Ninja, Bigger Brains, and other providers.

IBL News | New York

The Chinese company Tencent presented a framework for a large video generation model called “HunyuanVideo.”

This Text-to-Video model was released as open source with its code and weights.

HunyuanVideo was trained with over 13 billion parameters, making it the largest open-source model.

“It exhibits performance in video generation that is comparable to, if not superior to, leading closed-source models,” said the authors.

“It outperforms state-of-the-art models, including Runway Gen-3, Luma 1.6, and 3 top performing Chinese video generative models.”

IBL News | New York

Google published a technical report this December stating that Gemini’s LearnLM outperformed other leading AI models when it comes to adhering to learning science principles.

This includes explaining concepts appropriately, providing effective hints and guidance, interactively guiding learners, and encouraging active engagement.

For example, when prompted to teach complex topics, LearnLM breaks content into chunks and uses guiding questions to encourage research instead of providing direct answers.

“LearnLM is better able to follow instructions, support learning goals, and adapt to learner’s abilities, with pedagogy experts and testers preferring results from LearnLM over other models,” said Google’s report.

LearnLM is Google’s AI models and capabilities that infuse learning science into Gemini, YouTube, and Classroom.

IBL News | New York

Getty Images said it would merge with rival Shutterstock on Tuesday to create a $3.7 billion visual licensed content company. The agreement will be subject to both companies’ antitrust regulatory and shareholder approval.

The combined company would be named Getty Images Holdings, Inc and continue trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the “GETY” symbol. Getty CEO Craig Peters would remain chief executive.

The deal underscores the demand for images and content from creators and platforms at a time when the growing use of generative AI tools such as Midjourney poses a threat to the industry.

The two companies said the expected annual cost synergies would be between $150 million and $200 million by year three.

IBL News | New York

Nvidia launched Cosmos this week, an open-source video model to generate synthetic data at scale, addressing the data scarcity in robotics.

Trained on 20 million hours of video data and 9,000 trillion tokens, Nvidia Cosmos provides tools for creating physics-aware video simulations for various applications, mainly robotics and autonomous vehicles.

It contains Difusion-based and Autoregressive model architectures, which, respectively, generate continuous tokens to create controllable visual simulations and use discrete tokens to predict future video frames.

It supports text-to-video and video-to-video generation.

Cosmos is available on Hugging Face, licensed under Apache 2, while preview access is offered at build.nvidia.com.

Personal Supercomputer for AI

On the other hand, Nvidia also introduced a personal AI supercomputer, DIGITS, for rapid prototyping of open-source Llama models.

“By making @AIatMeta Llama models open source, we’re committed to democratizing access to cutting-edge AI technology. With Project DIGITS, developers can harness the power of Llama locally, unlocking new possibilities for innovation and collaboration.”
— @Ahmad_Al_Dahle, VP,… https://t.co/4SAABLaTd4

— NVIDIA AI Developer (@NVIDIAAIDev) January 7, 2025

IBL News | New York

Nvidia announced a partnership with CrewAI yesterday to provide an agent orchestration solution with enterprise-grade performance and complete infrastructure control.

Currently, PwC’s enterprise and startup Parloa are using this service.

CrewAI now powers 4.5M+ Crews with multiple AI Agents weekly across industries.

“The integration of CrewAI with NVIDIA AI Enterprise and NIM microservices marks a leap forward in production-grade AI agents,” said Justin Boitano, VP of Enterprise AI at NVIDIA

The two companies see this transformation across back-office automation, sales & marketing operations, financial analysis, and coding and software automation.

This production-ready demo showcased AI agents powered by Meta’s Llama 3.3 model on NVIDIA NIMs.

Ok this is SO COOL 🤯🤯🤯

I just made an AI agent that calls restaurants to make reservations for me.

How it works:

1. You punch in the name of the restaurant and desired time and number of guests.

2. It calls the restaurant (in an incredibly real sounding voice) and makes… pic.twitter.com/2oMNrhaGPO

— Andrew Wilkinson (@awilkinson) January 7, 2025

IBL News | New York

The text-to-speech platform ElevenLabs launched a powerful AI tool named “Conversational AI” this month that allows to build agents with voice.

The voice interaction shows low latency and interruption handling for back-and-forth conversation.

The model allows for swapping between Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT or bringing a custom implementation.

It features external function calling and integrates with any third-party app to get real-time information.

The agents are powered by 70 realistic-sounding AI voices in up to 32 languages and are built on users’ knowledge base.

As use cases, ElevenLabs mentioned the following:

• Customer Support to handle customer inquiries 24/7.

• Scheduling for appointment booking and management, from healthcare to personal services.

• Outbound Sales for cold calling at scale and qualifying leads.

• Gaming experiences.

• Education for personalized learning experiences, offering explanations, quizzes, and adaptive lessons based on a student’s progress.

• Fan engagement with interactive experiences from trivia to personalized content recommendations.

IBL News | New York

A charter school in Arizona, Unbound Academy, received official approval to offer next year a fully online experience from through to eighth grades, giving students two hours of academic instruction taught entirely by AI.

The Arizona State Board for Charter Schools greenlighted the initiative. Unbound Academy proposed in its application an “AI-driven adaptive learning technology that condenses academic instruction into a two-hour window.”

Unbound’s approach leans on edtech platforms like Khan Academy and IXL, with students engaging with “interactive, AI-powered platforms that continuously adjust to their individual learning pace and style.” Guides, rather than traditional teachers, will provide “targeted interventions and coaching” for each student.

IBL News | New York

Salesforce Inc. said it signed deals to install AI agents at more than 200 companies, including Accenture, Adecco Group, FedEx Corp., and IBM.

Experts predict that agents will become more widespread in the first quarter of 2025, reshaping workforces at companies.

Agents are AI tools that can handle multistep, repetitive tasks like onboarding clients, approving expenses and other administrative tasks, and answering customer service requests, all with minimal human supervision.

“This is really the rise of digital labor,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said.

“Agents are the next giant breakthrough,” said OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman. “An agent acts like a really smart senior coworker with whom you can collaborate on a project,” he added.

Salesforce launched its agent product, “Agentforce,” two months ago, while OpenAI is set to unveil an agent at a research preview in January.

• Bloomberg: Big Tech’s New AI Obsession: Agents That Do Your Work for You