IBL News

Category: Top News

  • An AI Chatbot Allows to Message Historical and Fictional Characters

    An AI Chatbot Allows to Message Historical and Fictional Characters

    IBL News | New York

    A new GPT-3.5 turbo–powered app called Superchat allows users to chat with historical, fictional characters like Shakespeare, Einstein, or Cleopatra, and experts and representatives from different professions, like lawyers, chefs, or therapists.

    The company, Gorilla Technologies, has also created its own characters, like an assistant named Aria. The artwork for the characters was created using Midjourney.

    This chatbot can aid users with everyday tasks, like email writing or marketing expertise.

    “The goal is to make AI technology accessible to everyone, not just people who know how to write great prompts,” explained Gorilla Technologies CEO Guglielmo Faglioni. “This app will be a great tool for kids who want to learn more about historical figures by chatting to cool characters like Shakespeare.”

    The app is structured like a messaging app, allowing users to have multiple conversations with different AI chatbots at the same time.

    A number of the characters are available for free with the app download, while others can be unlocked through a premium subscription of $70/year.

    Like Superchat, other apps hoping to cash in the hype around AI chatbots are Quora’s Poe, where users can now make their own bots using prompts, the Korean Typecast, or the Israeli D-ID.

  • Vimeo Will Release an End-to-End AI Suite for Video Creation on Its Platform in July

    Vimeo Will Release an End-to-End AI Suite for Video Creation on Its Platform in July

    IBL News | New York

    Vimeo.com (NASDAQ:VMEO) announced this week it will be adding to its platform in July a suite of generative AI-powered video creation and editing tools that will include a script generator — including tone and duration —, a teleprompter, and a text-based video editor.

    “It will enable anyone to create a fully produced video in minutes by automatically generating scripts in seconds, recording videos in one take using a built-in teleprompter, and deleting any unwanted content such as filler words (ums and uhs) and long pauses,” said the company.

    “These new capabilities have expansive applications, from quickly creating highlight reels to hosting virtual events or company meetings to exporting quote clips for short marketing videos, or simply cleaning up a high-profile video before sharing,” said Ashraf Alkarmi, chief product officer at Vimeo.

    Alkarmi continues, “We’re clearly only scratching the surface of what AI can accomplish for organizations and the people within them.”

    The capabilities will be free for anyone to trial as part of Vimeo’s subscription plan.

     

  • A French Startup Created to Compete Against OpenAI Raises $113 Million

    A French Startup Created to Compete Against OpenAI Raises $113 Million

    IBL News | New York

    A Paris, France – based startup named Mistral AI, co-founded by alums from Google’s DeepMind and Meta and created a month ago, has raised $113 million at a $260 million valuation.

    The round is led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Xavier Niel, JCDecaux Holding, Rodolphe Saadé, and Motier Ventures, in France; La Famiglia and Headline, in Germany; Exor Ventures, in Italy; Sofina in Belgium; and First Minute Capital and LocalGlobe, in the UK. French investment bank Bpifrance and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt are also shareholders.

    The goal of Mistral AI is to compete against OpenAI by creating open-source language models and generative AI solutions while focusing on enterprise, not consumers.

    “Open source is a core part of our DNA,” CEO Arthur Mensch noted.

    It plans to release its first models for text-based generative AI in 2024.

    The founders are all in their early thirties and have known each other since school when they  were all studying across the field of artificial intelligence.

    [In the picture above, CEO Arthur Mensch (center), along with his co-founders Timothée Lacroix (CTO – L), and and Guillaume Lample (Chief Science Officer – R)]

    Guillaume Lample led the development of LLaMA, Meta’s Large Language Model, and he was leading the LLM team at Meta before he left to co-found Mistral AI.

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  • WordPress.com Launches Its AI Assistant for Creating Posts, Headlines, and Translations

    WordPress.com Launches Its AI Assistant for Creating Posts, Headlines, and Translations

    IBL News | New York

    Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, announced the availability of an AI tool called Jetpack AI Assistant for the customers of its hosted service.

    It integrates with the WordPress editor and is also available through the Jetpack plugin, allowing users to create, by adjusting the tone, unlimited posts, pages, structured lists and tables within a blog post, headlines, and translations in twelve languages.

    The assistant also offers better spelling and grammar correction features than WordPress’s built-in tools.

    Like ChatGPT, Jetpack AI Assistant utilizes a conversational system so content creators can chat with it in natural language.

