Category: Top News

IBL News | New York

2U’s filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy might prompt the company’s 260 higher education institutions partners and customers to rework their contracts or finally leave OPM, experts told Inside Higher Ed.

Moreover, the bankruptcy could give 2U the chance to renegotiate the current contracts.

The news site also wrote that the 2U revenue-sharing model may no longer be possible under pending regulations from the Department of Education.

2U’s CEO, Paul Lalljie, expects the Chapter 11 process to be completed by the end of September, if not earlier.

If the U.S. bankruptcy court approves the deal, the restructuring agreement will take the company private, allow 2U to reduce its debt by more than half, and provide $110 million in new capital, extending its runway by two years.

Longtime opponents of OPMs, including the Center for American Progress, the Project on Predatory Student Lending, and the Student Borrower Protection Center, said the filing was an easy way out for a company that is long overdue.

These opponents of the OPM model always said it encourages dishonest recruiting methods to attract more students and more profits.

In 2021, 2U Inc. acquired from Harvard and MIT the edx.org platform, paying $800 million. The edX sale straddled 2U with almost $5oo million in debt. By 2022, edX became 2U’s flagship brand and platform.

“The decision to file for bankruptcy protection raises further questions about the long-term sustainability of edX — which continues to offer free, on-demand courses taught by faculty members at Harvard,” wrote The Harvard Crimson.

Currently, edx offers 3,300 courses, including CS50, Harvard’s flagship computer science course.

Harvard and MIT used the $800 million from the sale to launch Axim Collaborative in 2023, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting innovation in education. Axim has funded 15 partnerships with universities, including community and historically Black colleges.

IBL News | New York

Yesterday, OpenAI announced SearchGPT, a prototype of new search features that combines the strength of its AI models with real-time information across the internet.

It provides timely answers with relevant sources, becoming a meaningful threat to Google, which rushed to add AI features across its search engine.

It also puts OpenAI in more direct competition with the startup Perplexity, which labels itself as an AI “answer” engine.

Powered by the GPT-4 family of models, this AI-powered search engine was launched only to 10,000 test users and publishers — among them The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, and The Verge. OpenAI said that “in the future,” it will be integrated into ChatGPT. Now, there is a waitlist. 

• SearchGPT prominently cites and links to publishers in searches. Responses have clear, in-line, named attribution and links.

• It allows users to search in a more natural, intuitive way by asking follow-up questions or clicking the sidebar to open other relevant links.

• It provides visual responses with images and video.

 

IBL News | New York

Publicly traded online learning company 2U Inc., owner of edX.org, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in New York while being taken private in a deal that will wipe out about $459 million, or more than half its $945 million debt.

As a private company, 2U will be backed by its existing lenders and noteholders, including funds managed by Mudrick Capital Management, LP, Greenvale Capital LLP, and Bayside Capital, LLC.

The Lanham, Maryland-based company ensured that “all educational programs and services will continue seamlessly with no interruption for partners or learners.”

The agreement with its debtholders included infusing $110 million of new capital into 2U. 

To implement the transaction, 2U and its subsidiaries filed voluntary “prepackaged” Chapter 11 cases in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. 2U expects to complete the Chapter 11 process by the end of September.

“This financing demonstrates the investors’ deep belief in 2U and commitment to its essential mission,” said Brian Napack, Strategic Advisor to the investment group and former CEO of John Wiley (WLY).

“Today marks an important milestone for 2U. New capital and a healthier balance sheet will enable us to continue our long-standing mission,” said Paul Lalljie, Chief Executive Officer of 2U.

IBL News | New York

D2L Brightspace’s learning platform showcased an early version of Lumi, its AI feature for building content, assessments, and activities, during its annual gathering this month.

The Toronto–based LMS described Lumi this way:

IBL News | New York

NVIDIA and French startup Mistral AI released Mistral NeMo 12B this week, a new open-source LLM with 12 billion parameters and 128,000 token context window.

It is intended for developers who customize and deploy enterprise applications supporting chatbots, multilingual tasks, coding, and summarization without extensive cloud resources.

The open model license, Apache 2.0, allows enterprises to integrate Mistral NeMo into commercial applications seamlessly.

“We have developed a model with unprecedented accuracy, flexibility, high efficiency, and enterprise-grade support and security thanks to NVIDIA AI Enterprise deployment,” said Guillaume Lample, cofounder and chief scientist of Mistral AI.

Mistral NeMo is trained on the NVIDIA DGX Cloud AI platform and comes packaged as an NVIDIA NIM inference microservice. To advance and optimize the process, NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM for accelerated inference performance and the NVIDIA NeMo development platform was also used.

Designed to fit on the memory of a single NVIDIA L40S, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090, or NVIDIA RTX 4500 GPU, the Mistral NeMo NIM offers high efficiency, low compute cost, and enhanced security and privacy.

IBL News | New York

Goldman Sachs investment bank published a 31-page report titled “Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?” wonders if this technology is a bubble and states that this is “unreliable, unsustainable, requires an entire rebuild of America’s power grid, and is most decidedly not the future.”

