Category: Top News

IBM Will Dedicate $500 Million to Invest in Generative AI-Focused Start-Ups

IBL News | New York

IBM announced this month that it is launching a $500 million fund, named Enterprise AI Venture Fund, to invest in generative AI start-ups, regardless of their size, whether they are in early-stage or hyper-growth.

IBM is the latest tech giant to jump into the AI investing race.

The company has already invested in Hugging Face’s recent Series D funding round and in HiddenLayer’s Series A round.

IBM seeks mostly to gain operational expertise in product and engineering and go-to-market strategies by partnering with funded start-ups.

“AI is slated to unlock nearly $16 trillion in productivity by 2030. With the launch of the IBM Enterprise AI Venture Fund, we’re opening another channel to harness the enormous potential of the AI revolution into tangible, positive outcomes for IBM and the companies we invest in,” said Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President of Software and Chief Commercial Officer, IBM.

In September 2023, IBM announced the general availability of the first models in the watsonx Granite model series — a collection of generative AI models to advance the infusion of generative AI into business applications and workflows.

Earlier this year, IBM also announced plans to host Meta’s Llama 2-chat 70 billion parameter model within watsonx, furthering the company’s strategy of leveraging both third-party and its own AI models to maintain open innovation.

November 18, 2023
Sam Altman Fired as CEO of OpenAI and Replaced by CTO Mira Murati

IBL News | New York

In an extremely sudden turn of events, Sam Altman was fired as CEO of OpenAI and replaced by CTO Mira Murati as the interim CEO, the company announced on Friday.

The company will be conducting a search for a permanent CEO successor.

Employees at OpenAI found out about the news when it was announced publicly, according to multiple sources.

The removal is a stunning fall for Sam Altman, 38, who over the last year had become one of the tech industry’s most prominent executives. A year ago, OpenAI launched an industrywide AI frenzy when it released ChatGPT.

“Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities,” the company said in its blog post.

“The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”

“I loved my time at OpenAI,” Altman said in a post on X (formerly Twitter). “It was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. Most of all I loved working with such talented people. Will have more to say about what’s next later.”

i loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. most of all i loved working with such talented people.

will have more to say about what’s next later.

🫡

— Sam Altman (@sama) November 17, 2023

OpenAI also announced that co-founder Greg Brockman will be stepping down as chairman of the board, though he will remain at the company.

OpenAI’s board of directors consists of OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, independent directors Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology’s Helen Toner.

The majority of the board is independent, and the independent directors do not hold equity in OpenAI.

A longtime tech entrepreneur, Sam Altman helped found OpenAI with the financial backing of Elon Musk in 2015.

He was one of several tech CEOs to meet with White House leaders, including President Joe Biden, this year to emphasize the importance of ethical and responsible AI development.

Others wanted Altman and OpenAI to move more cautiously. Elon Musk, who helped found OpenAI before breaking from the group, and dozens of tech leaders, professors, and researchers  urged artificial intelligence labs like OpenAI to stop the training of the most powerful AI systems for at least six months, citing “profound risks to society and humanity.”

Murati was born and raised in Albania and studied engineering at Dartmouth. She joined OpenAI in 2018. Previously, she managed the product and engineering teams at augmented reality company Ultraleap (then called Leap Motion) and earlier worked at Tesla, where she helped develop the Model X.

The news shocked AI insiders, analysts, and tech executives alike.

His removal is a blow to Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion in OpenAI and has what amounts to a 49 percent stake in the company.

Sam Altman is a hero of mine. He built a company from nothing to $90 Billion in value, and changed our collective world forever. I can’t wait to see what he does next. I, and billions of people, will benefit from his future work- it’s going to be simply incredible. Thank you…

— Eric Schmidt (@ericschmidt) November 17, 2023

November 17, 2023
Sam Altman Will Ask More Funding from Microsoft to Push Ahead with the Vision of AGI

IBL News | New York

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, said to the Financial Times that his company will ask for more funding from Microsoft to push ahead with the vision to build out the computing needed to create AGI (artificial general intelligence) — software as intelligent as humans.

Earlier this year, Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI as part of a multiyear agreement that valued the San Francisco-based company at $29 billion.

This month, OpenAI announced a GTP Store, or a marketplace similar to Apple’s App Store, with the best apps tailored for specific applications and a shared revenue model with GPT creators.

“Those are channels into our one single product, which is superintelligence,” Sam Altman said.