    When writing a post or a page, users can add an AI Assistant block to their content. They type in a prompt, and the AI Assistant starts generating text.

    Automattic said that its AI Assistant, “still in the experimental phase, is free to use for all WordPress.com customers for a limited time.”

    It added:

    “Activate the block with the Inserter or the “/” command shortcut. (If you didn’t know, here’s a fun tip: Hit the “/” button while in the post or page editor and type the name of the block you’re looking for. In this case, it would be “AI.”).”

    According to TechCrunch, Jetpack AI Assistant block will let users send 20 requests as a free trial. After that, they have to pay $10 per month to access the feature.

    In the last months, Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Notion, and Grammarly have introduced AI-powered writing tools into their apps.
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  • edX Launches a Career Resource Center and an AI MicroBootCamp Program

    edX Launches a Career Resource Center and an AI MicroBootCamp Program

    IBL News | New York

    2U’s edX announced this month the launch of a free online career resource center to help learners find professional opportunities, career tips, tools, and advice from industry experts and alumni.

    This Career Resource Center features career-specific skill identification, personalized course recommendations, resume-building tools, job search assistance, and access to industry events.

    The hub offers insightful articles by career and industry experts to help learners master the complexities of job searching.

    “Our aim is not just to help people thrive in their present roles but also to help them build the confidence to navigate new sectors and technologies and unlock exciting professional opportunities,” said Anant Agarwal, Founder of edX and Chief Platform Officer at 2U.

    In addition, this month, edX has announced a groundbreaking, intensive 10-week micro boot-camp program in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence MicroBootCamp, starting in July 2023.

    This program is developed in partnership with twelve leading universities: Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, Southern Methodist University, The Ohio State University College of Engineering, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, University of Denver, University of Kansas Jayhawk Global, University of Central Florida, University of New Hampshire Professional Development & Training, University of Richmond).

    “In addition to the Machine Learning and AI MicroBootCamp program, six new ChatGPT open courses are now available on edX.org, giving millions of people worldwide the opportunity to learn about utilizing one of the world’s fastest-growing applications. Courses, which are free to audit, include Prompt Engineering Advanced ChatGPT and ChatGPT for education, business, healthcare, and technology, coding, and data,” said Anant Agarwal.

    [Disclosure: These ChatGPT courses have been developed in partnership with IBL Education, the parent company of IBL News]

     

  • Educause Advises Higher Ed Institutions to Incorporate AI Tools

    Educause Advises Higher Ed Institutions to Incorporate AI Tools

    IBL News | New York

    Higher education institutions need to plan for how to leverage AI in a way that improves efficiency and promotes learning, creativity, innovation, and growth, as these tools, which are becoming mainstream, help streamline workflows, address enrollment challenges, generate content, and impact the teaching and learning experience.

    This is one of the main findings of EDUCAUSE’s recently released 2023 Teaching and Learning Edition Annual Horizon Report, which advises institutions to plan for AI.

    Kathe Pelletier, director of the Educause Teaching and Learning Program, noted: “With the new capabilities in content generation and the operational efficiencies afforded by these technologies, higher education might find AI to be not only an opportunity for more freedom and time to focus on the most important aspects of education but also a potential competitor vying for some of the same core functions and human activities that make up the foundations of higher education.”

    In its analysis of trends, technologies, and upcoming practices in higher ed, EDUCAUSE notes that it won’t be a dichotomy between online and face-to-face learning, as learning experiences often incorporate both.
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  • Fast-Moving Open-Source LangChain Became the Trendiest Framework for AI

    Fast-Moving Open-Source LangChain Became the Trendiest Framework for AI

    IBL News | New York

    LangChain, the fast-rising, open-source application for LLMs, is the trendiest web framework of 2033 and is moving fast, becoming the trendiest web framework of 2023.

    Its primary use case is to build chat-based applications on top of LLMs, especially ChatGPT, and chat over documents.

    LangChain started out as a Python tool in October 2022. In February added TypeScript support, and by April 2024, it supported multiple JavaScript environments, including Node.js, browsers, Cloudflare Workers, Vercel/Next.js, Deno, and Supabase Edge Functions.

    The creator, Harrison Chase, who was studying at Harvard University, has created his own start-up. Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer, Kevin Scott, classified LangChain as part of the orchestration layer in its “Copilot technology stack” for developers.

