Category: Top News

  • Jupyter Releases Generative AI Features Allowing to Generate Notebooks from a Prompt

    Jupyter Releases Generative AI Features Allowing to Generate Notebooks from a Prompt

    IBL News | New York

    The Jupyter organization announced yesterday an open-source project to bring advanced generative AI features to Jupyter Notebook and JupyterLab.

    AWS Jupyter AI offers:

    • A native chat UI conversational assistant in JupyterLab.
    • An %%ai magic that turns the Jupyter Notebook into a reproducible generative AI playground. This works anywhere the IPython kernel runs (JupyterLab, Jupyter Notebook, Google Colab, VSCode, etc.).
    • Support for a wide range of generative model providers and models (AI21, Anthropic, Cohere, Hugging Face, OpenAI, SageMaker, etc.).

     

  • Meta Open-Sourced AudioCraft, a Generative AI Software for Sound and Music

    Meta Open-Sourced AudioCraft, a Generative AI Software for Sound and Music

    IBL News | New York

    Meta this week shared details on AudioCraft, a single open-source code base for music, sound, compression & generation of high-quality, realistic audio from text.

    AudioCraft consists of three models: MusicGen, AudioGen, and EnCodec.

    • MusicGen, trained with Meta-owned and specifically licensed music, generates music from text-based user inputs. [See Demo]

    • AudioGen, which was trained on public sound effects, generates audio from text-based user inputs.

    • EnCodec decoder allows for higher quality music generation with fewer artifacts.

    Meta’s pre-trained AudioGen model lets users generate environmental sounds and sound effects like a dog barking, cars honking, or footsteps on a wooden floor.

    The models are available for research purposes and to further people’s understanding of the technology.

    “We’re excited to give researchers and practitioners access so they can train their own models with their own datasets for the first time and help advance the state of the art,” said Meta in a blog post.

    Samples of generated audio.

  • “Chatbots are a terrible interface for LLMs,” Expert Designers Say

    “Chatbots are a terrible interface for LLMs,” Expert Designers Say

    IBL News | New York

    Chatbot interfaces look the same as a Google search box, a login form, and a credit card field. “They are not the future; pretty soon, we’re going to get sick of typing all the time, static text is dead,” wrote design expert Amelia Wattenberger.

    Dealing with text prompts, she suggested adding controls to better tailor the responses, as shown below.

     

    .

    • “Even if we’re determined to stick with a chat interface, we can make things easier for users. Recently, my team shipped a prototype named Copilot for Docs, exploring ways to make technical documentation easier for developers to use.” [See it below]

    • “I believe the real game changers are going to have very little to do with plain content generation. Let’s build tools that offer suggestions to help us gain clarity in our thinking.”
    .
    • “Chatbots are a terrible interface for LLMs. Or, at the very least, we can add controls, information, and affordances to our chatbot interfaces to make them more usable. I can’t wait to see the field become more mature and for us to start building AI tools that embrace our human abilities.”

     

    • GitHub: Awesome ChatGPT Prompts 

     

     

  • Ukrainian Startup Preply Raised $70M for Its Language Learning App

    Ukrainian Startup Preply Raised $70M for Its Language Learning App

    IBL News | New York

    The live language learning app Preply, known for its large number of human tutors (currently, 35,000 in 50 languages), raised $70 million in equity and debt to extend its series C to $120 million.

    The round was led by Horizon Capital, Hoxton Ventures, owl Ventures, and other investors.

    Preply, which made its name out of its network of tutors, and differentiated itself from the likes of Doulingo’s automatic approach, said in an announcement that it plans now to use the funding to double down on AI to scale its service.

    Founded in Ukraine, the company has already incorporated an AI teaching assistant that allows users to create exercises, grammar explanations, conversation starters, instructional planning, and after-lesson support. It’s also been building AI analytics to help understand how students are doing.

    Preply has Datadog, GroupM, and Bain among its customers.
    .

  • Canvas LMS Will Integrate AI Student Tutor and Teacher Assistant From Khanmigo

    Canvas LMS Will Integrate AI Student Tutor and Teacher Assistant From Khanmigo

    IBL News | New York

    Canvas LMS will include Khan Academy’s AI-powered student tutor and teaching assistant Khanmigo starting with a pilot during the 2024 – 2025 school year with a selected cohort of K-12 and Higher Ed early adopters.

    The announcement of a partnership between Khan Academy and Instructure, the parent company of Canvas LMS, was made during Instructure’s annual conference last week in Denver.

