IBL News

Category: Top News

  • Harvard University’s President Resigned After Comments About Antisemitism

    Harvard University’s President Resigned After Comments About Antisemitism

    IBL News | New York

    Harvard University’s President, Claudine Gay, resigned Tuesday after facing allegations of plagiarism and criticism over her comments about antisemitism on campus.

    Last month, during a tense congressional hearing, Dr. Gay said calls for the killing of Jews were abhorrent. She added, however, that it would depend on the context whether such comments would constitute a violation of Harvard’s code of conduct regarding bullying and harassment.

    As a result of the comments, she faced mounting pressure to step down in recent weeks. Dozens of politicians and some high-profile alumni called for her to step down over the comments.

    But nearly 700 staff members rallied behind her in a letter, and the university said she would keep her job despite the controversy.

    Claudine Gay, 53 years old, served as President for six months and was the first black person, and only the second woman, to be appointed to lead the Ivy League university. Her tenure was the shortest in its 388-year history.

    In a letter announcing her resignation, Dr. Claudine Gay said it was in the “best interests” of the university for her to step down.

    “This is not a decision I came to easily. Indeed, it has been difficult beyond words,” Dr. Gay said. She added that her resignation would allow Harvard to “focus on the institution rather than any individual”.

    Harvard is one of several universities in the U.S. accused of failing to protect its Jewish students following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October. Jewish groups have reported an alarming rise in antisemitic incidents in the U.S. since the conflict began.

    Just hours before she resigned on Tuesday, claims that Dr. Gay had failed to properly cite academic sources emerged and were published anonymously in the conservative Washington Free Beacon newspaper.

    Harvard’s board investigated the allegations of plagiarism and found two published papers that required additional citations. The board, however, said that she did not violate standards for research misconduct.

    Provost Alan M. Garber ’76, Harvard’s Chief Academic Officer, will serve as interim president effective immediately, The Harvard Gazette reported.

  • You.com Enables APIs for LLMs to Access the Internet in Real-Time

    You.com Enables APIs for LLMs to Access the Internet in Real-Time

    IBL News | New York

    You.com launched this month a set of APIs aimed to give Llama 2 and every other LLM real-time access to the internet, obtain up-to-date context, and augment questions from users.

    Most LLMs are trained on publicly available, static data scraped from public web pages, e-books, and elsewhere. That’s sufficient to get them to perform tasks from writing emails to drafting letters and essays. However, it limits the LLMs’ knowledge to the data’s time range.

    “When you ask about a recent event, like a Super Bowl score on the day of the Super Bowl, our API will search for those scores on the web, and then you can add that information, in that moment, to the LLM, and it can then use it to answer your question more accurately,” You.com CEO and founder Richard Socher told TechCrunch.

    LlamaIndex, Anthropic, and Cohere have already integrated it with their models.

    Starting at $100 per month for 14,200 API calls, You.com provides three “flavors” of API at launch: Web search, news results, and RAG (retrieval-augmented generation).
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  • Canva Will Provide Its AI-powered ‘Magic Studio’ to the Ten Campuses at UC For Free

    Canva Will Provide Its AI-powered ‘Magic Studio’ to the Ten Campuses at UC For Free

    IBL News | New York

    The University of California (UC) announced it partnered with Canva to provide all ten campuses with its new AI-powered Magic Studio for free as part of its package of Canva for Campus.

    In addition, Canva’s premium suite of visual communication and design tools will be free to students.

    The Canva for Campus Visual Suite includes documents, websites, whiteboards, data visualization tools, and Magic Studio. The company said its visual safety tools suite, Canva Shield, addresses using AI responsibly and safely.

    The rollout will be conducted in stages, starting in January 2024.

    Canva said the partnership highlights its commitment to visual tools as a learning method. Citing its 2023 Visual Economy Report that showed 94% of business leaders across every profession expect employees to have visual design skills. The company said 50 million K–12 teachers and students worldwide use Canva to teach visual literacy.

    “Our world today is a visual one. We communicate through presentations, reports, and social media,” said Van Williams, vice president of IT services at UC.
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  • OpenAI Held Talks with Major News Publishers About Licensing Their Content

    OpenAI Held Talks with Major News Publishers About Licensing Their Content

    IBL News | New York

    Major media outlets and publishers, including Gannett, News Corp, and IAC, in the U.S. have been in confidential talks with OpenAI to license their content, The New York Times reported yesterday. However, agreement on the price and terms has been elusive.

    For months, some of the biggest players in the U.S. media industry have been in confidential talks with OpenAI on a tricky issue: the price and terms of licensing their content to the artificial intelligence company.

    The curtain on those negotiations was pulled back this week when The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, alleging that the companies used its content without permission to build artificial intelligence products.

