Category: Top News

IBL News | New York

Runway ML released its latest text-to-video model called Gen-3 Alpha Turbo this month.

The New York City-based company said this AI model is seven times faster and half the cost of its predecessor, Gen-3 Alpha, which gained attention for its realistic video generation.

It costs $10 for 1,000 credits, or $0.01 per credit, and includes a free trial.

‘Gen-3 Alpha Turbo’ builds on the capabilities of Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha, explained Runway co-founder and CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela.

Runway competed with Pika Labs, Luma AI’s Dream Machine, and Kling in the AI video generation market.

OpenAI’s Sora is still out of reach to the public.

Users have found themselves impressed with its combination of speed and quality.

Like most competitors, Runway is facing scrutiny over the sources of its training data, particularly following allegations that the company may have used copyrighted content from YouTube for training purposes without authorization.

In this regard, legal battles over using copyrighted materials in AI training are intensifying.

IBL News | New York

Coursera announced seven new GenAI-focused courses, specializations, and certificates, eight enhanced entry-level professional certificates, and an expansion of its GenAI Academy.

“White-collar workers must stand out by proving their GenAI skills to secure jobs and advance in their careers,” wrote Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO at Coursera, in a blog post.

On the tech performance side, Coursera upgraded its AI-based guidance Coach, replacing its popup with a sidebar for paid learners.

“This tool enables learners to ask questions to clarify material and stay on track, summarize key takeaways for better note-taking, practice for quizzes and tests to solidify knowledge and identify gaps, and explore how their learning aligned with current or future goals,” said Jeff Maggioncalda.

Coursera said it has over 2 million enrollments across 250+ GenAI courses and Guided Projects on its platform.

Courses, specializations, and certificates

IBL News | New York

A public-private collaboration announced this month will allow educators in Californian colleges and universities to gain certification in generative AI with NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Institute.

“We want to train a workforce of the future and also excite students and adults who are out of the workforce about opportunities for the future,” said Stewart Knox, secretary of the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency.

The AI-education initiative is based on NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Institute’s University Ambassador Program, which connects instructors with high-quality teaching kits, workshop content, and GPU-accelerated workstations in the cloud.

NVIDIA is already working on multiple projects across California, helping students and professionals in biotechnology and life sciences, advanced manufacturing, media, and entertainment.

The University of California and California State University schools have embarked on several workforce, climate, and community-based projects.

An example is San José State University, which evaluates how the NVIDIA Omniverse development platform could support the creation of digital twins — 3D virtual representations of real-world systems — for San José.

“As a world leader in AI computing, NVIDIA is a natural partner to prepare the future of California’s workforce,” said Amy Tong, secretary of the California Government Operations Agency.”

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

 

• NVIDIA’s resources for educators

IBL News | New York

OpenAI launched fine-tuning for GPT-4o yesterday, allowing developers to customize the structure and tone of responses or follow domain-specific instructions.

Fine-tuning was one of the most requested features. It can significantly impact model performance and cost reduction.

OpenAI announced it offers 1 million training tokens daily for free for every organization through September 23.GPT-4o fine-tuning training costs $25 per million tokens, and inference is $3.75 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens.

For GPT-4o mini, OpenAI offers 2 million training tokens daily for free through September 23.

One featured example is Genie, an AI software engineering assistant that can autonomously identify and resolve bugs, build features, and refactor code in collaboration with users.

It is powered by a fine-tuned GPT-4o model trained on examples of real software engineers at work, enabling the model to learn to respond in a specific way.

The model is also trained to output in specific formats, such as patches that could be easily committed to codebases.

IBL News | New York

Google rolled out a new AI-powered mobile voice assistant called Gemini Live this month.

It works a lot like ChatGPT’s voice chat feature, with ten voices to choose from and the ability to speak conversationally, even interrupting and pausing the conversation.

Google made this tool available for Gemini Advanced app users ($20-a-month subscription on Android phones) and implemented it as the default assistant on the Google Pixel 9 smartphone.

Gemini Live works in the background or when the device is locked and hands-free (“Just long press on the power button or say, “Hey Google” and Gemini will appear, ready to help.”). It’s powered by Gemini 1.5 Flash.

Google is launching new extensions in the coming weeks, including Keep, Tasks, Utilities, Calendar, and expanded features on YouTube Music.

The search giant provided this example:

“Let’s say you’re hosting a dinner party: Have Gemini dig out that lasagna recipe Jenny sent you in your Gmail, and ask it to add the ingredients to your shopping list in Keep. And since your guests are your college friends, ask Gemini to “make a playlist of songs that remind me of the late ‘90s.” Without needing too many details, Gemini gets the gist of what you want and delivers.”

 

IBL News | New York

Anthropic, the creator of the Claude model, introduced its API prompt caching this month.

This feature remembers the context between API calls and allows developers to avoid repeating prompts.

Prompt caching is available in public beta on Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3 Haiku, with support for Claude 3 Opus coming soon.

According to the company, this feature also significantly reduces costs and latency by up to 90%.

For Claude 3.5 Sonnet, writing a prompt to be cached will cost $3.75 per 1 million tokens (MTok), but using a cached prompt will cost $0.30 per MTok.

The base price of an input to the Claude 3.5 Sonnet model is $3/MTok, so paying a little more upfront is expected to yield a 10x savings increase.

Claude 3 Haiku users will pay $0.30/MTok to cache and $0.03/MTok when using stored prompts.

However, as AI influencer Simon Willison noted on X, Anthropic’s cache only has a 5-minute lifetime and is refreshed upon each use.
Anthropic suggests using prompt caching on:

• “Conversational agents: Reduce cost and latency for extended conversations, especially those with long instructions or uploaded documents.
• Coding assistants: Improve autocomplete and codebase Q&A by keeping a summarized version of the codebase in the prompt.
• Large document processing: Incorporate complete long-form material, including images, in your prompt without increasing response latency.
• Detailed instruction sets: Share extensive lists of instructions, procedures, and examples to fine-tune Claude’s responses. Developers often include a few examples in their prompts, but with prompt caching, you can perform even better by including dozens of diverse examples of high-quality outputs.
• Agentic search and tool use: Enhance performance for scenarios involving multiple rounds of tool calls and iterative changes, where each step typically requires a new API call.
• Talk to books, papers, documentation, podcast transcripts, and other long-form content: Bring any knowledge base alive by embedding the entire document(s) into the prompt and letting users ask it questions.”

Simon Last, Co-founder at Notion, said that his company’s AI assistant added prompt caching to reduce costs, increase speed, and optimize internal operations.

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