    “This solution is a large step forward in delivering personalization for each student while allowing busy educators to scale their excellence and impact in ways unimaginable a few short months ago,” said Steve Daly, CEO at Instructure.

    Khanmigo supports human-driven, technology-enhanced essay feedback and grading, lesson planning, and rubric creation. “Its tutoring capabilities are aimed to help students use generative AI ethically, equitably, and with integrity, demonstrating an authentic work product becomes easy and clear,” said the company.

    “Every educator we talk to is seeking ways to address students using ChatGPT to write school essays and do homework,” said Sal Khan, founder and CEO of Khan Academy.

    “How can classrooms use AI tools, while ensuring students develop critical thinking skills? We’re teaming up with Instructure to solve this. We’re using AI to show teachers not just the final essay, but how the student got there. So students will be supported in developing critical writing and thinking skills, while getting the benefit of AI designed for education. Khanmigo can also help with rubric creation and grading, saving teachers time. Students won’t get answers, but they will get appropriate levels of support,” he added.

     

  • Google Tests ‘Genesis’, an AI Assistant for Journalists

    Google Tests ‘Genesis’, an AI Assistant for Journalists

    IBL News | New York

    Google pitched to executives at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, a personal assistant tool for journalists that uses AI to take in details of current events and generate news copy.

    The tool, known as Genesis, can automate some tasks for journalists and free up time for others, The New York Times reported this month.

    “If this tool is misused by journalists and news organizations on topics that require nuance and cultural understanding, it could damage the credibility of the news organizations that use it,” said Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor and media commentator.

    Currently, news organizations around the world are grappling with whether to use artificial intelligence tools in their newsrooms.

    However, Google’s Genesis tool can spur anxiety among journalists who have been writing their own articles for centuries.

    Publishers and other content creators have already criticized Google and other major companies for using decades of their articles and posts to help train their AI systems without compensating the publishers.

    Some news organizations, including NBC News and The Times, have taken a position against AI’s sucking up their data without permission.

    In addition, experts say that Google’s chatbot Bard presents factual assertions that are sometimes incorrect and do not send traffic to more authoritative sources, such as news publishers.
    .

  • Stack Overflow Launches Its Own Into Generative AI Solution

    Stack Overflow Launches Its Own Into Generative AI Solution

    IBL News | New York

    Yesterday, the community-based question-and-answer website Stack Overflow announced an extensive list of generative AI capabilities on both the public site and its enterprise offering.

    “We are giving the ability for users to ask conversational questions through OverflowAI, and the generative answers are going to come straight from the 58 million questions and answers from public Stack Overflow, with citations to the very specific sources,” said Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar.

    OverflowAI brings a set of features to the platform not to replace the community, but rather to complement it in a number of ways.

    The OverflowAI model enables natural language processing (NLP)-based queries, intended to yield highly accurate generated results. The model was trained on the corpus of the Stack Overflow public knowledge base.

    The company ensured that community-directed responses will remain core to the platform.

    Github Copilot’s AI technology has captured the attention of the code development community in recent months, and critics say that OverflowAI will have a hard time competing with this new service.

     

  • [Sponsored] Google Cloud Post: IBL Education’s GenAI-Based Chat Mentor with Google

    [Sponsored] Google Cloud Post: IBL Education’s GenAI-Based Chat Mentor with Google

    [Google Cloud Post, July 24, 2023]

    Rachel Manning
    Head of EdTech, Google Cloud

    Fernando Cruz
    Head of EdTech Marketing, Google Cloud

    With more than 6 years of experience in building open source and Generative AI in education at scale, ibleducation.com continues to evolve its approach and services. More recently, the company became an education-focused Vertex AI integrator. They provide enterprises and academic institutions with a platform to build, train and securely customize large language models (LLMs) for interactive mentors using Google’s Vertex AI.

    “The education industry only recently began understanding the value of Generative AI with open source and the opportunities it presents,” says Miguel Amigot II, Chief Technology Officer at ibleducation.com. “We’re providing the chance to build a new type of learning, mentoring, and analytics platform that gives organizations total control over their training methods, data, and more, without locking into one vendor.”

    Organizations large and small, including Fortune 500 companies and leading universities institutions, use ibleducation.com to support their learners, allow educators to develop coursework, and provide engineers with a solid platform to build on.rely on it to power their learning strategies.

    Recently, ibleducation.com chose to partner with Google Cloud to improve its platform and scale beyond its base of millions of users.

    Harnessing the power of GenAI in education and training

    ibleducation.com initially began working with Google Cloud to unify its education data strategy to drive real-time and predictive analytics.

