IBL News

Category: Top News

  • The White House Pushes AI Leading Companies to Mitigate Risks and Harms

    The White House Pushes AI Leading Companies to Mitigate Risks and Harms

    IBL News | New York

    The Biden Administration announced actions to deal with AI-related risks and opportunities and make sure companies deploy safe products.

    Yesterday, Vice President Harris and senior Administration officials met with CEOs of Alphabet, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI encouraging them to apply safeguards that mitigate risks and potential harms to individuals and society [In the picture, Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, left, and Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, arriving at the White House.]

    More engagements are planned with corporations, researchers, civil rights organizations, not-for-profit organizations, communities, international partners, and others on critical AI issues.

    “New actions include the landmark Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and related executive actions announced last fall, as well as the AI Risk Management Framework and a roadmap for standing up a National AI Research Resource released earlier this year,” said the Biden Administration in a press release.

    In addition, the National Science Foundation announced $140 million in funding to launch seven new National AI Research Institutes, that will advance AI R&D to drive breakthroughs in critical areas, including climate, agriculture, energy, public health, education, and cybersecurity.

    This investment will bring the total number of Institutes to 25 across the country, and extend the network of organizations involved to nearly every state.

    The Administration will promote an independent commitment from leading AI developers, including Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Stability AI, will participate in a public evaluation of AI systems by Scale AI—at the AI Village at DEFCON 31.

    “This independent exercise will provide critical information to researchers and the public about the impacts of these models, and will enable AI companies and developers to take steps to fix issues found in those models. Testing of AI models independent of government or the companies that have developed them is an important component in their effective evaluation,” said the Biden Administration.

     

  • The “Godfather of AI” Statements About the Danger of the Technology Cause Widespread Concern

    The “Godfather of AI” Statements About the Danger of the Technology Cause Widespread Concern

    IBL News | New York

    Discussing the impacts of artificial intelligence, Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder said on CNN that he was not concerned. [See video below]

    “I am confident AI will be used by bad actors, and yes it will cause real damage,” Microsoft Corp. Chief Economist Michael Schwarz said during a World Economic Forum panel in Geneva on Wednesday.

    “It can do a lot damage in the hands of spammers with elections and so on,” he added.

    His statements came one day after the “Godfather of AI”, Dr. Geoffrey Hinton [in the picture], quit Google after warning of the dangers of AI ahead, as The New York Times reported.

    Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, an artificial intelligence pioneer, announced he was regretting his life’s work and was leaving Google, where he has worked for more than a decade so that he freely shares his concern that artificial intelligence could cause the world serious harm.

    On Monday he joined a growing number of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.

    “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Dr. Hinton said to The New York Times.

    “Dr. Hinton’s journey from A.I. groundbreaker to doomsayer marks a remarkable moment for the technology industry at perhaps its most important inflection point in decades,” wrote the paper.

    Many industry insiders say Generative A.I. can already be a tool for misinformation, soon, it could be a risk to jobs, and somewhere down the line, it could be a risk to humanity.

    “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Dr. Hinton said.

    Google spent $44 million to acquire a company started by Dr. Hinton and his two students. And their system led to the creation of increasingly powerful technologies, including new chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard.

    In 2018, Dr. Hinton and two other longtime collaborators received the Turing Award, often called “the Nobel Prize of computing,” for their work on neural networks.

    Dr. Hinton believes that the race between Google and Microsoft and others will escalate into a global race that will not stop without some sort of global regulation.

    “The best hope is for the world’s leading scientists to collaborate on ways of controlling the technology.”

     

  • A New Personal Chatbot Named PI Will Play an Active Listening Role

    A New Personal Chatbot Named PI Will Play an Active Listening Role

    IBL News | New York

    Palo Alto-based startup Inflection AI, run by Ex-DeepMind leaders, is launching a conversational chatbot named PI (for “personal intelligence”) that plays the active listener role and acts in a more personal way over back-and-forth dialog.

    “It’s really a new class of AI — it’s distinct in the sense that a personal AI is one that really works for you as the individual,”  said Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Inflection AI, [in the picture below].

    “Pi will help you organize your schedule, prep for meetings, and learn new skills,” he added. “It’s AI that is singularly aligned to your interests, that’s really yours.”

    Built on one of Inflection’s in-house large language models, Pi is designed to speak casually as if conversing with an attentive friend while giving fact-based answers. Its company Inflection AI has raised $225 million to date.

    The market is now being flooded with all kinds of bots, with the industry shipping new models and products in an accelerated way.

    Last week, Suleyman’s former colleague at Google, AI “godfather” Geoffrey Hinton, announced he quit his job at Google to be able to speak more freely about AI’s dangers. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” Hinton told The New York Times. “Take the difference and propagate it forward. That’s scary.”

    Suleyman’s previous company, DeepMind, was acquired by Google in 2014 to form the backbone of much of the company’s AI research — and the industry’s — ever since.

