IBL News

Category: Top News

  • Prof. Barba Presents a New Pedagogical Design to Build a Course-Level AI Mentor

    Prof. Barba Presents a New Pedagogical Design to Build a Course-Level AI Mentor

    IBL News | New York

    [Updated: October 17, 2024]

    Professor Lorena A. Barba at George Washington University presented a new AI mentor at the institution’s School of Engineering & Applied Science, one that is both student-centered and faculty-led.

    “What sets our approach apart is its focus on pedagogical design and cost-effectiveness. Unlike enterprise-wide solutions, the pay-as-you-go model could save institutions significant resources while offering greater customization,” Profesor Barba explained.

    GW’s School of Engineering & Applied Science endorsed the initiative.

    According to a July 2024 survey by the Digital Education Council, 86% of students already use AI in their studies.

    “Most are using ChatGPT, and not very well. Our AI mentor addresses this reality by providing a customizable, course-specific tool that grounds AI responses in course materials,” Profesor Barba explained during a presentation [video | pdf document].

    Key features of this AI mentor include:

    • Instructor-controlled AI persona
    • Integration of course resources
    • Context-aware responses (via RAG)
    • Flexible model selection (no vendor lock-in)
    • Cost usage tracking via AI vendor dashboard

    Professor Lorena A. Barba showcased the AI mentor’s interface with a live demo, showing how to add course resources, set the AI’s behavior through prompts, and moderate student interactions.

    The demo included examples of the AI mentor responding to student queries, showcasing its ability to provide course-specific information and encourage critical thinking.

    This pilot was conducted in collaboration with ibl.ai as the technical partner.

    • GW: Professor Barba Unveils AI Mentor for Course-Level Support at GW Engineering

    (Disclosure: ibl.ai is the parent company of iblnews.org news service).

     

  • Nvidia Released a Powerful Open-Source AI Model Named ‘NVLM 1.0’

    Nvidia Released a Powerful Open-Source AI Model Named ‘NVLM 1.0’

    IBL News | New York

    Nvidia released a powerful open-source AI model that competes with proprietary systems like OpenAI and Google this week.

    Nvidia researchers explained in a paper that its new NVLM 1.0 family of large multimodal language models, led by the 72 billion parameter NVLM-D-72B, “demonstrates exceptional performance across vision-language tasks, rivaling the leading proprietary models (e.g., GPT-4o) and open-access models.”

    By making the model weights publicly available and promising to release the training code, Nvidia is breaking from the trend of keeping advanced AI systems closed.

    The initiative grants researchers and developers unprecedented access to cutting-edge technology.

    Benchmark results comparing NVIDIA’s NVLM-D model to AI giants like GPT-4, Claude 3.5, and Llama 3-V, showing NVLM-D’s competitive performance across various visual and language tasks. (Credit: arxiv.org)

     

    NVIDIA’s new AI model analyzes a meme comparing academic abstracts to full papers, demonstrating its ability to interpret visual humor and scholarly concepts. (Credit: arxiv.org)

    Nvidia’s decision to make such a powerful model openly available could accelerate AI research and development across the field.

    Experts said that this move could spark a chain reaction as other well funded  companies may feel pressure to open their research, potentially accelerating AI progress across the board.

    Nvidia’s decision also raises questions about the future of AI business models. If state-of-the-art models become freely available, companies may need to rethink how they create value and maintain competitive edges in AI.

     

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

  • Microsoft Announced New Copilot Capabilities On Windows For All Users

    Microsoft Announced New Copilot Capabilities On Windows For All Users

    IBL News | New York

    Microsoft announced new Copilot capabilities on Windows for all users this month, including a tool that responds to questions about what’s on the screen. Also, Microsoft launched new versions, with a new style, of Copilot apps for iOS, Android, Windows, and the web.

    Another feature is Copilot Vision, which, installed on the Edge browser tool, reads and interprets the images and text it sees on the page for the first time.

    According to the giant company, “It can suggest next steps, answer questions, help navigate whatever you want to do, and assist with tasks, all while you simply speak to it in natural language.” However, it can interpret only the types of non-payment websites.

    An additional interesting feature is CoPilot Voice. Like OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode for ChatGPT, Copilot Voice can detect the user’s tone during conversations and respond accordingly. Users can interject at any point while Copilot Voice is answering.

  • The OPM Industry Is On Life Support, Analysts Say

    The OPM Industry Is On Life Support, Analysts Say

    IBL News | New York

    The OPM (Online Program Manager) industry is at a standstill after colleges’ interest in partnering with these companies vanished, according to data released by market researcher Validated Insights.

    Venture Capital investments for OPMs have disappeared, and colleges appear to simply be disenchanted with OPM providers.

    The OPM companies work on a revenue-sharing model through which they take a percentage, usually a majority, of tuition and fees for every student they recruit.

    In 2023, 147 contracts and partnerships with OPMs expired or were terminated, the most of any year since 2020.

