IBL News

Category: Top News

  • Top Organizations Start Hiring Managers for the Role of Chief AI Officer

    Top Organizations Start Hiring Managers for the Role of Chief AI Officer

    IBL News | New York

    In May this year, NASA named its first AI officer, David Salvagnini. This role expanded Salvagnini’s current role as chief data officer. “AI can accelerate the pace of discovery,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

    The chief AI Officer is a new role within companies intended to keep up with everything related to AI and implement it in certain operations.

    In addition to NASA, other brands such as Dell, LVMH, Morgan Stanley, and the Dubai government recently hired managers for this role.

    Experts say that major organizations are trying to fall behind when using AI tools more effectively.

    “For example, this person might find a ChatGPT prompt that makes the Finance team work 10% faster, get the Marketing team using Midjourney to work 25% faster, or implement AI tools to streamline HR processes and save teams hours a day,” wrote Rowan Cheung, founder of the popular newsletter “The Rundown AI.”

  • Google Introduces Gemini-Powered Lens in Chrome Desktop

    Google Introduces Gemini-Powered Lens in Chrome Desktop

    IBL News | New York

    Google is rolling out new Gemini-powered features for Chrome, such as Lens for desktop, tab compare for shopping, and AI-powered history search, as an opt-in feature for U.S. users this month.

    Lens allows the user to ask questions about what is seen —a video, item, or image—while browsing. It will live in the address bar and the three-dot menu. After clicking, the user selects a part of a page and asks more questions to get search results.

    With Lens—which is located in the address bar and the three-dot menu—users can tap on objects and ask questions through multi-search to find a similar item in different colors or brands. Depending on the question, users  might also get AI Overviews in answers.

     

  • The U.S. Department of Education Releases A Guide for Designing with AI

    The U.S. Department of Education Releases A Guide for Designing with AI

    IBL News | New York

    The U.S. Department of Education released this month “Designing for Education with Artificial Intelligence: An Essential Guide for Developers.”

    This 49-page guide describes how developers and educators can work together to strengthen trust.

    It also provides insights into how educational organizations or development teams can strengthen their approach to responsible AI in education.

    The guide builds on the Department’s prior report, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Teaching and Learning: Insights and Recommendations (2023 AI Report).

    • PDF Download

    • Webinar: The Power of a Clean Slate – Removing Barriers to Career-Connected Education

  • AI Startup Groq Gets a $2.8 Billion Valuation After Another Funding Round

    AI Startup Groq Gets a $2.8 Billion Valuation After Another Funding Round

    IBL News | New York

    Groq Inc. — a startup based in Mountain View, California, that designs semiconductors and software for AI systems — raised $640 million in new funding at a valuation of $2.8 billion.

    The founding round was led by BlackRock Inc. funds and included backing from the investment arms of Cisco Systems and Samsung Electronics.

    This Series D round almost triples its valuation from $1 billion in a funding round in 2021.

    The company has entered into competition against incumbents such as the leader Nvidia, as well as Intel Corp., Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

    Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Ross said in an interview on Bloomberg Television that Groq plans to use the funding to build about 108,000 language processing units, hire significantly, and consider some acquisitions.

    The company said that former Intel executive Stuart Pann is joining Groq as its chief operating officer.

    Additionally, Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, will become an adviser to the startup. Ross said LeCun’s push for open-source models, such as Meta’s Llama, allowed Groq to grow.

    “Groq would not exist today if not for open source,” Ross said. We built the best chips, but if we didn’t also have the software, we would not be able to demonstrate that.”

    Open-source models allow people to get into the AI business without having to train models.

  • “Google Has Illegally Maintained a Monopoly Over Online Search and Related Advertising”

    “Google Has Illegally Maintained a Monopoly Over Online Search and Related Advertising”

    IBL News | New York

    A federal judge in Washington ruled that Google illegally monopolized the search market and related advertising, through exclusive deals, setting itself as the default option on phones and browsers. This violates U.S. antitrust law, said Judge Amit Mehta.

    Google’s owner, Alphabet Inc., paid $26 billion to make its search engine the default option on smartphones and web browsers, effectively blocking any other competitor from succeeding in the market.

    In a 286-page ruling, Judge Mehta stated that Google has consistently raised the prices of online advertising without consequences by monopolizing distribution on phones and browsers.

    “The trial evidence firmly established that Google’s monopoly power, maintained by the exclusive distribution agreements, has enabled Google to increase text ads prices without any meaningful competitive constraint,” he wrote.

    Antitrust enforcers alleged that Google has paid Apple, Samsung Electronics, and others billions over decades for prime placement on smartphones and web browsers.

    This default position has allowed Google to become the most used search engine in the world and fueled more than $300 billion in annual revenue, largely generated by search ads.

    This case is giving the Federal Government a win in its first major antitrust case against a tech giant in over two decades.

    “This victory against Google is a historic win for the American people,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland. “No company — no matter how large or influential — is above the law. The Justice Department will continue to enforce the antitrust laws vigorously.”

    Google said it plans to appeal the decision.

  • Khan Academy Partners with Microsoft to Provide for Free ‘Khanmigo for Teachers’

    Khan Academy Partners with Microsoft to Provide for Free ‘Khanmigo for Teachers’

    IBL News | New York

    Khan Academy partnered with Microsoft to provide all U.S. educators free access to its chatbot Khanmigo for Teachers.

    Powered with Azure OpenAI Service, this tool has an intuitive interface that includes 20+ teacher activities without prompting.

    Khanmigo for Teachers is designed to reduce the time educators spend on burdensome preparatory tasks, such as delivering standards-aligned differentiated lesson plans, developing rubrics for expository essays, creating lesson hooks, suggesting student groupings, providing insights on student performance, recommending assignments, and refreshing instructors’ knowledge.