    The Times said that before suing, it had been talking with the companies for months about a deal. And it was not alone. Other news organizations — including Gannett, the largest U.S. newspaper company; News Corp, the owner of The Wall Street Journal; and IAC, the digital colossus behind The Daily Beast and the magazine publisher Dotdash Meredith — have been in talks with OpenAI, said three people familiar with the negotiations, who requested anonymity to discuss the confidential talks.

    The News/Media Alliance, which represents more than 2,200 news organizations in North America, has also been talking with OpenAI about coming up with a framework for a deal that would suit its members, a person familiar with the talks said.

  • Saudi Arabia Sets a Framework to Promote AI in Digital Education

    Saudi Arabia Sets a Framework to Promote AI in Digital Education

    IBL News | New York

    Saudi Arabia’s National eLearning Center (NeLC) launched this week a national framework to boost AI in digital education and training and foster innovation.

    This initiative aims to establish a set of guidelines, standards, and best practices for implementing AI in all educational sectors, including general, higher, vocational, and lifelong learning.

    The framework acts as a comprehensive resource for decision-makers and educational practitioners to maximize the benefits of AI.

    It emphasizes the importance of ongoing assessment and improvement while encompassing nine key dimensions: leadership, curriculum design, and content development, teaching and learning methodologies, evaluation and performance, ethical considerations and responsible use, adherence to technology standards, security and data privacy, student support mechanisms, and professional development opportunities.

    The National eLearning Center (NeLC) was established by the Council of Ministers in Saudi Arabia to enhance trust in online learning, facilitate equitable access to relevant lifelong online learning, and lead sustainable innovation in online learning to provide trusted online learning.

  • Researchers from Apple and Columbia Released an Open-Source Multimodal LLM

    Researchers from Apple and Columbia Released an Open-Source Multimodal LLM

    IBL News | New York

    In October 2023, researchers from Apple and Columbia University released the code and weights of an open-source, for research use only, multimodal LLM (MLLM). It was called Ferret and it did not receive much attention then.

    Also, recently Apple announced it made a breakthrough in deploying LLMs on iPhone and iPad, including new techniques for 3D avatars and more immersive visual experiences.

    Ferret includes the curation of “GRIT, a comprehensive refer-and-ground instruction tuning dataset including 1.1M samples that contain rich hierarchical spatial knowledge, with 95K hard negative data to promote model robustness.”

    “The resulting model not only achieves superior performance in classical referring and grounding tasks but also greatly outperforms existing MLLMs in region-based and localization-demanded multimodal chatting,” wrote the creators of Ferret.

    Interestingly, the news about Apple’s open source and local ML developments comes as both Anthropic and OpenAI are negotiating massive new funding raises for their proprietary LLM development efforts.

  • The New York Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft For Copyright Infringement on AI

    The New York Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft For Copyright Infringement on AI

    IBL News | New York

    The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, the paper reported.

    In its lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, The Times said OpenAI and Microsoft used unauthorized published work in the form of millions of articles to train their AI technologies.

    The suit calls for the companies to destroy any chatbot models and training data that use copyrighted material from The Times.

    The paper is the first major American media organization to sue the creators of ChatGPT.

    The lawsuit doesn’t claim an exact amount of money, but it holds OpenAI and Microsoft responsible for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages.” They both declined to comment on the case.

    The lawsuit could carry major implications for the news industry.

    OpenAI is now valued by investors at more than $80 billion. Microsoft has committed $13 billion to OpenAI and has incorporated the company’s technology into its Bing search engine.

    The lawsuit filed on Wednesday apparently follows an impasse in negotiations involving The Times, Microsoft, and OpenAI. In its complaint, The Times said that it approached Microsoft and OpenAI in April to raise concerns about the use of its intellectual property and explore “an amicable resolution” — possibly involving a commercial agreement and “technological guardrails” around generative A.I. products — but that the talks reached no resolution.

    The lawsuit also highlights the potential damage to The Times’s brand through so-called AI “hallucinations.” The complaint cites several cases in which Microsoft’s Bing Chat provided incorrect information that was said to have come from The Times, including results for “the 15 most heart-healthy foods,” 12 of which were not mentioned in an article by the paper.

    Microsoft has previously acknowledged potential copyright concerns over its AI products. In September, the company announced that if customers using its AI tools were hit with copyright complaints, it would indemnify them and cover the associated legal costs.

    The Times retained the law firm Susman Godfrey as its lead outside counsel for the litigation. Susman represented Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation case against Fox News, which resulted in a $787.5 million settlement in April. Susman also filed a proposed class action suit last month against Microsoft and OpenAI on behalf of nonfiction authors whose books and other copyrighted material were used to train the companies’ chatbots.

     

  • Salesforce Will Sell Best-Known Apps on AWS’ Marketplace

    Salesforce Will Sell Best-Known Apps on AWS’ Marketplace

    IBL News | New York

    Salesforce Inc. announced last month it will begin selling select products on AWS’ marketplace. The leading CRM company is seeking to expand “self-service” purchases and cut down on costs.