Altman hired Brad Lightcap as his chief operating officer to build out the enterprise business. This executive previously worked at Dropbox and start-up accelerator Y Combinator.

Currently, OpenAI is working to build more powerful autonomous agents that can perform complex tasks and actions, such as executing code, making payments, sending emails, or filing claims.

“The amount of business value that will come from being able to do that in every category, I think, is pretty good.”

The company is also working on GPT-5, the next generation of its AI model, although Altman did not commit to a timeline for its release. The CEO of ChatGPT said it was technically hard to predict exactly what new capabilities and skills the GPT-5 model might have.

It will require more data to train on, which Altman said would come from a combination of publicly available data sets on the internet, as well as proprietary data from companies.

OpenAI recently put out a call for large-scale data sets from organizations that “are not already easily accessible online to the public today.”

To train its models, OpenAI, like most other large AI companies, uses Nvidia’s advanced H100 chips, which are in a supply shortage.

OpenAI has already taken the lead in the race to build generative AI — systems that can create text, images, code, and other multimedia in seconds.

Altman said his team believed that language was a “great way to compress information” and, therefore, develop intelligence, a factor he thought that the likes of Google DeepMind had missed.

He also said “the biggest missing piece” in the race to develop AGI is what is required for such systems to make fundamental leaps of understanding.
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November 16, 2023
2U and USC Terminated Its Partnership for Developing Online Degree Programs

IBL News | New York

Online program management (OPM) company 2U won’t provide services for the University of Southern California’s (USC) online degree programs from the USC Rossier School of Education, USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, and the USC Iovine and Young Academy, after fifteen years of collaboration.

“After much thoughtful consideration, 2U and USC have mutually agreed to conclude our relationship,” announced 2U/edX last week in a joint release.

Over the next 15 months, 2U and USC said they will work together to transfer the delivery and administration of these programs to the university.

2U will continue to work with USC on its hybrid online clinical program in physical therapy, according to the announcement.

USC will pay nearly $26 million to 2U to extract itself from the arrangement, Inside of Higher Ed wrote. Dhawal Shah, CEO and Founder of ClassCentral.com, reported that “as part of this agreement, USC will pay 2U a $40 million break fee.”

The announcement comes as USC faces lawsuits over some of its offerings. Graduates of USC’s online master’s in social work sued the university earlier this year, alleging that it presented the program as on par with the on-campus version even though “substantial aspects” were outsourced to 2U.

The Wall Street Journal’s 2021 article about USC’s social work program became a flashpoint for the Biden administration and congressional Democrats; it was titled “USC Pushed a $115,000 Online Degree. Graduates Got Low Salaries, Huge Debts.”

Also in 2021, the Los Angeles Times criticized the program’s recruitment tactics in an op-ed titled “USC tarnishes its reputation again, this time with for-profit recruitment tactics.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, USC paid 2U approximately $398 million from 2013 to 2020.

Last week, Chip Paucek, CEO at 2U, explained to investors that “The market for degree programs has changed over the years and some programs have become more difficult to run due to their pricing or other factors.”

Also last week, 2U announced that it would add 50 new programs with six institutions using its flex degree approach, which gives institutions more flexibility in which 2U services they use and changes the agreements’ pricing accordingly.

The average price of flex degree programs is $40,000, about 50 percent less than our full-model degree programs.

“We anticipate these new degrees will generate $120 million in revenue at their steady state, effectively replacing the revenue from the degrees phased out through our portfolio management strategy,” said Chip Paucek.

Dhawal Shah analyzed the trajectory and latest results of 2U, valued below $100 million and with a debt of $883.1 million, and said that 2U has taken over Pearson’s OPM portfolio.

November 15, 2023
Google Plans to Deepen Its Partnership with Character.ai by Investing Millions

IBL News | New York

Alphabet’s Google is in talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Character.ai, the fast-growing chatbot that is in need of capital to keep up with user demand.

The investment could be structured as convertible notes, Reuters reported.

The company is also in talks to raise equity funding from venture capitalists and achieve a valuation of over $5 billion. In March, it raised $150 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $1 billion valuation.

Founded by former Google employees Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, Character.ai is currently using Google’s cloud services and Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) to train its models.

Character.ai allows people to create their own AI assistants while engaging with virtual versions of celebrities or anime characters in a fun experience.

