IBL News

Category: Top News

  • 2U / edX Deals with Financial Distress, Although It Might Avoid Bankruptcy

    2U / edX Deals with Financial Distress, Although It Might Avoid Bankruptcy

    IBL News | New York

    2U, owner of edX.org, is running out of cash and is facing an existential change in 2024, wrote educational analyst Phil Hill in a report issued after the company’s long-time CEO and Co-Founder, Christopher “Chip” Paucek, stepped down and was replaced by the existing CFO, Paul Lalljie [in the picture].

    “There is no apparent way for 2U to meet its debt obligations by 2025,” Phil Hill stated.

    “The company will likely survive, but it will undergo some significant changes from bankruptcy, from selling off assets, from additional layoffs, or more likely from some combination.” 

    2U market capitalization was $107 million yesterday. In the last year, the company lost

    “Bankruptcy is increasingly likely. 2U could pursue a structured bankruptcy in 2024 to alleviate its debt obligations while continuing to operate the company. Keep in mind that we have seen EdTech companies successfully manage bankruptcy, such as Cengage from 2013 / 14. There are signs that the markets already understand 2U’s situation.”

    The probability of bankruptcy is over 58%, according to an analysis mentioned by Phill Hill.

    • “The basic issue at hand is that 2U holds nearly $1 billion of debt with a significant portion ($380 million minimum) that must be paid off in early 2025, and the company does not have the cash or ability to generate profits to be able to cover the debt maturity.”

    • “2U had roughly $41 million in cash & equivalents as of September 30th, and it generated roughly $32 million in cash (adjusted unlevered free cash flow) in the past 12 months – that level of operations is not going to work.”

    • “2U’s ‘portfolio management’ efforts to ‘transition out of certain degree programs’ are also intended to generate short-term cash, mostly to deal with the debt problem. But the combination of cash and likely cash flow (augmented by portfolio management) is in the neighborhood of $150 million, not nearly enough to handle the debt obligations. This means that the only way 2U survives is if it can renegotiate or refinance the debt.”
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  • AI Image-Generators Are Being Trained on Child Abuse Materials, an Study from Stanford Shows

    AI Image-Generators Are Being Trained on Child Abuse Materials, an Study from Stanford Shows

    IBL News | New York

    A massive public dataset named ‘LAION-5B’ that served as training data for popular AI image generators such as Stable Diffusion was found to contain thousands of instances of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), stated a study published yesterday by Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), a watchdog group based at the Californian university.

    This organization urged companies to take action to address a harmful flaw in the technology they build. Removal of the identified source material was currently in progress.

    The report found more than 3,200 images of suspected child sexual abuse in the giant AI database LAION, an index of online images and captions that’s been used to train leading AI image-makers,

    The Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) worked with the Canadian Centre for Child Protection and other anti-abuse charities to identify the illegal material and report the original photo links to law enforcement.

    These entities examined the LAION-5B dataset using a combination of PhotoDNA perceptual hash matching, cryptographic hash matching, k-nearest neighbors queries, and ML classifiers.

    “This methodology detected many hundreds of instances of known CSAM in the training set, as well as many new candidates that were subsequently verified by outside parties. We also provide recommendations for mitigating this issue for those that need to maintain copies of this training set, building future training sets, altering existing models, and the hosting of models trained on LAION-5B.”

    LAION-5B doesn’t include the images themselves and is instead a collection of metadata including a hash of the image identifier, a description, language data, whether it may be unsafe, and a URL pointing to the image. A number of the CSAM photos found linked in LAION-5B were hosted on websites like Reddit, Twitter, Blogspot, and WordPress, as well as adult websites like XHamster and XVideos.