    Only eight new OPM contracts were signed in the first quarter 2025 and 21 in the second quarter.

    Total funding for OPMs has dropped by 97 percent since peak interest in early 2021, and venture capital investments in the companies have all but disappeared.

    Validated Insights’ head of market research, Brady Colby, told Inside Higher Ed, “It used to be that 2U or some other OPM could ink a 15-year agreement at a 70 percent revenue share.” “Those days are over. Institutions now have the upper hand at the negotiating table.”

    Ed-tech market analyst Phil Hill said the sector was “on life support.”

    Last year, federal regulators put the companies in their crosshairs over their aggressive recruitment practices.

    The Education Department is threatening to regulate the OPM space more strictly, primarily by updating guidance for third-party services. For years, OPMs have been able to share revenue with colleges.

    This strict regulatory environment has played a role in the sector’s downturn.

    In 2024, onetime market leader 2U declared bankruptcy. Fordham University filed to end its long-standing partnership with 2U early last month after seven years of what the institution described as “incompetence” and “negligence.”

    In May, Minnesota passed the first state law restricting OPM growth.

    This month, a student legal advocacy group sued provider Coursera and its partner, the University of Maryland Global Campus, challenging the legality of the OPM business model.

  • Hugging Face Hub for Fine-Tuned AI Models Surpassed One Million Listings

    Hugging Face Hub for Fine-Tuned AI Models Surpassed One Million Listings

    IBL News | New York

    The Hugging Face hosting platform surpassed 1 million listings of AI models trained on data to perform specific tasks or make predictions.

    The platform started as a chatbot app in 2016 and became an open-source hub for AI models and tools for developers and researchers in 2020.

    In a post on X, Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue wrote about how his company hosts many high-profile AI models, like “Llama, Gemma, Phi, Flux, Mistral, Starcoder, Qwen, Stable diffusion, Grok, Whisper, Olmo, Command, Zephyr, OpenELM, Jamba, Yi,” but also “999,984 others.”

    Delangue explained,
    “Contrary to the ‘1 model to rule them all’ fallacy, smaller specialized customized optimized models for your use-case, your domain, your language, your hardware and generally your constraints are better. As a matter of fact, something that few people realize is that there are almost as many models on Hugging Face that are private only to one organization—for companies to build AI privately, specifically for their use-cases.”

    Hugging Face’s exponential growth into a major AI platform hosting fine-tuned models shows the increased interest in the field.

    Developers and researchers worldwide have contributed their results, making Hugging Face a large ecosystem.

    For example, many different fine-tuned versions of Llama models are optimized for specific applications.

    At the top of the most downloads category, with a massive lead at 163 million downloads, is Audio Spectrogram Transformer from MIT, which classifies audio content like speech, music, and environmental sounds.

    Following that, with 54.2 million downloads, is BERT from Google, an AI language model that learns to understand English by predicting masked words and sentence relationships, enabling it to assist with various language tasks.

    At the top five AI models, users find OpenAI’s CLIP, which connects images and text, allowing it to classify or describe visual content using natural language.

  • 2U’s CEO, Paul S. Lalljie, Stepped Down After Less Than a Year

    2U’s CEO, Paul S. Lalljie, Stepped Down After Less Than a Year

    IBL News | New York

    2U’s CEO, Paul S. Lalljie, stepped down just weeks after the company emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

    According to the company’s announcement, Lalljie, who has been 2U’s CEO since late 2023, also resigned from his board seat.

    Lalljie [in the picture] served as chief executive for less than a year after succeeding 2U co-founder and longtime CEO Chip Paucek.

    2U’s Board appointed Matthew Norden as interim CEO and initiated a search for a permanent successor. Norden is currently 2U’s Chief Financial Officer and will continue in this role as well.

    “Leading 2U through this period has been both demanding and fulfilling,” said Lalljie.

    “With over a decade of experience at 2U, Matt Norden deeply understands 2U’s business, its culture, and critically, the needs of our incredible partners,” said Brian Napack, Executive Chairman of 2U’s Board.

    • News about 2U

     

  • Professors Create Digital Twins to Upload Course Materials 

    Professors Create Digital Twins to Upload Course Materials 

    IBL News | New York

    Another approach to dealing with course materials is to leverage GenAI to create a digital twin and get 24/7 answers to course-related questions.

    This AI-based knowledge base provides students access to the course repository and supplemental learning resources.

    The SecureTwin.AI platform is one of the competing companies.

    This digital twin responds to common queries (provided as prompts) and any other questions the student might have.

    The videos below demonstrate how a professor solved these challenges

    The instructor created a digital twin, populated it with course materials, and allowed students to ask questions via chat.

    This approach allowed him to gain the flexibility to juggle teaching and research.

  • Nvidia’s Competitor Cerebras Systems Delays Its Planned IPO

    Nvidia’s Competitor Cerebras Systems Delays Its Planned IPO

    IBL News | New York

    AI chipmaker and cloud services start-up Cerebras Systems filed its prospectus for an IPO on the Nasdaq last month.