Google has been investing in AI startups, including $2 billion for Anthropic in the form of convertible notes, on top of its earlier equity investment. Anthropic uses Google Cloud and TPUs.
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November 14, 2023
OpenAI’s Custom GPTs Start to Proliferate

IBL News | New York

OpenAI’s custom GPTs are starting to proliferate.

Some bloggers, like Rowan Cheung, author of The Rundown AI newsletter, have started to create directories of GPT.

Supertools.therundown.ai includes AI chatbots classified by area as well as a top-pick ranking.

Its creator said that he got over 500 submissions in just 24 hours.

OpenAI’s custom GPTs are taking over.

I built a directory to find the best GPTs and got OVER 500+ submissions in 24 hrs.

The top 10 community favorites so far:

— Rowan Cheung (@rowancheung) November 12, 2023

Before we start, here’s the link to my GPT directory.

Search, find, filter, and submit all the best custom GPTs directly, all in one spot.

Link: https://t.co/Zvk5OAciKt pic.twitter.com/K8l03suER8

— Rowan Cheung (@rowancheung) November 12, 2023

1. Designer GPT

Creates and hosts beautiful websites, all built inside ChatGPT.

Link: https://t.co/rh5I3t0kH1 https://t.co/Rz6SV81XKf

— Rowan Cheung (@rowancheung) November 12, 2023

OpenAI wants to be your backend, and frontend. It’s consolidating. It’s remaking the primitives.

Backends and infra are already deprecated. It’s just boilerplate and code is starting to feel ephemeral.

There won’t be Vercels. AWS will be automated away. RAG will just be an… https://t.co/o4fOx3Onvc

— Rob Phillips 🤖🦾 (@iwasrobbed) November 12, 2023

ChuanhuChatGPThttps://t.co/wQVTuQbBSK

Lightweight and User-friendly @Gradio Web-UI for LLMs including ChatGPT/ChatGLM/LLaMA pic.twitter.com/9JgQgbcPqV

— AK (@_akhaliq) November 11, 2023

Built in 20 mins using @OpenAI and @streamlit

📣 Introducing UI Auditor

Upload a picture of your app’s UI and get feedback from GPT

GPT-Vision is crazy man I’m gonna build a million wrappers

Link below if you want to try it 👇🏽 pic.twitter.com/EiKuySm7zj

— Kartik (@Kdeshpande3) November 8, 2023

November 13, 2023
GitHub Announced Its Copilot Enterprise Plans that Let Companies Customize Their Codebase

IBL News | New York

GitHub announced this week the availability of GitHub Copilot Chat in December 2023, as well as new plans for GitHub Copilot Enterprise, new AI-powered security features, and the GitHub Copilot Partner Program.

The Microsoft-owned company unveiled these advancements during its annual GitHub Universe developer conference.

Copilot Chat, which sits inside the developer’s integrated development environment (IDE), allows them to ask questions about the code they’re currently working on, including getting it to identify and propose fixes to bugs in a particular program and even provide inline feedback about specific lines of code.

It is powered by the latest OpenAI large language model (LLM) GPT-4 and is available as part of the standard Copilot subscription ($10/month for individuals and $19/month for businesses.)

The GitHub Copilot Enterprise subscription will cost $39/month and will be available from February 2024. It will include the ability for companies to personalize it for their codebase and fine-tune the underlying models.

“Just as GitHub was founded on Git, today we are re-founded on Copilot,” said the company in a blog post.
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November 11, 2023
Humane Introduced Its Wearable Device ‘Ai Pin’ After $240M In Funding and Much Hype

IBL News | New York

The San Francisco-based startup Humane, founded by two former Apple employees, showcased its bold sci-fi venture yesterday—a device named Ai Pin.

The unveiling followed five years of development, $240 million in funding, the acquisition of 25 patents, significant hype, and partnerships with top tech companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Salesforce.

Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, Humane’s husband-and-wife founders [in the picture below], envision a future with reduced dependence on screens, a departure from the ubiquity created by their former employer, Apple.

They promote the pin as the first artificially intelligent device. Control options include speaking aloud, tapping a touchpad, or projecting a laser display onto the palm of a hand.

In an instant, the device’s virtual assistant can send a text message, play a song, snap a photo, make a call, or translate a real-time conversation into another language. The system relies on AI to help answer questions and can summarize incoming messages.

Essentially, the device can follow a conversation from one question to the next without needing explicit context.

