Category: Top News

IBL News | New York

The new start-up, Safe Superintelligence (SSI), co-founded by Ilya Sutskever and currently with ten employees, raised $1 billion in cash on a valuation of $5 billion.

Investors included top VC firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global and SV Angel. NFDG, an investment partnership run by Nat Friedman and SSI’s Chief Executive Daniel Gross, also participated.

The funds will be used to acquire computing power and build a small team of researchers and engineers between Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. SSI plans to spend a couple of years doing R&D on the product before bringing it to market.

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s former chief scientist and one of the most influential technologists in AI [in the center of the picture], told Reuters that his company plans to develop safe artificial intelligence systems that surpass human capabilities.

AI safety refers to preventing AI from causing harm amid fears that rogue AI could act against humanity’s interests or cause human extinction.

IBL News | New York

Anthropic launched an enterprise subscription plan yesterday for its AI chatbot Claude,

Claude Enterprise, an alternative proposal to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise, offers a 500K context window (that can be extended to Projects and Artifacts), SSO and domain capture, role-based permissions, audit logs, increased capacity, admin tools, and GitHub integration to work on codebases with Claude.

“GitHub is the first native integration we’re building to connect Claude to your most important data sources, enabling Claude to provide more relevant and insightful assistance,” said the company. This feature is currently in beta for early Enterprise plan users.

Claude Enterprise allows businesses to upload internal knowledge to analyze information and answer questions, create graphics and simple web pages, provide deep function-specific guidance, or act as a company-specific AI assistant.

The 500,000 tokens window means that Anthropic’s models can process up to 200,000 lines of code, dozens of 100-page documents, or a two-hour audio transcript in a single prompt.

IBL News | New York

Google rolled out a feature that allows Gmail mobile app users on Android to chat directly with the AI assistant Gemini about their emails. The company promised that this Gmail Q&A feature will come “soon” to Apple’s iOS.

To activate Gmail Q&A on Android, administrators must ensure that smart features and personalization settings are enabled in the Admin console.

In June, the search giant made Gemini available on Gmail’s side panel for $20 monthly. It allows users to summarize emails, ask questions, and find specific information.

Traditionally, the search bar at the top of Google was used to find information in Gmail. The Gemini button will be added to the search bar to access emails.

The company plans to add Gemini to its existing products, including Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calendar, and more — but it all comes at a price.

It’s unlikely that Gmail Q&A will come to free Gmail users anytime soon.

IBL News | New York

Salesforce plans to launch its platform in September, during its Dreamforce conference, to create, test, and scale custom AI agents.

It is called Agentforce and uses the company’s Einstein1 low-code platform.

“With Agentforce, your custom AI agents achieve greater accuracy by securely grounding in all your enterprise data with Data Cloud, take action seamlessly by leveraging Flow automation, connect effortlessly to your enterprise APIs through MuleSoft, test with confidence in Sandboxes before deployment, use in your apps, web, social, and Slack,” wrote Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff.

He said his company will deploy millions of AI-powered “agents,” intending to reach 1 billion in the business wild.

Build your own Gen AI Agents with Salesforce’s new Agentforce platform—anyone can create, test, and scale custom Gen AI Agents using our unique Einstein1 low-code platform—deeply integrated with our Einstein1 platform. The future of AI Agent and App Dev is in your hands!

With… pic.twitter.com/h8vbbQT0WE

— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) August 12, 2024

New: Salesforce is deploying millions of AI powered “agents” with a goal of reaching 1 billion out in the business wild. @salesforce co-founder, chairman and CEO @Benioff with the deets.

(v/@YahooFinance⬇️) https://t.co/gLcyNELw7q pic.twitter.com/ZPSapJffa0

— Brian Sozzi (@BrianSozzi) August 29, 2024

IBL News | New York

Apple and NVIDIA are in talks to invest in OpenAI at a valuation of over $100 billion. Microsoft, which already owns 49% of OpenAI, may also participate.

The New York Times reported that Thrive Capital would lead the deal should it happen.

Early this year, Thrive Capital led a deal that valued OpenAI at over $80 billion.

This new round takes place as OpenAI is said to be on track to lose $5 billion by year-end as it expands its AI training and staffing efforts.

OpenAI runs and trains its generative AI models primarily on Nvidia GPUs, while Apple agreed to integrate ChatGPT into iOS as part of Apple’s upcoming AI features.

IBL News | New York

OpenAI said ChatGPT has more than 200 million weekly active users, doubling the 100 million last November.

The company’s spokesperson, Taya Christianson, confirmed the number and added that the API usage has doubled following the release of the cheaper model GPT-4o Mini.

She also said that 92% of Fortune 500 companies use its products.

