Category: Top News

IBL News | New York

Google introduced yesterday on Chrome — on browser release M121 — experimental generative AI features.

These features will be available in Chrome on Macs and Windows PCs over the next few days, starting in the U.S.

“Because these features are early public experiments, they’ll be disabled for enterprise and educational accounts for now,” said Parisa Tabriz, Vice President of Chrome.

When turned on, these experimental AI features organize tabs into groups, create custom themes, and provide help with writing on the web in forum posts and online reviews, as shown in the images below.

Chrome will also suggest names and emojis for the tab groups it creates to make them easier to find. This feature is intended to assist when users are online shopping, researching, trip planning, or doing other tasks that tend to leave a lot of open tabs.

In addition to AI-generated themes, users can also customize Chrome with photos uploaded or themes from Chrome Web Store’s collections.

The features join other AI-powered and machine learning (ML) tools already available in Chrome, like its ability to caption audio and video, protect users from malicious sites via Android’s Safe Browsing feature in Chrome, silence permission prompts, and summarize web pages via the “SGE while browsing” feature.

In 2025, Chrome will be updated with more AI and ML features, including through integrations with its new AI model, Gemini, according to Google.
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IBL News | New York

The Mayo Clinic announced it’s partnering with Cerebras Systems to develop its own AI models for the healthcare industry after tapping into decades of anonymized medical records and data.

These models will summarize lengthy medical records, scour images for patterns that experts may not detect, or analyze genome data.

The well-known medical center, based in Rochester, Minnesota, ensured that these systems would not make medical decisions, not reokace doctors.

The institution plans to make the outcome of its work available on its Mayo Clinic Platform, a data network that is also used by the Mercy health care system in the U.S., the University Health Network in Canada, along with systems in Brazil and Israel.

Matthew Callstrom, Mayo’s medical director for strategy and chair of its radiology department, said that the clinic has not yet decided how much it will charge for the AI technology.

The clinic planned to disclose the new effort during an address at JPMorgan Chase’s healthcare conference in San Francisco.

Cerebras Chief Executive Officer Andrew Feldman said the deal is a “multi-million-dollar” agreement over several years but declined to give more specifics.

Cerebras will provide both hardware and software development services to Mayo under the deal.
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IBL News | New York

Google Cloud launched this month new chatbots and virtual agents for retailers, which they can quickly deploy on websites and apps to personalize shopper experience, schedule appointments, and offer product recommendations based on consumers’ preferences.

For example, a virtual agent can converse with a shopper looking for a formal dress for a wedding, and provide personalized product options based on preferred colors, venue type, weather, matching accessories, and budget.

This Generative AI solution can run on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, or be embedded into a retailer’s existing catalog management applications.

In the same Vertex platform, Google Cloud also introduced a new AI Search capability to provide more relevant product results to consumers and improve engagement.

Retailers custom-tune an LLM to their unique product catalog and shopper search patterns.

This offering integrates with a retailer’s existing customer relationship management (CRM) system.

In addition, retailers can use the solution to boost employee productivity with AI-powered summarizations of customer conversations and respond to clients in real-time based on knowledge across a retailer’s internal resources.

Retailers can use this technology—when combined with Google Cloud’s data warehouse, BigQuery—to synthesize shopper sentiment across sources like online reviews, social media posts, customer feedback, and chats with customer service representatives.

Google Cloud’s announcement of these AI tools comes days before the start of the National Retail Federation’s annual convention in New York City.

Amazon debuted an AI tool for sellers last fall, and many retailers incorporated conversational AI systems into their platforms in 2023.
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IBL News | New York

The Hollywood union SAG-AFTRA signed a deal this month with AI voiceover start-up Replica Studios that set terms for the use of generative AI in video games.

Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the union’s executive director, said that terms include informed consent for the use of AI to create digital voice replicas, along with their safe storage.

He explained at a press conference in Las Vegas’ CES.

“This is an evolutionary step forward. AI technology is not something we can block. It’s not something we can stop. That’s not a tactic or a strategy that’s ever worked for labor in the past.”

In the 2023 strike, SAG-AFTRA reached a deal with the major studios and TV producers, establishing consent and compensation requirements for the use of AI to replicate actors’ likenesses.

The deal did not block studios from training AI systems to create “synthetic” actors that bear no resemblance to real performers.

SAG-AFTRA is now engaged in a similar negotiation with a coalition of major video game studios. The union has obtained a strike authorization vote, though talks continue.

Replica Studios sells AI voices to video game developers from its library of “ethically licensed” voices.
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IBL News | New York

In an Instagram video today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company is developing open-source artificial general intelligence (AGI).

“Our long-term vision is to build general intelligence, open source it responsibly, and make it widely available so everyone can benefit,” wrote Zuckerberg in a caption.

“It’s become clear that the next generation of services required is building full general intelligence, building the best AI assistants, AIs for creators, AIs for businesses, and more that needs advances in every area of AI from reasoning to planning to coding to memory and other cognitive abilities.”

Zuckerberg said that he is bringing two of its META’s AI research teams – FAIR and GenAI – closer together with the goal of building full general intelligence and open-sourcing it as much as possible.