    The German non-profit LAION said that “it has a zero-tolerance policy for illegal content,” and announced that their public datasets would be temporarily taken down, to return back after update filtering in the second half of January.
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  • Many Start-Ups Are Being Forced by VCs to Shut Down As They Run Out of Cash

    Many Start-Ups Are Being Forced by VCs to Shut Down As They Run Out of Cash

    IBL News | New York

    Over 3,200 private venture-backed U.S. companies, which raised $27.2 billion, have gone out of business this year, according to The New York Times.

    Moreover, investors fear that the failure and collapse of once-promising tech start-ups will increase in the coming months.

    VC firms are deciding which young companies are worth saving and urging others to shut down or sell.

    Many companies are being forced to shut down before they run out of cash, returning what remains to investors. Others are stuck in “zombie” mode — surviving but unable to grow.

    In the last six weeks, high-profile companies have filed for bankruptcy or shut down.

    Among them is WeWork, which raised over $11 billion, the health care firm Olive AI ($852 million raised), the freight start-up Convoy ($900 million raised), and home construction start-up Veev ($647 million).

    In August, Hopin, a start-up that raised more than $1.6 billion and was once valued at $7.6 billion, sold its main business for just $15 million.

    Last month, Zeus Living, a real estate start-up that raised $150 million, said it was shutting down. Plastiq, a financial technology start-up that raised $226 million, went bankrupt in May. In September, Bird, a scooter company that raised $776 million, was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange because of its low stock price.

    From 2012 to 2022, investment in private U.S. start-ups ballooned to $344 billion. The flood of money was driven by low-interest rates and successes in social media and mobile apps.
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  • Nvidia Became The Most Active Investor in Generative AI Start-Ups

    Nvidia Became The Most Active Investor in Generative AI Start-Ups

    IBL News | New York

    Nvidia invested in 35 AI start-ups in 2023, almost six times more than last year,  according to estimates by Dealroom. It both leads rounds itself and invests alongside VC firms.

    These investments made Nvidia the most active large-scale investor in AI, outstripping iconic VCs in Silicon Valley, such as Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia.

    All of the invested companies are Nvidia customers, whether using its GPU chips or its software.

    The company’s portfolio includes Inflection AI, Cohere, Hugging Face, CoreWeave, and Mistral.

    “For Nvidia, the number one criteria for making start-up investments is relevancy,” Mohamed Siddeek, Head of NVentures (Nvidia’s venture arm), told the Financial Times.

    “NVentures looks to generate healthy returns from its investments, while its corporate development team could invest for more strategic purposes,” Mohamed Siddeek said.
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  • Training a Custom Model with OpenAI’s GPT-4 Takes $2-$3 Million

    Training a Custom Model with OpenAI’s GPT-4 Takes $2-$3 Million

    IBL News | New York

    Training a custom model from scratch using OpenAI’s GPT-4 may take several months, with pricing starting at $2 to $3 million, according to the company.

    This high price sparked a discussion among practitioners on Twitter, now known as X. Many users agreed that a much smaller pre-trained base model with fine-tuning on top of it would cost ten times less.

    OpenAI justifies the price by stating:

    “The Custom Models program gives selected organizations an opportunity to work with a dedicated group of OpenAI researchers to train custom GPT-4 models to their specific domain.”

    “This includes modifying every step of the model training process, from doing additional domain-specific pre-training to running a custom RL post-training process tailored for the specific domain.”

    “Organizations will have exclusive access to their custom models. This program is particularly applicable to domains with extremely large proprietary datasets—billions of tokens at minimum.”

    On the other hand, OpenAI announced Data Partnerships, an initiative intended to work with organizations to produce public and private datasets for training AI models as a way to combat models that contain toxic language and biases.

    To work with data and PDFs in those large-scale datasets, OpenAI says that it uses world-class OCR technology and automatic speech recognition (ASR) to transcribe spoken words.
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  • Grok, Elon Musk’s Chatbot, Tries to Raise $1 Billion

    Grok, Elon Musk’s Chatbot, Tries to Raise $1 Billion

    IBL News | New York

    X.AI, the AI start-up launched by Elon Musk in July, filed with the SEC to raise up to $1 billion in an equity offering.

