Category: Top News

IBL News | New York

ACI Learning, a Denver, Colorado-based IT, cyber, and audit training leader, launched myACI, a personalized enterprise learning system for IT teams.

It’s a skills-building platform that provides an adaptive learning experience, supports industry-recognized certifications, and includes an AI-powered career mentor.

The company said that the company has an 80% content completion rate.

“With myACI, we are shifting the company’s market-defining content offerings to a full-service, scalable solution enabling individuals and organizations to leverage amazing training, real-world labs, and integrated AI mentoring to understand and gain the critical skills needed to succeed today,”  said Brett Shively, CEO of ACI Learning.

With over 1,000 courses and labs in IT, cyber, and audit, ACI Learning serves over 3,000 customers and 250,000 subscribers worldwide.

According to the company, key features of myACI include:

• “AI Mentor: This innovative tool empowers learners to identify skill gaps for targeted growth, engage deeply with personalized learning insights, and build custom course curriculum and content tailored to individual needs — without leaving the platform.
• Skill Labs: With over 5,000 custom labs, the market-leading Skill Labs offer a dynamic and immersive environment to provide learners with hands-on practice and real-world application. Unlike traditional simulations, Skill Labs replicate authentic scenarios and challenges, allowing learners to hone skills in a genuine and practical setting.
• Leader Dashboards and Reporting: A comprehensive view for leaders to track learners’ progress, customize training paths, and add internal training modules. The platform also allows organizations to upload internal training modules and specialized learning paths tailored to team members’ needs.
• Gamified Learning: A fun and motivating way to track progress and achievements, encouraging continuous learning and engagement. Gamification features include skill points, badges, and credentials.
• Secure Integrations: myACI securely integrates with all existing technologies, including any existing Learning Management Systems (LMS), and can scale to any size team and organization.
• Improved Content Catalog: A thoughtfully designed catalog that curates content based on individual preferences and past use, making it easier for users to find relevant learning paths.”

• myACI on LinkedIn

IBL News | New York

The French AI startup Mistral released this week its first model for coding, dubbed Codestral. It can be downloaded on HuggingFace.

Like other code-generating models, Codestral is designed to help developers write and interact with code.

As a 22B model, Codestral has been trained on a diverse dataset of 80+ programming languages, including Python, Java, C, C++, JavaScript, and Bash. It also performs well on more specific ones like Swift and Fortran.

Codestral can complete coding functions, write tests, and “fill in” partial code. It can also answer questions about a codebase in English.

Mistral’s open-source license prohibits commercial use of the code. Techcrunch wrote that the reason could be that Codestral was trained partly on copyrighted content.

According to a June 2023 Stack Overflow poll, over 44% of developers said that they use AI tools. However, security researchers have warned that such tools can amplify existing bugs and security issues in software projects.

IBL News | New York

Anthropic announced yesterday that it is releasing a new feature called “tool use” for its chatbot, Claude 3. This release allows people to create various assistants or agents.

The feature enables Claude 3 to interact with external tools and APIs, perform tasks, manipulate data, and provide more dynamic responses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0LLVS_a46Q&t=2s

IBL News | New York

Zapier launched this month an experimental AI workspace where users can teach bots to work across over 6,000 apps, like Google Sheets, Slack, and Shopify.

Powered with ChatGPT, this solution, Zapier Central, works through a Chrome extension that allows users to chat with any website, summarize and translate page content, and take action via personalized AI bots in thousands of apps.

“People are using Zapier Central bots to save time in sales, marketing, operations, engineering, and more,” said Zapier on its Chrome Web Store page.

These are some use cases, according to Zapier:

• Draft a cold email based on a LinkedIn profile.
• Perform sentiment analysis on a YouTube transcript and save it to a spreadsheet.
• Add data about sales leads on the page to your CRM
• Post a team update in Slack based on a change log in your project management app
• Generate a list of key takeaways from any blog post and save that to a document

Users can use Zapier Central for free and upgrade it. A Zapier account is required to use Central and this Chrome extension.

Zapier Central’s Chrome Extension is live.

You can now take your personal AI assistants anywhere on the Internet.

Chat with any web page, summarize and transform content and take action in 6,000+ apps like Google Sheets, Slack and Shopify—all without leaving your current tab pic.twitter.com/FBsxTje0yd

— Andy Berman (@berman66) May 15, 2024

How to create a meeting screening AI bot with @Zapier Central in under 2 mins 🤯

Try it here https://t.co/gRv57tc6Px pic.twitter.com/UBzvvXYY55

— Andrew Kordampalos (@ckor) May 17, 2024

IBL News | New York

Jan Leike, the leading researcher who resigned from OpenAI earlier this month before publicly criticizing the company’s approach to AI safety, has been hired by Anthropic.

Leike was co-leading OpenAI’s Superalignment team, which intended to solve the core technical challenges of controlling superintelligent AI in the next four years, 

OpenAI’s leadership, headed by Sam Altman, recently dissolved this team.

In a post on X, Jan Leike said that his team at Anthropic will focus on various aspects of AI safety and security and automated alignment research.

I’m excited to join @AnthropicAI to continue the superalignment mission!

My new team will work on scalable oversight, weak-to-strong generalization, and automated alignment research.

If you’re interested in joining, my dms are open.

— Jan Leike (@janleike) May 28, 2024

Anthropic has often attempted to position itself as more safety-focused than its rival company, OpenAI.

Its researchers are currently working on techniques to control large-scale AI behavior in predictable and desirable ways.

Years ago, Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, who was once the VP of research at OpenAI, split with OpenAI after a disagreement over the company’s direction — namely OpenAI’s growing commercial focus.