    Structured as a public benefit corporation, Inflection employs about 30 people today, with Hoffman spending about one day per week with the company, according to Suleyman.

    Inflection plans to offer Pi for free for now, with no token restrictions. Like OpenAI, Inflection uses Microsoft Azure for its cloud infrastructure.

    “Through 10 or 20 such exchanges, Pi can tease out what a user really wants to know, or is hoping to talk through, more like a sounding board than a repackaged Wikipedia answer,” Suleyman said to Forbes.

    Unlike other chatbots, Pi remembers a hundred turns of conversation with logged-in users across platforms, including WhatsApp, SMS messages, Facebook messages, and Instagram.

    It also detects when users appear to be agitated or frustrated, and tweak its tone of responses, Suleyman said.

  • Chegg’s Value Fell Nearly 50% As ChatGPT Started to Hurt Revenues

    Chegg’s Value Fell Nearly 50% As ChatGPT Started to Hurt Revenues

    IBL News | New York

    California-based Chegg (CHGG.N), which provides online study guides, saw its shares tumble after the company admitted that ChatGPT is hurting its growth.

    Its revenue would be between $175 million and $178 million this quarter, far below the analyst consensus estimate of $193.6 million.

    Chegg shares were down 48.41% to $9.06 during Tuesday trading. That means nearly $1 billion in market valuation.

    “In the first part of the year, we saw no noticeable impact from ChatGPT on our new account growth and we were meeting expectations on new sign-ups,” CEO Dan Rosensweig said during the earnings call this Monday. “However, since March we saw a significant spike in student interest in ChatGPT. We now believe it’s having an impact on our new customer growth rate.”

    Chegg is developing its own AI assistant, CheggMate, which is meant to help students with their homework. The product is built in collaboration with OpenAI. However, analysts estimate that the impact of the product is uncertain.

    Across the education sector share fell sharply on Tuesday as

    Overall, investors bet that artificial intelligence could upend business models in the education sector.

    Pearson’s share fell by 15% while language-learning platform Duolingo was down by 10%, Coursera by 6.68%, 2U by 15.32%, and Udemy by 5%.

  • OpenAI Attracts Another $300 Million From Prominent VCs At $29 Billion Valuation

    OpenAI Attracts Another $300 Million From Prominent VCs At $29 Billion Valuation

    IBL News | New York

    Venture Capital firms — including Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive, and K2 Global — have put in over $300 million at a valuation of $27 billion – $29 billion in OpenAI, TechCrunch reported.

    Outside investors now own more than 30% of OpenAI. The company declined to comment or confirm the story. This is separate from the $10 billion investment from Microsoft, which has integrated OpenAI’s APIs with its Azure infrastructure and Office 365 productivity suite.

    OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been a hit, with more than 1 billion visitors to its website in February, says SimilarWeb.

    In addition, hundreds of businesses have started deploying GPT and ChatGPT into their products and services.

  • Quora Issues a Feature to Launch User-Created Bots

    Quora Issues a Feature to Launch User-Created Bots

    IBL News | New York

    Q&A site Quora issued this week a new feature on its chatbot Poe that allow users to make their own chatbot based on a short text prompt and an existing bot, like ChatGPT, as the base.

    Poe is the latest product from Quora as the company tries to expand into the search market by allowing consumers to play with technologies like OpenAI and Anthropic via simple mobile interfaces.

    The new chatbot offers the ability for users to create their own bots using prompts — that is, adding text to direct a chatbot to perform as a favorite author, in a particular format, or aimed at a certain audience, among other things. Poe targets a new creator class within the field of prompt engineering.

    Once created, the chatbot, based on either Claude or ChatGPT, will have its own unique URL (poe.com/botname). Users will access the bots via Poe’s iOS app or Android app on mobile or via its desktop web interface.

    “It’s amazing how much value prompting can unlock from language models,” Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo said.

    Quora plans to offer bot creators feedback about how people are using their the tool, along with an API that would allow anyone to host more complex bots from a server they operate potential. It’d a new business for Quora, as well.

    To date, the mobile app version of Poe has 1.17 million installs and has generated $520,000 in gross revenue, according to app intelligence firm data.ai. The app is currently ranked No. 32 in the Productivity category on the App Store.

  • Chegg Will Launch in May a Personalized AI Companion for Its Students

    Chegg Will Launch in May a Personalized AI Companion for Its Students

    IBL News | New York

    The learning platform Chegg (NYSE: CHGG) announced the launch of CheggMate, an AI conversational study companion built with OpenAI’s GPT-4, in May 2023.

    The Santa Clara, California – based company explained that CheggMate will deliver personalized learning pathways, tailor-made quizzes and tests, and help guide for each student’s journey.

    Students will be able to input a written text, photo, math query, or diagram in order to get answers, drill down into concepts they don’t understand, or master subjects.

    “CheggMate will enable students to have an instantaneous AI conversation that is personalized to their learning style and needs, supported by our substantial proven and reliable content library,” said Dan Rosensweig, CEO & President of Chegg, Inc.