    The company, which released a chatbot called Grok, already brought in $135 million from investors.

    “Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!” X.AI wrote on its website, adding, “It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.”

    Grok, X.AI has real-time knowledge of the internet, including access to all of X, giving it a leg up on all other chatbots.

    It aims to compete directly with ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude. However, Musk said that Grok has been designed to be anti-woke and lacks the political correctness built into other chatbots.

    Grok started rolling out to X Premium Plus users this month at $16 a month, per month.

    “We are a separate company from X Corp, but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission,” X.AI says on its website.

    People working on X.AI include alumni of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Twitter, and Tesla.
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  • Mistral, a French AI Start-Up, Was Valued at $2 Billion in Funding Round

    Mistral, a French AI Start-Up, Was Valued at $2 Billion in Funding Round

    IBL News | New York

    Mistral AI, the 22-people French start-up founded seven months ago by researchers from Google and Meta, raised $415 million (or 385 million euros) at a valuation of $2 billion.

    Investors include the Silicon Valley venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

    Also, this month, Mistral opened beta access to its platform services so people can build their own chatbots.

    The start-up also released Mixtral 8x7B, a high-quality sparse mixture of expert model (SMoE) with open weights, handling a context of 32k tokens, and licensed under Apache 2.0.

    It handles English, French, Italian, German and Spanish and shows strong performance in code generation.

    Mistral AI stated:

    “Mixtral — pre-trained on data extracted from the open Web — outperforms Llama 2 70B on most benchmarks with 6x faster inference. It is the strongest open-weight model with a permissive license and the best model overall regarding cost/performance trade-offs. In particular, it matches or outperforms GPT3.5 on most standard benchmarks.”

    Rivals like OpenAI and Google said that Mistral, which releases its technology as open-source software, can be dangerous, arguing that the raw technology could be used to spread disinformation and harmful material.

    The Mistral platform serves three endpoints: Mistral-tiny, which serves Mistral 7B Instruct v0.2; Mistral-small (Mixtral 8x7B); and Mistral-medium.

    The French Finance Minister pointed to Mistral as providing the European continent a chance to challenge U.S. tech giants.

    In the sphere of open-source, the American company Meta has been at the forefront. This year, it released an LLM called LLaMA.
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  • Google Makes ‘Gemini Pro’ Available to Developers and Enterprises

    Google Makes ‘Gemini Pro’ Available to Developers and Enterprises

    IBL News | New York

    Google announced yesterday that it was making its new AI model, Gemini Pro, available to developers and enterprises. It has been released via the Gemini API, and it’s free for now. SDKs are also available for Gemini Pro to help to build apps.

    Last week, Google started to roll out Gemini, which comes in three sizes: Ultra, Pro, and Nano.

    “The faster way to build with Gemini is with Google AI Studio, a free, web-based developer tool that enables you users to develop prompts and then get an API key to use in their app development,” said the company.

    Google intends that users migrate from AI Studio to Vertex AI. Early next year, the company plans to launch Gemini Ultra, its largest and most capable model for complex tasks.

    Yesterday, Google announced that Duet AI for Developers will be launched in Q1 of 2024. It will compete with GitHub GPT-based Copilot.

    Google’s partners adding support for coding with Duet AI for Developers include Confluent, Elastic, Grafana Labs, Hashicopr, MongoDB, Neo4j, Pinecone, Redis, and SingleStore.

    In addition, Google Cloud’s image-generation capabilities have been upgraded with Imagen 2. This feature is now generally available for Vertex AI customers on the allowlist.
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  • IBM, Meta, and 40 Top Organizations Create the ‘AI Alliance’ to Develop Open Source Technology

    IBM, Meta, and 40 Top Organizations Create the ‘AI Alliance’ to Develop Open Source Technology

    IBL News | New York

    IBM, Meta, and over 40 companies and organizations are creating the AI Alliance, an industry and academic group dedicated to open-source AI technology.