Amodei launched Anthropic with some ex-OpenAI employees, including OpenAI’s former policy lead, Jack Clark.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has formed a new committee to oversee “critical” safety and security decisions related to the company’s projects and operations.

OpenAI decided to staff the committee with company insiders — including Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO — rather than outside observers.

IBL News | New York

Elon Musk’s owned xAI announced yesterday that it raised $6B Series B from investors, such as Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, and Kingdom Holding, at a pre-money valuation of $18 billion.

In November 2023, xAI released the chatbot Grok-1 as open-source (but without any training code). Months later, it announced the Grok-1.5 model with long context capability and Grok-1.5V with image understanding.

“The funds from the round will be used to take xAI’s first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies,” said the company. xAI is hiring now for numerous roles.

xAI’s pitch revolves around developing “advanced AI systems that are truthful, competent, and maximally beneficial for all of humanity” after “understanding the true nature of the universe.”

xAI partners closely with X Corp to bring its technology to more than 500 million users of the X app.

IBL News | New York

OpenAI updated its signature ChatGPT to import files—including tables and charts—directly from Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive and its apps, such as Google Sheets, Docs, Slides, and Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.

This capability, which understands datasets for analysis improvements, will be available in OpenAI’s new flagship model, GPT-4o, over the coming weeks for ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Enterprise users.

IBL News | New York

Praktika, a Palo Alto, California–based start-up that lets users create personalized AI avatars as 1-1 tutors for learning languages through its app, secured a $35.5 million Series A funding round led by Blossom Capital.

The round follows a $2.5 million seed fundraiser by Creator Ventures and Blue Wire Capital.

Praktika claims it has generated $20 million in the last year, with 1.2 million active monthly users.

AI avatars tailor lessons for users by mimicking human-to-human interaction and speaking with several accents, such as American, British, Asian, and Indian.

IBL News | New York

Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence released its 2024 AI Index Report last month.

The document synthesizes AI-related data, developing a nuanced understanding of this field regarding innovation, investment, regulation, and social impacts.

This year’s report documents AI’s astonishing progress on tasks such as image classification and language understanding, where it has surpassed human capabilities. Humans maintain an edge in other areas, such as advanced mathematics and visual commonsense reasoning and planning. It seems it’s only a matter of time before it catches up to humans on these skills.

The AI Index is recognized globally as one of the most credible and authoritative sources for data and insights on AI. Previous editions have been cited in major newspapers, including The New York Times, Bloomberg, and The Guardian, have amassed hundreds of academic citations, and have been referenced by high-level policymakers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, among other places.

This year’s edition surpasses all previous ones in size, scale, and scope, reflecting the growing significance that AI is coming to hold in all of our lives.

These are some key findings:

1. AI beats humans on some tasks but not on all.

AI has surpassed human performance on several benchmarks, including some in image classification, visual reasoning, and English understanding. Yet it trails behind on more complex tasks like competition-level mathematics, visual commonsense reasoning, and planning.

2. Industry continues to dominate frontier AI research.

In 2023, the industry produced 51 notable machine learning models, while academia contributed only 15. There were also 21 notable models resulting from industry-academia collaborations in 2023, a new high.

3. Frontier models get way more expensive.

According to AI Index estimates, the training costs of state-of-the-art AI models have reached unprecedented levels. For example, OpenAI’s GPT-4 used an estimated $78 million worth of compute to train, while Google’s Gemini Ultra cost $191 million for compute.

4. The United States leads China, the EU, and the U.K. as the leading source of top AI models.

 In 2023, 61 notable AI models originated from U.S.-based institutions, far outpacing the European Union’s 21 and China’s 15.

5. Robust and standardized evaluations for LLM responsibility are seriously lacking.

New research from the AI Index reveals a significant lack of standardization in responsible AI reporting. Leading developers, including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, primarily test their models against different responsible AI benchmarks. This practice complicates efforts to systematically compare the risks and limitations of top AI models.

6. Generative AI investment skyrockets.

Despite a decline in overall AI private investment last year, funding for generative AI surged, nearly octupling from 2022 to reach $25.2 billion. Major players in the generative AI space, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, and Inflection, reported substantial fundraising rounds.

7. The data is in: AI makes workers more productive and leads to higher quality work.

In 2023, several studies assessed AI’s impact on labor, suggesting that AI enables workers to complete tasks more quickly and to improve the quality of their output. These studies also demonstrated AI’s potential to bridge the skill gap between low- and high-skilled workers. Still other studies caution that using AI without proper oversight can lead to diminished performance.

8. Scientific progress accelerates even further, thanks to AI.

In 2022, AI began to advance scientific discovery. 2023, however, saw the launch of even more significant science-related AI applications—from AlphaDev, which makes algorithmic sorting more efficient, to GNoME, which facilitates the process of materials discovery.

9. The number of AI regulations in the United States sharply increases.

The number of AI-related regulations in the U.S. has risen significantly in the past year and over the last five years. In 2023, there were 25 AI-related regulations, up from just one in 2016. Last year alone, the total number of AI-related regulations grew by 56.3%.

10. People across the globe are more cognizant of AI’s potential impact—and more nervous.

A survey from Ipsos shows that, over the last year, the proportion of those who think AI will dramatically affect their lives in the next three to five years has increased from 60% to 66%. Moreover, 52% express nervousness toward AI products and services, marking a 13 percentage point rise from 2022. In America, Pew data suggests that 52% of Americans report feeling more concerned than excited about AI, rising from 38% in 2022.

• Full-Text Report (502 pages; PDF.)