IBL News | New York

Adobe this week announced Firefly Services, a set of over 20 new generative and creative APIs, tools, and services.  It allows developers to speed up content creation in custom workflows.

In addition, the company launched Custom Models, which allows businesses to fine-tune Firefly models based on their assets. Custom Models is already built into Adobe’s new GenStudio.

Firefly Services includes APIs for removing backgrounds, cropping images, and automatically leveling the horizon in a photo, as well as, access to core AI-driven Photoshop features like Generative Fill and Expand.

In addition to these AI features, Firefly Services also exposes tools for editing text layers, tagging content, and applying presets from Lightroom, for example.
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IBL News | New York

Amazon put another $2.75 billion into San Francisco-based Anthropic AI last month, its largest outside investment in its three-decade history.

The deal was struck at the AI startup’s last valuation, which was $18.4 billion. In September, the e-commerce giant invested $1.25 billion.

Amazon will maintain a minority stake in this startup and won’t have an Anthropic board seat.

 

IBL News | New York

OpenAI eliminated yesterday the requirement of opening an account in its flagship conversational chat.openai.com to use its conversational AI tool. This feature will be gradually rolled out to every country.

Those who opt for no logging in will see their chats going into OpenAI’s data training unless they opt out.

These non-logged users won’t be able to save or share chats, use custom instructions, or unlock features like voice conversations and custom instructions, which are capabilities associated with a persistent account.

In addition, this extra-free version of ChatGPT will have “slightly more restrictive content policies,” the company said.
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IBL News | New York

The University of South Florida (USF) plans to launch a college of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and computing in Fall 2025, seeking to position itself as a national leader in AI.

The college would offer undergraduate and graduate programs to prepare students for in-demand careers in AI.

This college will be located in the Tampa Bay area, already a hub for the tech industry.

With this initiative, the university wants to respond to the shortage of qualified talent in AI skills. “The demand for professionals skilled in these areas continues to grow, along with the need for more research to better understand how to utilize powerful new technologies in ways that improve our society,” USF President Rhea Law says.

In 2023, it established an AI graduate certificate while urging its faculty to incorporate the subject in the classroom.

Today, about 200 USF faculty members are already researching related subjects.

Last year, the National Science Foundation reportedly awarded more than $800 million for AI-related research.
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IBL News | New York

Apple researchers presented in a paper new methods for training multimodal LLM on both text and images in what seems to be a significant advance for Generative AI and future Apple products.

The research, posted this month, was described in a paper titled “MM1: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Multimodal LLM Pre-training”.

The largest 30B parameter model showed a strong ability to learn from only a handful of examples and reason over multiple images.

This multimodal model benchmarks compete with GPT-4V and Gemini Pro.

The model was trained on a carefully curated mix of image captions, image-text data, and text-only data.

Experts say that Apple’s level of detail is a big departure for the brand, and represents a massive win for the open-source community.

IBL News | New York

OpenAI released yesterday seven videos generated by its new realistic text–and image–to video tool ‘Sora‘ – which remains out of reach to the public.

A select group of filmmakers, visual artists, creative directors, designers, advertising agencies, and musicians who were given access to the ‘Sora’ model showcased examples of their artistic work, along with early thoughts on how they can see this powerful tool fitting into their workflows and businesses. [See below.]

The San Francisco-based research lab said, “We have gained valuable feedback from the creative community, helping us to improve our model.”

 

 

IBL News | New York

Saudi Arabia is planning a $40 billion push into AI, The New York Times reported.

Its government will create a fund of that amount to invest in AI initiatives.

Wall Street banks are currently helping put together this tech fund. The $40 billion fund would make the oil-rich nation the world’s largest investor in AI. It would also allow it to establish itself as a more influential player in geopolitics.

Currently, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund has assets of more than $900 billion.

In recent weeks, representatives of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund have discussed a potential partnership with Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms, and other financiers, according to the paper.

In this context, Anthropic declined to take money from Saudi Arabia. Anthropic executives cited national security concerns, CNBC reported.
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IBL News | New York

Stability AI Founder and CEO Emad Mostaque stepped down from his role, the company announced on Friday. COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte were appointed as interim co-CEOs, it said in a blog post.

Mostaque’s departure comes amid an ongoing struggle at the startup that was spending a reported estimate of $8 million a month as of October 2023, according to Bloomberg, which also noted that the startup had unsuccessfully attempted to raise new funding at a $4 billion valuation.

The move followed months of tensions with major investors like Coatue Management, who called for Mostaque to step down.

Emad Mostaque [in the picture above] said that he decided to resign to fix the concentration of power on his Board as he held the most number of controlling shares.

“We should have more transparent & distributed governance in AI as it becomes more and more important. It’s a hard problem, but I think we can fix it,” he added.
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As my notifications are RIP some notes:

1. My shares have majority of vote @StabilityAI
2. They have full board control

The concentration of power in AI is bad for us all

I decided to step down to fix this at Stability & elsewhere

Will be sharing more soon

Exciting times https://t.co/rknp5lCWh4

— Emad acc/acc (@EMostaque) March 23, 2024

Backed by investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Coatue Management, Stability AI, a startup known for its image generation tool Stable Diffusion, has lost more than half a dozen key talent in recent quarters.

Recently, Stability AI released Stable Video 3D (SV3D), a gen AI video tool for rendering 3D video.

SV3D is available for commercial use with a Stability AI Professional Membership ($20 per month for creators and developers with less than $1 million in annual revenue). For non-commercial purposes, users can download the model weights from Hugging Face.

IBL News | New York

Microsoft agreed to pay Inflection AI — creator of the PI chatbot — about $650 million in a licensing deal. The software giant will make Inflection’s models available for sale on its Azure cloud service through this deal.

As part of the transaction, Microsoft is hiring the co-founder of Inflection, Mustafa Suleyman, and much of the start-up staff.

It’s like an acquisition but with some other kind of clothing to avoid antitrust regulators, experts say. “Microsoft seems to be pioneering the non-acquisition acquisition,” wrote Madeline Renbarger and Eric Newcomer.

This would be the second time Microsoft ran this sort of playbook after its still largely secret partnership with OpenAI based on funneling over $10 billion and holding a 49% stake in the non-profit company.

The deal took place on the same week the Justice Department sued Apple for allegedly monopolizing the smartphone business. U.S. antitrust regulators are also going after Google, Meta, and Amazon.
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