    “We believe AI has the potential to provide tailored learning experiences to everyone and improve the way people around the world learn,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. “We are very excited to work with Chegg, given their history as the leading student-first learning platform.”

    “Chegg understands learners like no one else. We are building generative AI into our powerful and proprietary learning tools to support students’ active engagement in their learning process,” said Nina Huntemann, Ph.D, Chief Academic Officer of Chegg Inc.

    Chegg’s personalized AI companion will offer the ability for students to pick up exactly where they left off or begin new learning interactions at any time, according to the company.

    The company plans to open a limited access of CheggMate in May 2023.

  • AI-Powered Platform iLearningEngines, to List on NASDAQ Via Merger

    AI-Powered Platform iLearningEngines, to List on NASDAQ Via Merger

    IBL News | New York

    Bethesda, Maryland-based training software company iLearningEngines Inc has agreed to go public on Nasdaq through a merger with blank-check company Arrowroot Acquisition Corp (ARRW.O) in a SPAC deal that values the combined company at $1.4 billion.

    The deal will provide iLearningEngines with $143 million in gross proceeds, some of which will be used for future acquisitions.

    This publicly traded special-purpose acquisition company is sponsored by Arrowroot Capital, a 10-year-old private equity firm specializing in enterprise software.

    iLearningEngines supplies companies with personalized training materials using AI-powered automation tools and software.

    Founded in 2010, the company builds “Knowledge Clouds” from an organization’s internal and external content and data, creating a central repository of all enterprise intellectual property. Then, it distributes knowledge into enterprise workflows in order to drive autonomous learning, intelligent decision making, and process automation.

    The company is a profitable $300 million annual revenue business that provides services to companies in 12 core verticals, including industries like oil & gas, education, healthcare and insurance.

    Arrowroot Acquisition Corp raised $290 million through its initial public offering in 2021, with the aim of merging with companies in the enterprise software sector.

    iLearningEngines, a company with over 100,000 engineering research and development hours invested in its platform, priced the deal at 3.3x estimated 2023 revenue.

    The combined company will continue to be led by iLearningEngines’ existing CEO and founder, Harish Chidambaran.

    Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) startups globally have raised about $12.1 billion so far this year, according to PitchBook.
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  • edX Launches “Try It Courses”, an Initiative that Offers a Free Preview of Boot Camps

    edX Launches “Try It Courses”, an Initiative that Offers a Free Preview of Boot Camps

    IBL News | New York

    2U’s edX platform announced this month the launch of a new initiative named Try It Courses.

    The idea is based on one-two hour introductory, ungraded, online courses designed to give learners a preview of in-demand skills — such as Python, UI/UX Design Thinking, HTML, GitHub — and gain familiarity with these technical subjects before they make the decision to enroll into full boot-camps offered in edX in partnership with 50 non-profit colleges.

    Each course includes one hour of instruction and one hour of practical exercise, followed by a brief assessment.

    “It’s a meaningful, accessible on-ramps to online education opportunity offered by top universities or leading companies,” said Anant Agarwal, Founder of edX and 2U’s Chief Platform Officer.

    Currently, the portfolio of courses include the following:

    edX plans to launch additional Try It Courses that connect learners to its degree portfolio and executive education courses.

    According to a report of World Economic Forum, half of all employees worldwide would need to reskill or upskill by 2025. And a recent survey by IBM, found that 40% of employees said the greatest barrier to professional skill development is knowing where to start.
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  • Sal Khan Demoed Khanmigo AI Tutor Described As “A Teacher’s Aide on Steroids” [Video]

    Sal Khan Demoed Khanmigo AI Tutor Described As “A Teacher’s Aide on Steroids” [Video]

    IBL News | New York

    Khan Academy’s Founder & CEO Sal Khan demoed its Khanmigo AI tutor during the 2023 ASU+GSV Summit, held in San Diego on April 17–19.

    Powered with OpenAI’s GPT-4, this classroom assistant was described by Sal Khan “as a teacher’s aide on steroids that will unlock a whole new dimension of learning that was science fiction a few months ago.” 

    The American nonprofit educational organization Khan Academy started using Khanmigo as a personalized learning tool a few weeks ago. It spent over six months of prompt-engineering with the help of pedagogical experts.

    During its talk, Khan said, “Kids are going to cheat, and if someone doesn’t put guardrails around it, it won’t capture the benefits, and that was our framework around Khanmigo.”

    “We’ve already started using AI not just to help the teachers with lesson plans and to help the students but to help communication between the parents and teachers and students. The future is where the teacher talks to AI and says, ‘What are the kids up to?’ And the AI says, ‘Three kids finished that assignment and three kids haven’t, and I helped Billy with binomials, and a couple of students are having trouble so let’s put a rubric together.”
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    Also, Sal Khan gave a recent TED talk, with a similar demo. The founder of Khan Academy highlighted that “We’re at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen.”