The technology is a step forward from Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, wrote The New York Times. “To tech insiders, it’s a moonshot. To outsiders, it’s a sci-fi fantasy.” “It’s a gadget that’s reminiscent of the badges worn in Star Trek.”

Humane plans to commence shipping the pins next year, expecting to sell approximately 100,000 units at a cost of $699 each, requiring a $24 monthly subscription in the first year. The pin comes with a new operating system called Cosmos and its own wireless plan. Users will need new phone numbers for the device.

“Users will need to dictate rather than type texts and trade a camera that zooms for wide-angle photos. They’ll need to be patient because certain features, like object recognition and videos, won’t be available initially. And the pin can sometimes be buggy, as it was during some of the company’s demos for The New York Times.”

“The tech industry has a large graveyard of wearable products that have failed to catch on.”

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, has invested in Humane, as well as another AI company, Rewind AI, which plans to create a necklace that records what people say and hear. He has also discussed teaming up with Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief designer, to create an AI gadget with ambitions similar to Humane’s.
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This is the Humane Ai Pin https://t.co/ytUSGF3y55 pic.twitter.com/Zrcoaf49u7

— Humane (@Humane) November 9, 2023

November 10, 2023
Elon Musk’s xAI Released an Early Version of Its LLM

IBL News | New York

Elon Musk’s xAI start-up announced this weekend its AI model, named Grok, and built with real-time knowledge as it accesses the X (formerly Twitter) platform.

“Grok is intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask,” according to the company.

Other characteristics of this tool are:

• “Designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!”

• “It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.”

• “Research and innovation-focused: We want Grok to serve as a powerful research assistant for anyone, helping them to quickly access relevant information, process data, and come up with new ideas.”

The LLM engine powering Grok is Grok-1, developed over the last four months. It’s built on a custom training and inference stack based on Kubernetes, Rust, and JAX.

This early model approaches LLaMA 2 (70B) capabilities on standard LM benchmarks but uses only half of its training resources,” said the developing team of xAI.

In terms of capabilities, Grok-1 surpassed ChatGPT-3.5 and Inflection-1. “It is only surpassed by models that were trained with a significantly larger amount of training data and compute resources like GPT-4. This showcases the rapid progress we are making at xAI in training LLMs with exceptional efficiency.”

xAI opened a waitlist to offer a limited number of users in the United States to try out our Grok prototype and provide feedback.

November 9, 2023
OpenAI Prepares the Opening of Its GPT Store

IBL News | San Francisco

In the coming weeks, by the end of November, OpenAI will release its GPTs, a platform accessible through the GPT Store, which will allow users without coding knowledge to create custom versions — or agents — of ChatGPT for all sorts of use cases.

Initiatives such as Character.AI, Meta, Replika, and Poe will face the competition of these GTP agents.

Details about how the GPT Store will look and work are scarce, though OpenAI is promising to eventually pay creators based on how much their GPTs are used. GPTs will be classified into categories like productivity, education, and “just for fun”.

GPTs will be available to paying ChatGPT Plus subscribers and OpenAI enterprise customers, who can make internal-only GPTs for their employees.

These developments were announced Monday at OpenAI’s DevDay conference in San Francisco.

There, the company also announced a cheaper, turbocharged GTP-4.

GPT creators’ apps will be monitored by OpenAI to ensure that fraud, hate speech, and adult themes are blocked.

ChatGPT has reached 100 million weekly users.

Today, OpenAI announced they are releasing the ChatGPT Store, an App Store for ChatGPT

Shopify Apps: 33,000 apps, $561M of revenue
App Store: 1.8M apps, $910B of revenue
ChatGPT Store: 0 “agents”, $0 revenue

Probably millions of agents, billions revenue soon

I wish I had… pic.twitter.com/zgwf2w07Zw

— GREG ISENBERG (@gregisenberg) November 6, 2023

🦜🤖OpenGPTs

OpenAI just announced “GPTs” – chatbots augmented with custom tools and custom instructions that anyone can create

We’re excited to announce OpenGPTs – a open source GitHub repo enabling similar functionality. This will allow:

🛠️Easier tool definition
🧠Usage of… pic.twitter.com/jgrn0boBVI

— LangChain (@LangChainAI) November 6, 2023

Advanced Data Analysis (formerly Code Interpreter) support has been added to the ChatGPT iOS app.

You now have a data scientist or data analyst in your pocket. pic.twitter.com/IjTjcb1J1k

— Adam.GPT (@TheRealAdamG) November 8, 2023

November 8, 2023