He also pointed out that the company is currently training Llama 3 and announced that its company is building a “massive compute infrastructure,” which includes 350,000 Nvidia H100s by the end of this year.

He also touted the metaverse and Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses. “People are also going to need new devices for AI and this brings together AI and Metaverse is over time,” he said. Zuckerberg’s announcement comes after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman softened his tone about the existential risks of AGI at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

It also comes after Meta chief scientist Yann LeCun has often expressed skepticism that AGI will arrive anytime soon — and not in the next five years.

Meanwhile, Anthropic released a paper that said open models could have destructive ‘sleeper agents’ lurking at their core.
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IBL News | New York

Arizona State University (ASU) announced today a partnership with Microsoft-backed OpenAI that will give the institution access to the enterprise version of ChatGPT, which offers more security, privacy, and higher-speed access to this technology.

ASU highlighted in its announcement that “it has become the first higher education institution to collaborate with OpenAI.”

To date, OpenAI has signed dozens of partnerships with companies in media, technology, and other industries.

The university’s President, Michael Crow, said, “ASU recognizes that augmented and artificial intelligence systems are here to stay, and we are optimistic about their ability to become incredible tools that help students to learn.” 

IBL News | New York

The Q&A website Quora announced this month it raised $75 million from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), destined to accelerate the growth of its AI chat platform ‘Poe,’ which was launched a year ago.

With this round — the first in nearly seven years — Quora is valued at $500 million, according to its CEO, Adam D’Angelo [in the picture above].

Despite this decline in valuation, Adam D’Angelo said that the company is cash flow positive.

“We expect the majority of the funding to be used to pay creators of bots on the platform through our recently launched creator monetization program,” wrote Adam D’Angelo in a statement.

“Our goal is for Poe to enable as many individual developers as possible to make a living, and for as many businesses as possible to operate profitably solely by using the platform.”

“This is true whether developers are creating a bot using an existing model with a prompt and any uploaded files, or whether they are training a model themselves,” he added.

Poe aggregates a wide range of text and image AI models like ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, Claude 2, Stable Diffusion, Llama, and others, which gives creators a huge playground of tools to access.

According to data TechCrunch viewed from Apptopia in October, Poe’s mobile app was downloaded more than 250,000 times in February, its first month open to the public. Through October, Poe saw over 18.4 million installs and grew to nearly 1.22 million monthly active users.

“Already, Poe shows signs of increasing returns to scale,” wrote Andreessen Horowitz‘s partner David George in a blog post. “Currently, Poe is one of the top 5 largest generative AI-related properties, and creators have built 1M+ bots on Poe the platform.”
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IBL News | New York

Domain-specific applications using domain-specific data will unlock a lot of value and competitive advantage, said Coursera’s CEO Jeff Maggioncalda at Davos during the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.

“Don’t try to build the next LLM for the world, try to build some domain-specific language models,” he stated. “It’ll be difficult to build businesses, unless you’re building foundation models.”

“There is a huge untapped opportunity in building generative AI applications over building large language models (LLMs),” added Andrew NG, the founder and CEO of Landing AI and former CEO of Coursera.

“There are so many more opportunities in applications of AI to healthcare, financial services, IT consulting, and so on. These have huge opportunities that relatively very few people are working on,” said Ng.
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Update: On Thursday, January 18, Jeff Maggioncalda said that Coursera added a new user every minute on average for its artificial intelligence courses in 2023. The platform has more than 800 AI courses and saw more than 7.4 million enrollments last year.

Every student on the platform gets access to a ChatGPT-like AI assistant called “Coach” that provides personalized tutoring.

The chatbot uses OpenAI and Google’s Gemini’s LLMs.

Maggioncalda said that the company does not plan to build or train its own models.“We’ll probably be fine tuning with proprietary data just on top of these large language models.”

Coursera has also used the technology to translate about 4,000 courses in different languages and plans to ramp up hiring for AI roles this year.

IBL News | New York

Upgrad Education, led by Indian entrepreneur Ronnie Screwvala, is in the advanced stages of acquiring this year for $80 million the Silicon Valley online education platform Udacity, one of the three big MOOC platforms, along with Coursera and edX/2U, according to The Economic Times.

Sebastian Thrun-founded Udacity was last valued at $1 billion in 2015 after it raised $105 million from investors like Germany’s Bertelsmann and Scotland’s Baillie Gifford. VC Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is also one of its investors.

Upgrad founder Ronnie Screwvala [in the picture], who owns of 22.4% in Upgrad, has pitched to external investors for about $50-60 million.

According to the same source, the Mumbai-based Upgrad is trying to raise up to $100 million, of which about 80% will be used for financing the deal.

If this funding round is completed, the valuation for Upgrad will see a jump from its last assessment of $2.5 billion.

Upgrad has raised $365 million since its inception in 2015.

California-based Udacity offers courses across data engineering, business analytics, artificial intelligence, data science, product management and others. Udacity has three key verticals: individuals, government, and enterprise. The enterprise business is the largest revenue driver for the US-based firm.
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