    These class prep tasks might consume over 50% of teachers’ time. The goal is to give them more time and focus with students.

    Microsoft also announced that it will integrate Khan Academy content into its free school communication app Microsoft Teams for Education, which, according to the company, is designed to support the needs of students, educators, staff, and guardians.

    Khan Academy’s content library covers math PreK-12 through early college, grammar, science, history, AP, SAT prep, and more.

    As part of this deal, Khan Academy added a new “Share to Teams” feature to its platform, enabling sharing of its content in student assignments.

    Teams composing functions.

     

    • Khanmigo for Teachers
    • Khanmigo for Teachers Quick Guide
    • Microsoft Copilot as an AI assistant for educators
    • Khanmigo in CBS’ 60 Minutes

  • OpenAI Trains Models to Explain Themselves Better

    OpenAI Trains Models to Explain Themselves Better

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI researchers released a new scientific paper this month revealing a new algorithm by which OpenAI’s GPT-4 and other LLMs can learn to explain them better to users.

    The paper “Prover-Verifier Games Improve Legibility of LLM Outputs” explains how OpenAI is improving the legibility of LLM outputs.

    “Understanding and addressing the performance/legibility balance can lead to more effective and trustworthy AI applications, benefiting a wide range of fields where precise and clear communication is essential,” say the researchers.

    OpenAI’s researchers used two custom fine-tuned GPT-4 family models and had them engage in several rounds of the game, in which they were asked to answer grade school math word problems with known answers.

  • Google Open-Sources ‘Project Oscar’, An AI Agent that Enriches Issues Reports

    Google Open-Sources ‘Project Oscar’, An AI Agent that Enriches Issues Reports

    IBL News | New York

    Google announced Project Oscar, an experimental open-source project maintainer of agents developed under the auspices of the Go project.

    Project Oscar focuses on processing incoming issues, such as matching questions to existing documentation.

    In other words, Go uses an AI agent that takes issue reports and enriches them by reviewing this data or invoking development tools to surface the information that matters most. The agent also interacts with whoever reports an issue to clarify anything, even if human maintainers are not online.

    “Oscar is very much an experiment. We don’t know yet where it will go or what we will learn. Even so, our first prototype, the @gabyhelp bot, has already had many successful interactions in the Go issue tracker,” said Google.

    Google said Project Oscar will soon be deployed to other open-source projects from Google.

     

  • Meta Now Allows Users to Create AI Characters to Reach More Fans

    Meta Now Allows Users to Create AI Characters to Reach More Fans

    IBL News | New York

    Meta started rolling out AI Studio in the U.S. this week. This tool, built with Llama 3.1, allows users to discover AI characters and create an AI agent based on their interests as an extension of themselves to reach more fans. AI’s character name, personality, tone, and tagline can be customized.

    Instagram users with many followers can make AI can answer messages on their behalf.

    Mark Zuckerberg expects there will eventually be “hundreds of millions” of creator-made AIs on Meta’s apps.

    Meta previously experimented with AI chatbots that took on the personalities of celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Kendall Jenner.

    AI Studio is available at ai.meta.com/ai-studio or through the Instagram app.

    There are a variety of prompt templates to start with, such as AI that teaches to cook, helps with Instagram captions, or generates memes to make friends laugh.

    Meta created a step-by-step guide with expert tips and best practices.

    These are some of the AI characters recently created by the community, according to Meta:

    > “Creators can customize their AI based on their Instagram content, topics to avoid, and links they want it to share.”

    > “Through the professional dashboard in the Instagram app, creators can turn auto-replies on and off and even decide who their AI replies to. Responses from creator AIs are clearly labeled, so there’s full transparency for fans.”

    > “Creators like Chris Ashley, Violet Benson, Don Allen, and Kane Kallaway have already created their AIs.” Tap the Message button with the ✨icon on your Instagram profile (accessible via mobile only).”

    Phone screen showing the AI character options

    GIF of a phone screen showing an AI response from a creator AI

     

  • Meta and Mistral Released Their New Open-Source Text-Only, Not Multimodal, LLMs

    Meta and Mistral Released Their New Open-Source Text-Only, Not Multimodal, LLMs

    IBL News | New York

    Last week, Meta and Mistral launched two new open-source LLMs that are much more capable, with higher performance and better pricing.

    Llama 3.1 405b is Meta’s biggest model, containing 405 billion parameters. According to the company, it is competitive with leading LLMs like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

    Available to download or use on cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, Llama 3.1 405b is currently being used on WhatsApp and Meta.ai.

    Like Mistral Large 2, Meta’s latest model can perform various tasks, from coding and answering basic math questions to summarizing documents in eight languages (English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi, Spanish, and Thai).

    It’s not multimodal — and neither is Mistral Large 2. It’s text-only, meaning it can’t, for example, answer questions about an image.

    In this regard, OpenAI is far ahead of the competition in multimodal AI systems that simultaneously process images and text.

    In its announcement, the Paris-based AI startup Mistral said that Large 2 is “significantly more capable in code generation, mathematics, and reasoning, as well as provides much stronger multilingual support and advanced function calling capabilities.”

    “It performs on par with leading models such as GPT-4o, Claude 3 Opus, and Llama 3 405B,” said Mistral.

    The model has a 128,000 token window (roughly a 300-page book in a single prompt.)

    Additionally, Mistral Large 2 is trained to acknowledge when it cannot find solutions or has insufficient information to provide a confident answer.

    This model is available via la Plateforme under the name mistral-large-2407. It can also be used on Google Vertex AI, Amazon Bedrock, Azure AI Studio, and IBM Watsonx.ai. Weights for the instruct model are available and are also hosted on HuggingFace.

    It is not fully open source, as any commercial application needs a paid license.