    This coalition said in a statement that it will focus on the responsible development of AI technology, including safety and security tools.

    AI Alliance will look to increase the number of open-source models rather than the proprietary systems favored by companies such as OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Microsoft.

    It will also develop new hardware and team up with academic researchers.

    The AI Alliance consists of a broad range of organizations that are working across aspects of AI education, research, development and deployment, and governance.

    Among them, there are creators of some of today’s most used open models including Llama2, Stable Diffusion, StarCoder, Bloom, as well as application developers like MLPerf, Hugging Face, LangChain, LlamaIndex, and other open-source AI toolkits will participate.

    Frameworks that drive platform software, including PyTorch, Transformers, Diffusers, Kubernetes, Ray, Hugging Face Text generation inference, and Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning, joined the initiative.

    Partners and collaborators include:

    • Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)
    • Aitomatic
    • AMD
    • Anyscale
    • Cerebras
    • CERN
    • Cleveland Clinic
    • Cornell University
    • Dartmouth
    • Dell Technologies
    • Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
    • ETH Zurich
    • Fast.ai
    • Fenrir, Inc.
    • FPT Software
    • Hebrew University of Jerusalem
    • Hugging Face
    • IBM
    • Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)
    • Imperial College London
    • Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
    • Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
    • Intel
    • Keio University
    • LangChain
    • LlamaIndex
    • Linux Foundation
    • Mass Open Cloud (MOC) Alliance, operated by Boston University and Harvard
    • Meta
    • Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
    • MLCommons
    • National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
    • National Science Foundation (NSF)
    • New York University
    • NumFOCUS
    • OpenTeams
    • Oracle
    • Partnership on AI
    • Quansight
    • Red Hat
    • Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
    • Roadzen
    • Sakana AI
    • SB Intuitions
    • ServiceNow
    • Silo AI
    • Simons Foundation
    • Sony Group
    • Stability AI
    • Together AI
    • TU Munich
    • UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society
    • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
    • The University of Notre Dame
    • The University of Texas at Austin
    • The University of Tokyo
    • Yale University

    In addition to bringing together leading developers, scientists, academics, students, and business leaders in the field of artificial intelligence, the AI Alliance will plan to partner with initiatives from governments, non-profit and civil society organizations working in the AI space.



  • Google’s Promotional Video of Gemini Was Fabricated

    Google’s Promotional Video of Gemini Was Fabricated

    IBL News | New York

    Google’s main Gemini AI demo video released — see it below — last week was fabricated, misrepresenting the model’s capabilities. The company admitted it in a report issued by Bloomberg.

    “Google’s video made it look like you could show different things to Gemini Ultra in real time and talk to it. You can’t,” Bloomberg’s reported wrote in a tweet.

    Google researchers interacted with Gemini through text, not voice, then picked the best interactions and edited them together with voice synthesis to make the video.

    As a result, the Internet giant is now facing controversy among AI experts.

    Running still images and text through LLM is computationally intensive and makes real-time video largely impractical. That was one of the clues that led experts to detect that the video was misleading.

    As Ars Technica reports, “OpenAI has embarrassed Google in generative AI over the last year.”

    On December 6th, Gemini was introduced as the first true rival to OpenAI’s GPT-4.

    The stock of the company went up 5% amidst comments about Google’s model “sophisticated reasoning capabilities,” supported by multiple benchmarks.

    The contested video, titled “Hands-on with Gemini: Interacting with multimodal AI,” shows that the AI model sees, accompanied by the AI model’s responses on the right side of the screen. The viewer hears a voice, apparently of Gemini Ultra, responding to the questions.

    Additionally, on the next day, TechCrunch reported that users were very disappointed with Gemini Pro’s performance on Bard.

    ArsTechnica‘s tests showed that Google’s AI system improved in the eight months but “ChatGPT is still the winner”.
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