    “Google Cloud outperforms others when it comes to maintaining control over algorithms and general data governance,” says Amigot.  “We’re fortunate to be able to maintain ownership of our models while maintaining a pay-per-use pricing model. This is critical for our business. It allows our clients to avoid lower-value maintenance tasks, focus on innovation and user experience, and not worry about excessive costs.”

    In the past, because of the high costs and need for AI and engineering talent to produce large language models, schools have been unable to take full advantage of open-source education technologies. Together, ibleducation.com and Google Cloud democratize access to AI-enabled tools for educators worldwide.

    With a strong analytics and AI foundation, ibleducation.com has been able to personalize, translate, and create education content faster than before. This has been especially effective in improving accessibility, as automated translation and repurposing ensures those with visual and hearing impairments can interact with the content.

    “Google Cloud enables us to reduce the total cost of building, running, and maintaining large language models by more than 70%,” says Amigot. “We’ve seen language model hosting costs decrease before, but nothing like this.”

    Bringing AI-powered content creation to educators

    Vertex AI has been especially useful in creating content, helping ibleducation.com to dramatically scale out its learning materials. Usage-based pricing mixed with an open-source model gives ibleducation.com the resources to support its users in developing evolving, valuable learning experiences to serve people worldwide.

    Additionally, Google Cloud powers ibleducation.com’s Generative AI-based mentors, which provides a one-to-one learning experience to students and professionals looking for tailored skills development.

    “The mission is to provide educators with a centralized system wherein they can manage everything from indexing data about customer courses to designing and facilitating UI/UX for users’ digital mentors,” says Amigot. “Google Cloud has helped us cover all of these bases.”

    ibleducation.com allows users to create virtual mentors that provide personalized teaching, assess student knowledge, guide students through skills and learning paths, and offer robust learning analytics. Text-to-text and speech-to-speech interfaces can be offered over Slack, Discord, text message-based bots, web scripts, and LTI integrations.

    “AI Mentor has been a very effective tool for our users because it adapts to the needs of educators and organizations very quickly,” says Amigot. “We’re seeing people use it for teaching assistance, marketing and administration, and a lot more. Vertex AI allows us to have many models for any variety of purposes.”

    Looking forward, ibleducation.com is looking to continue taking personalized learning to new heights.

    “From a mission standpoint, we want to expand to reach all the organizations not currently served by online education through our platform, analytics, and other AI-powered services,” says Amigot. “Our relationship with Google Cloud is instrumental in achieving our goal to democratize access to next-generation educational capabilities to more communities and organizations around the globe.”

    Ready to take the next step? Join our upcoming GenAI workshop for higher education to learn how Google’s AI tools can help education institutions or explore our EdTech solutions to see how you can make education more personal, safe, and accessible with 100+ cutting-edge products.

  • Uncensored and Unmoderated Chatbots Are Widely Adopted

    Uncensored and Unmoderated Chatbots Are Widely Adopted

    IBL News | New York

    A new wave of uncensored and unmoderated chatbots is coming online without many ethical guardrails against misinformation, false and hate content, and pornography, The New York Times described in an article.

    Names like GPT4All, FreedomGPT, and WizardLM-Uncensored were created for little or no money by independent programmers or teams of volunteers.

    Users can download an unrestricted chatbot on their own computers, and train it on private messages, personal emails, or secret documents without risking a privacy breach.

    Volunteer programmers can develop clever new add-ons, moving faster than large companies.

    Dozens of independent and open-source A.I. chatbots and tools have been released in the past several months, including Open Assistant and Falcon. HuggingFace, a large repository of open-source A.I.s, hosts more than 240,000 open-source models.

    Released in April and widely adopted today, Open Assistant was developed with help from 13,500 volunteers, using existing language models, including one model that Meta first released.

  • AWS Launches a Free “Generative AI for Executives” at Its Skills Platform

    AWS Launches a Free “Generative AI for Executives” at Its Skills Platform

    IBL News | New York

    AWS launched a free course about Generative AI aimed at executives this month. It’s available on the AWS Skill Builder platform and its YouTube channel.

    The course includes five videos that cover the foundational elements, historical context, and use cases of the technology.

    It also offers executives insights into training and reskilling needed for successful implementation.

    As the vendor AI push continues, some of the top tech giants are providing courses to help address a key adoption roadblock: in-house skills.

    In May and June, Google and Microsoft released no-cost AI training courses

    According to a Gartner survey, seven in ten companies are investigating or exploring generative AI, while 19% are advancing pilots or are in production.