    Microsoft has its own tool, Semantic Kernel, that does a similar thing to LangChain. It also announced a new tool called Prompt Flow, which Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said was “another orchestration mechanism that actually unifies LangChain and Semantic Kernel.”
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  • JPMorgan Chase Is Developing ‘IndexGPT,’ an AI Stock Picker and Financial Advisor

    JPMorgan Chase Is Developing ‘IndexGPT,’ an AI Stock Picker and Financial Advisor

    IBL News | New York

    JPMorgan Chase is creating a ChatGPT-like tool to help investors pick stocks that can displace financial advisors’ roles in the markets.

    Last month, the bank applied to trademark a product called IndexGPT that will use AI for “analyzing and selecting securities tailored to customer needs,” according to the filing.

    IndexGPT might also be used for insurance and financial services, funds investment, and in everything from advertising to marketing services to clerical and administrative tasks.

    Wealth management firms, including Morgan Stanley and Bank of America’s Merrill, offer simple Robo-advisor services, but that hasn’t stopped their human advisors from gathering billions of dollars more in assets.

    JPMorgan Chase, which employs 1,500 data scientists and machine-learning engineers, is testing “a number of use cases” for GPT technology, said global tech chief Lori Beer.

    “We’re already using it to do risk, fraud, marketing, prospecting—and it’s the tip of the iceberg. To me this is extraordinary,” CEO Jamie Dimon said.

    IndexGPT isn’t JPMorgan’s first move into AI. In April, the company’s economists began using an AI model that analyzes Federal Reserve communications to help predict the central bank’s next moves.

    Other big investment banks have also begun testing AI products recently. In March, Morgan Stanley announced that it was developing tools to help its wealth managers sift through and better understand the investment bank’s mountain of research on the economy and markets.

    In a similar move, in April, Goldman Sachs indicated it was creating its own “ChatGS” to help financial advisors sort through data and better serve clients.

     

    https://youtu.be/9wmsHSX51SU

  • Morgan Stanley Will Use Generative AI to Allow Personnel Locating Relevant Information on Wealth Management

    Morgan Stanley Will Use Generative AI to Allow Personnel Locating Relevant Information on Wealth Management

    IBL News | New York

    Wealth management bank Morgan Stanley disclosed that it has implemented OpenAI’s GPT-4 model into an internal chatbot, which uses embeddings and retrieval capabilities.

    Over 200 employees are querying the system on a daily basis to obtain the insight they need and enable them to assist clients more quickly.

    Morgan Stanley currently maintains a content library and papers, largely in PDF form, across many internal sites, with hundreds of thousands of pages of knowledge and insights. This vast amount of information, largely in PDF form, spans investment strategies, market research and commentary, and analyst insights.

    Its personnel is required to scan through this library to find answers to specific questions in a time-consuming and cumbersome search.

    “The model effectively unlocks the cumulative knowledge of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management,” says Jeff McMillan, Head of Analytics, Data & Innovation, whose team is leading the initiative.

    “Think of it as having our Chief Investment Strategist, Chief Global Economist, Global Equities Strategist, and every other analyst around the globe on call for every advisor, every day. We believe that is a transformative capability for our company,” he added.

    GPT4 accesses, processes, and synthesizes the info. It’s being trained on vast amounts of text on the internet and builds relationships between words, sentences, concepts, and ideas.

    In addition to having trained GPT-4 for its internal chatbot, the wealth management firm is also evaluating additional OpenAI technology to enhance and streamline follow-up client communications.
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  • OpenAI Releases New GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4 Versions and Reduces Pricing by 25%

    OpenAI Releases New GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4 Versions and Reduces Pricing by 25%

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI released yesterday the new GPT-3.5 turbo and GPT-4 versions that include a new “function calling” feature.

    The San Francisco – based startup also reduced the pricing of the original GPT-3.5-turbo by 25%, as the competition in the generative AI space is growing fierce.

    “All of these models come with the same data privacy and security guarantees we introduced on March 1 — customers own all outputs generated from their requests, and their API data will not be used for training,” said the company.

    The “function calling” feature allows for a more reliable connection to GPT’s capabilities with external tools and APIs. It’s basically like ChatGPT Plugings but for your own code.

    Developers can now describe functions to gpt-4-0613 and gpt-3.5-turbo-0613 and have the model intelligently choose to output a JSON object containing arguments to call those functions.

    For example, developers will be able to:

    • Create chatbots that answer questions by calling external tools (e.g., ChatGPT Plugins)
    • Convert natural language into API calls or database queries
    • Extract structured data from text