    Salesforce Executive Vice President Patrick Stokes said it will make it easier for its customers to integrate AWS data into Salesforce products and use generative AI tools more effectively.

    In addition, Salesforce will now support Amazon Bedrock, making it available through the Einstein Trust Layer to power AI-driven apps and workflows. In addition, Salesforce Data Cloud will expand to support data sharing across additional AWS technologies.

    The new product integrations will be available in 2024.
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  • Apple Discussed $50M Deals with Condé Nast, NBC News and IAC to Train Its AI Systems

    Apple Discussed $50M Deals with Condé Nast, NBC News and IAC to Train Its AI Systems

    IBL News | New York

    Apple is negotiating with major media and publishing organizations seeking permission to use their news articles to train their generative AI systems, The New York Times reported.

    The news organizations contacted by Apple include Condé Nast, publisher of Vogue and The New Yorker; NBC News; and IAC, which owns People, The Daily Beast, and Better Homes and Gardens.

    Apple has floated multiyear deals worth at least $50 million to license this material. Apple declined to elaborate.

    AI companies have been accused of taking written material from across the internet without the permission of the artists, writers, and coders who created it, leading to several copyright lawsuits.

    In a statement, an OpenAI spokesman said to The New York Times that the company respects “the rights of content creators and owners and believes they should benefit from A.I. technology,” citing its recent deals with the American Journalism Project and the German publisher Axel Springer.
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  • Leadership, Cybersecurity, and Gen AI Are the Fastest Growing Skills, Coursera Says

    Leadership, Cybersecurity, and Gen AI Are the Fastest Growing Skills, Coursera Says

    IBL News | New York

    Coursera released this month its third annual Job Skills Report, identifying the year’s fastest-growing competencies.

    It highlights that leadership, AI, and cybersecurity are the skill areas that have witnessed the most remarkable surge in the Coursera platform.

    The report is based on insights from five million enterprise learners affiliated with 3,000 businesses, 3,600 higher education institutions, and governments in over 100 countries.

    Many of Coursera’s fastest-growing skills align with WEF’s fastest-growing global jobs, including AI and machine learning specialists, business intelligence specialists, information security analysts, and data analysts. Fastest growing skills for 2024 were:

    1. ChatGPT
    2. Cybersecurity
    3. HTML/CSS
    4. UX design
    5. Front-end development
    6. Bookkeeping
    7. Data integrity and governance
    8. React Native
    9. Database management
    10. Generative AI modeling and development

    The Job Skills Report of 2024 identifies eight trends:

    #1: All leadership skills for supporting teams are a growing priority, particularly those on empathy, strategic leadership, and employee development. Managers are encouraged to increase their focus on leading teams with empathy, team building, and team management.

    #2: AI-related skills drove record-breaking course enrollment. Coursera’s 800 AI-related courses attracted 6.8 million total enrollments this year. The course Generative AI for Everyone from DeepLearning.AI was the fastest-growing course in 2023.

    Over 450,000+ learners are enrolled in AI-translated content.

    The other top genAI courses published on Coursera in 2023 were:

    1. Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT (Vanderbilt University)
    2. Generative AI with Large Language Models (AWS; DeepLearning.AI)
    3. Introduction to Generative AI (Google Cloud)
    4. Generative AI for Everyone (DeepLearning.AI)
    5. ChatGPT Advanced Data Analysis (Vanderbilt University)

    #3: The demand is surging for cybersecurity and information security skills. There’s an estimated shortfall of nearly 3.5 million cybersecurity workers.

    #4: The fastest-growing skills are business skills, particularly in digital marketing and customer experience.

    #5: Data visualizations and overall skills to read, understand, analyze, work with, and communicate with data continue to be among the fastest growing. Data literacy and storytelling to achieve organizational goals are in huge market demand.

    #6: Web development and cloud computing skills remain high. Investments in these skills can help meet ongoing skill shortages and the need for technical employees to stay current with emerging technologies.

    #7: Audit, copyright, and data skills for providing oversight and compliance are increasingly essential, particularly among learners affiliated with government programs.

    #8: Curated learning paths, like Professional Certifications and Specializations, are driving the largest skill rank changes. These curated learning paths can improve business productivity, boost student employability, and improve internal mobility.

    The most popular courses in Coursera in 2023 were:

    1. Foundations: Data, Data, Everywhere (Google)
    2. Foundations of Project Management (Google)
    3. Foundations of Cybersecurity (Google)
    4. Foundations of Digital Marketing and E-commerce (Google)
    5. The Science of Well-Being (Yale University)
    6. Ask Questions to Make Data-Driven Decisions (Google)
    7. Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design (Google)
    8. Financial Markets (Yale University)
    9. English for Career Development (University of Pennsylvania)
    10. Technical Support Fundamentals (Google)
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