“Tech giants and beyond are set to spend over $1tn on AI capex in coming years, with so far little to show for it. So, will this large spend ever pay off?” questions Goldman Sachs.

The investment bank states, “The technology isn’t designed to solve the complex problems that would justify the costs, which may not decline as many expect.”

“Even if it does, we explore whether the current chips shortage and looming power shortage will constrain AI growth.”

Goldman Sachs mentions that utility companies will have to spend nearly 40% more in the next three years to keep up with the demand from hyperscalers like Google and Microsoft.

It also adds that only about 5% of companies report using generative AI in regular production.

The report includes an interview with economist Daron Acemoglu of MIT, an Institute Professor who published a paperback in May called “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI” that argued that “the upside to US productivity and, consequently, GDP growth from generative AI will likely prove much more limited than many forecasters expect.”

Acemoglu declared that “truly transformative changes won’t happen quickly, and few—if any—will likely occur within the next 10 years.”

“AI’s ability to affect global productivity is low because “many of the tasks that humans currently perform are multi-faceted and require real-world interaction, which AI won’t be able to improve anytime soon materially.”

Newsletter: Goldman Sachs has called BS on Generative AI, and I believe that it’s time that everybody follows suit – generative AI is unreliable, unsustainable, requires an entire rebuild of America’s power grid, and is most decidedly not the future.https://t.co/YULEkHYBFP

— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) July 8, 2024

IBL News | New York

Axim Collaborative, the organization behind the Open edX platform, announced the launch of its latest release called Redwood.

This new version includes a new data and analytics system called Aspects Reports, which is not currently installed by default. As data visualization tool, it uses Superset.

It provides access to near real-time course and instance data, tracking progress and success metrics. The course-level dashboard displays enrollment, engagement, and performance information for all learners in a course. There is also an at-risk learner dashboard for students who might not complete the course.

The new Content Tagging feature on Redwood allows course authors to add tags, such as skills or competencies, to their course content.

Authors can tag individual course components like videos and problems or full units, sections, and subsections.

It also supports any third-party taxonomy.

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The Studio authoring environment got a facelift with a redesigned, sleeker, modernized UI. Every page in Studio has been converted to the Paragon design system.
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This release has reintroduced the in-course navigation sidebar, which displays the user’s current course section, subsection, and unit.

 

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Redwood now includes a Course Search to find content, making it easier for authors to find content they wish to edit or reuse. Results appear at the block, unit, subsection, and section level and can be filtered by tags and content type.

When used together, content tagging, course search, and content copy/paste allow course teams to easily find, manage, and reuse content.

The copy/paste feature enables authors to copy any part of the course and paste it into any other course. Authors can copy individual course components like videos and problems or full units, subsections, and sections.

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IBL News | New York

OpenAI released GPT-4o mini yesterday, its latest cost-effective small model. It hosts text and vision in the API, supporting text, image, video, and audio inputs and outputs.

GPT-4o mini will replace GPT-3.5 Turbo, OpenAI’s smallest model. The model has a context window of 128,000 tokens, roughly the length of a book, supports up to 16K output tokens per request, and a knowledge cutoff of October 2023.

It is priced over 60% cheaper than GPT-3.5 Turbo, at 15 cents per 1M input tokens and 60 cents per 1M output tokens (roughly the equivalent of 2500 pages in a standard book).

The company claims that GPT-4o mini outperforms industry-leading small AI models, such as Llama 3 8b, Claude Haiku, and Gemini 1.5 Flash, on text and vision reasoning tasks.

Small AI models are becoming more popular for developers due to their speed and cost efficiencies compared to larger models, such as GPT-4 Omni or Claude 3.5 Sonnet. They’re a useful option for developers’ high-volume tasks.

IBL News | New York

Groq AI, a startup that develops high-speed processing and low-latency performance chips, released an app called Groqbook this month that generates entire books in seconds from a one-line prompt.

It works well on nonfiction books and generates each chapter within seconds.

It uses Llama3 on Groq. Specifically, it mixes Llama3-8b and Llama3-70b, utilizing the larger model to generate the structure and the smaller of the two to create the content.

Currently, the model only uses the context of the section title to generate the chapter content.

Groq said that “in the future, this will be expanded to the fuller context of the book to allow Groqbook to generate quality fiction books as well.”

Groq’s CTO demoed this app last week at New York’s Imagine AI Live Event, which IBL News covered.

 

IBL News | New York

OpenAI set up a five-tiered classification system to track its progress towards AGI, that is, AI software capable of outperforming humans.

An OpenAI spokesperson told Bloomberg that the San Francisco–based research lab shared this new classification system with employees this month. Later, it will be shared with investors and others outside the organization.

These are the tiers:

Level 1: Chatbots, AI that can interact in conversational language with people

Level 2: Reasoners, human-level problem solving

Level 3: Agents, systems that can take actions like basic problem-solving tasks and humans with a doctorate-level education

Level 4: Innovators, AI that can aid in innovation

Level 5: Organizations, AI that can do the work of an organization

OpenAI executives told employees that the company believes it is currently on the first level but on the cusp of reaching the second.