    However, the news agency Reuters reported yesterday that the company will likely postpone its IPO after facing delays with a U.S. national security review on UAE-based tech conglomerate G42’s minority investment in the AI chipmaker.

    Cerebras competes with industry leader Nvidia in the lucrative artificial intelligence chip market.

    The Sunnyvale, California-based company—which will trade under the ticker symbol “CBRS”—seeks to capitalize on investor excitement for AI by conducting a hot IPO (Initial Public Offering).

    The company said its WSE-3 chip has more cores and memory than Nvidia’s popular H100.

    Nvidia’s graphics processing units are the industry’s choice for training and running AI models. But the AI semiconductor market is getting more crowded.

    Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are developing AI chips for their cloud services. AMD and Intel are also in this market.

    Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company makes the Cerebras chips. Cerebras warned investors that any possible supply chain disruptions may hurt the company.

    According to the filing, Cerebras had a net loss of $66.6 million on $136.4 million in sales in the first six months of 2024.

    The company reported a net loss of $127.2 million on revenue of $78.7 million for the full year of 2023.

    Last year, 83% of Cerebras’s revenue came from G42, a UAE-based AI firm that counts Microsoft as an investor.

    According to the filing, in May, G42 committed to purchasing $1.43 billion in orders from Cerebras before March 2025. G42 currently owns under 5% of Cerebras’ Class A shares, and the firm can purchase more depending on how much Cerebras product it buys.

    The largest investor in Cerebras is venture firm Foundation Capital, followed by Benchmark and Eclipse Ventures. According to the filing, Alpha Wave, Coatue, and Altimeter each own at least 5%.

    Other investors include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. The only individual who owns 5% or more is Andrew Feldman, the startup’s co-founder and CEO.

    Just 82 companies went public in the U.S. in the first half of the year, a slight uptick from last year.

    Even though conditions to go public are good — interest rates are falling, and tech stocks are trading up —

    Many companies are pushing I.P.O. plans to 2025, hoping to avoid any market volatility caused by the presidential election. “It’s almost like a wait-and-see environment,” said one analyst.

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

  • UCLA Unveiled a University-Wide Deployment of a Tailored ChatGPT Tool

    UCLA Unveiled a University-Wide Deployment of a Tailored ChatGPT Tool

    IBL News | New York

    The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) announced an agreement with OpenAI to deploy a tailored version of ChatGPT Enterprise to its students, faculty, researchers, and administrative staff this month.

    The institution noted that more universities in the University of California system could adopt this approach.

    Lucy Avetisyan, UCLA’s Associate Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Officer, announced in a press release that this fall, the institution will solicit project ideas to boost student success, research efforts, and institutional effectiveness and efficiency.

    OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap said, “We look forward to working closely with UCLA to find the best ways for ChatGPT to support a rich learning experience and cutting-edge research.”

    UCLA Chief AI Officer Chris Mattmann explained that AI can customize learning and practice materials, schedule appointments, and maintain calendars.

  • OpenAI Introduced “Canvas,” a New Interface for Working On Writing and Coding Projects

    OpenAI Introduced “Canvas,” a New Interface for Working On Writing and Coding Projects

    IBL News | New York

    Yesterday, OpenAI introduced “Canvas,” a new interface built with GPT-4o, in early beta, for working with ChatGPT on writing and coding projects in a separate window.

    It’s a new way of working together beyond the simple chat that allows users to create and refine ideas side by side or edit text or code while better understanding context. “It’s a new operating system for the AI age,” said one expert.

    ChatGPT’s new interface offers similar features to Anthropic’s Artifacts, launched in June, and the viral coding companion, Cursor. OpenAI is racing to match competitor offerings.

    Canvas was rolled out globally for ChatGPT Plus and Team users. Enterprise and Edu users will get access next week. OpenAI plans to make it available to all ChatGPT Free users when it’s out of beta.

    Users can also restore previous versions of their work by using the back button.

    Canvas opens automatically when ChatGPT detects a scenario that could be helpful. 

    Writing shortcuts include:

    • Suggest edits: ChatGPT offers inline suggestions and feedback.
    • Adjust the length: Edits the document length to be shorter or longer.
    • Change reading level: Adjusts the reading level, from Kindergarten to Graduate School.
    • Add final polish: Checks for grammar, clarity, and consistency.
    • Add emojis: Adds relevant emojis for emphasis and color.

    Coding shortcuts include:

    • Review code: ChatGPT provides inline suggestions to improve your code.
    • Add logs: Inserts print statements to help you debug and understand your code.
    • Add comments: Adds comments to the code to make it easier to understand.
    • Fix bugs: Detects and rewrites problematic code to resolve errors.
    • Port to a language: Translates your code into JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Java, C++, or PHP.

    ChatGPT is also getting a new “review code” button, which will suggest specific edits for the code in the window.