“People are using our tools now as a part of their daily lives, making a real difference in areas like healthcare and education—whether it’s helping with routine tasks, solving hard problems, or unlocking creativity,” CEO Sam Altman said in a statement to Axios.

On the other hand, this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the company’s AI assistant has reached over 400 million monthly active users and 185 million weekly active users — despite not rolling out in the UK, Brazil, or EU yet.

The adoption of its open-source Llama models has also grown sharply. With the release of Llama 3.1 in May and July of this year, usage at the major cloud service providers doubled.

IBL News | New York

After previewing them at the I/O 2024 conference in May, Google is rolling out Gems to Gemini Advanced, Business, and Enterprise subscribers.

Gems are the Google’s version of OpenAI’s GPT. They are described as custom versions of Gemini that users can create to act as experts on topics and remember detailed instructions.

The user enters a paragraph of “Instructions” and has Gemini rewrite it into a more structured format that lays out Purpose, Goals, and Behavior Rules, along with tone, maximum sentence length for responses, or even request emojis throughout replies.

Everything can be further edited. After naming and saving, they appear in the Gem manager.

Gemini offers some premade Gems:

• Learning coach helps break down complex topics, making them easier to understand.
• Brainstormer provides easy inspiration, from fresh ideas for a themed party to the perfect gift for an upcoming birthday.
• Career guide unlocks your career potential with detailed plans to refine your skills and achieve goals.
• Writing editor can elevate your writing through clear, constructive feedback on everything from grammar to structure.
• A coding partner levels up your coding skills and can help you build projects and learn as you go.

In addition, Google is rolling out Imagen 3, its latest image-generation model, with a photorealistic quality.

IBL News | New York

A study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School showed that High school students who use generative AI to prepare for math exams performed worse on the tests than those who didn’t use the tools.

UPenn’s report, which involved nearly a thousand students, found that access to generative AI tutors can improve student performance in practicing math problems. However, copying and pasting answers leads students to engage less with the material.

Experts say that an ideal scenario would involve a personal tutor for every student, but AI-driven learning still faces many hurdles. However, many educators have struggled to find the best ways to incorporate AI into the classroom.

“A key remaining question is how generative AI affects learning, namely, how humans acquire new skills as they perform tasks.”

This is UPenn’s explanation:

“In a field experiment, we deployed and evaluated two GPT-based tutors, one that mimics a standard ChatGPT interface (called GPT Base) and one with prompts designed to safeguard learning (called GPT Tutor).

These tutors comprise about 15% of the curriculum in each of the three grades. Consistent with prior work, our results show that access to GPT-4 significantly improves performance (48% improvement for GPT Base and 127% for GPT Tutor).

However, we additionally find that when access is subsequently taken away, students actually perform worse than those who never had access (17% reduction for GPT Base).

That is, access to GPT-4 can harm educational outcomes. These negative learning effects are largely mitigated by the safeguards included in GPT Tutor.

Our results suggest that students attempt to use GPT-4 as a “crutch” during practice problem sessions, and when successful, perform worse on their own. Thus, to maintain long-term productivity, we must be cautious when deploying generative AI to ensure humans continue to learn critical skills.”

IBL News | New York

Anthropic announced yesterday that it made Artifacts available for all Claude.ai users on Free, Pro, and Team plans. In addition, users can now create and view Artifacts on their iOS and Android apps.

According to the company, since it launched in June as a feature preview, users have created tens of millions of Artifacts.

Artifacts enable a dedicated window on the right side of the screen to instantly see, iterate, and build on the work created with Claude.

Examples of Artifacts are:

• Developers can make architecture diagrams from codebases
• Product managers can create interactive prototypes for rapid feature testing
• Marketers can design campaign dashboards with performance metrics

IBL News | New York

Walmart’s CEO Doug McMillon said on the Q2 financial earnings call with analysts last week that the company is using AI to dramatically improve its productivity and save money, finding “tangible ways” to leverage this technology to improve customer, member, and employee experiences.

The multibillion-dollar company is exploring generative AI in all areas of its business ops.

One area where Walmart uses its product catalog is its product catalog, where multiple LLMs are being implemented to update and improve over 850 million product catalog entries 100 times faster than human-led methods.

“Without the use of generative AI, this work would have required nearly 100 times the current headcount to complete in the same amount of time, and for associates picking online orders, showing them high-quality images of product packages helps them quickly find what they’re looking for,” McMillan said.

Also, customers can now use AI-powered search and a new shopping assistant on Walmart’s app and website—it even provides advice for questions like “Which TV is best for watching sports?”

Walmart Inc. plans to continue experimenting with AI globally across all parts of its business.