IBL News

Category: Top News

  • 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.”

     

  • Users Will Be Able to Turn Off Their Chat History in ChatGPT

    Users Will Be Able to Turn Off Their Chat History in ChatGPT

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI.com is now letting users to disable their chat history in ChatGPT so it won’t be used to train the AI company’s model. The San Francisco – based research company said that when chat history is turned off, it will retain the new conversations only for 30 days to review them if necessary to monitor for abuse. Later, they will be permanently deleted.

    A new Export option will be available in the settings sidebar, allowing users to submit a file containing their conversations and relevant data via email.

    Analysts saw these moves as a privacy safeguard for people who share sensitive information with OpenAI’s chatbot.

    In addition, the company announced that it will launch “in the coming months” a Business subscription for professionals who need more control over their data as well as enterprises seeking to manage their end users.

    OpenAI summarized in ten tasks what ChatGPT allows to do:

  • Generative AI Will Affect 80% of All Occupations, A Research Cautions

    Generative AI Will Affect 80% of All Occupations, A Research Cautions

    IBL News | New York

    Generative AI and GTP (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) models will significantly influence or augment at least 80% of all occupations, but not necessarily replace them. Jobs requiring a college education will see the highest impacts, with half of the tasks performed by people affected.

    These are the main findings of a research paper from OpenAI, OpenResearch, and the University of Pennsylvania.

    “Considering each job as a bundle of tasks, it would be rare to find any occupation for which AI tools could do nearly all of the work,”     researchers observe.

    Programming and writing skills are more likely to be influenced by generative AI. They include the following:

    • Interpreters and translators
    • Survey researchers
    • Poets, lyricists, and creative writers
    • Animal scientists
    • Public relations specialists
    • Writers and authors
    • Mathematicians
    • Tax preparers
    • Financial quantitative analysts
    • Web and digital interface designers

    Tasks involving science and critical thinking skills are less likely to be affected.

    The authors caution that accurately predicting future job applications in the labor market is a significant challenge, even for experts.

    However, they add that some occupations may eventually disappear, but those that can harness the productivity and power of AI will create new innovations and services that improve people’s lives.
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    • Timothy B Lee: Why I’m not worried about AI causing mass unemployment

  • Hugging Face Releases an Open-Source Chatbot Alternative to OpenAI’s

    Hugging Face Releases an Open-Source Chatbot Alternative to OpenAI’s

    IBL News | New York

    Hugging Face, a leading AI startup valued at $2 billion, launched today an open-source chatbot named HuggingChat.

    This chatbot is designed to be an alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and is part of a growing trend of open-source alternatives in the AI industry.

    The AI model of HuggingChat was developed by a German nonprofit Open Assistant.

    “We want to build the assistant of the future, capable of not only writing emails and cover letters but also performing meaningful work, using APIs, dynamically researching information, and much more, with the ability to be personalized and extended by anyone,” wrote Open Assistant on its GitHub page.

    However, this chatbot can easily make mistakes and hallucinates, as shown in the image below, captured during a test at IBL News.

    “HuggingChat can derail quickly depending on the questions it’s asked — a fact Hugging Face acknowledges in the fine print,” TechCrunch wrote.

    HuggingChat is part of a growing list of open-source alternatives to ChatGPT. Last week, Stability AI released StableLM, a set of models that can generate code and text based on basic instructions.


     

    Stability Releases Its New LLM, Open-Source, and Free to Use Commercially

    Open-Source Initiatives Challenge Closed, Proprietary AI Systems With New LLMs

  • NVIDIA’s New Open-Source “NeMo Guardrails” Prevents AI Chatbots From Hallucinating

    NVIDIA’s New Open-Source “NeMo Guardrails” Prevents AI Chatbots From Hallucinating

    IBL News | New York

    NVIDIA released today an open-source software called NeMo Guardrails that can prevent AI chatbots from “hallucinating” wrong facts — such as saying incorrect facts, talking about harmful subjects, or opening up security holes.

    It’s a layer of software that sits between the user and the LLM (Large Language Model) or other AI tools. It heads off bad outcomes or bad prompts before the model spits them out.

    The “hallucination” issue with the latest generation of large language models is currently a major blocking point for businesses.

    The company designed this software to work with all LLM-based conversational applications, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.

    NeMo Guardrails enables developers to define user interactions and integrate these guardrails into any application using a Python library.

    It can run on top of LangChain, an open-source toolkit used to plug third-party applications into LLMs.

    In addition, it works with Zapier and a broad range of LLM-enabled applications.

    Developers can create new rules quickly with a few lines of code by setting three kinds of boundaries:

    • Topical guardrails prevent apps from veering off into undesired areas. For example, they keep customer service assistants from answering questions about the weather.
    • Safety guardrails ensure apps respond with accurate, appropriate information. They can filter out unwanted language and enforce that references are made only to credible sources.
    • Security guardrails restrict apps from making connections only to external third-party applications known to be safe.

    “You can write a script that says, if someone talks about this topic, no matter what, respond this way,” said Jonathan Cohen, Vice President of Applied Research at NVIDIA.

    • “You don’t have to trust that a language model will follow a prompt or follow your instructions. It’s actually hard coded in the execution logic of the guardrail system what will happen.”

    • “If you have a customer service chatbot, designed to talk about your products, you probably don’t want it to answer questions about our competitors.”

    • “You want to monitor the conversation. And if that happens, you steer the conversation back to the topics you prefer.”

    The company said, “Much of the NeMo framework is already available as open-source code on GitHub.  Enterprises also can get it as a complete and supported package, part of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform. NeMo is also available as a service. It’s part of NVIDIA AI Foundations, a family of cloud services for businesses that want to create and run custom generative AI models based on their own datasets and domain knowledge.”

    NVIDIA, which tries to maintain its lead in the market for AI chips by simultaneously developing software for machine learning, mentioned the case of South Korea’s leading mobile operator who built an intelligent assistant that’s had 8 million conversations with its customers, as well as a research team in Sweden that employed NeMo to create LLMs that can automate text functions for the country’s hospitals, government and business offices.

    Other AI companies, including Google and OpenAI, have used a method called reinforcement learning from human feedback to prevent harmful outputs from LLM applications. This method uses human testers who create data about which answers are acceptable or not and then train the AI model using that data.

    • NVIDIA Developer Blog: NVIDIA Enables Trustworthy, Safe, and Secure Large Language Model Conversational Systems


    [Disclosure: IBL Education, the parent company of IBL News, works for NVIDIA on projects related to Online Education]

  • Snapchat Makes its Chatbot ‘My AI’ Free but It Gets Negative Reaction

    Snapchat Makes its Chatbot ‘My AI’ Free but It Gets Negative Reaction

    IBL News | New York

    Snapchat made its OpenAI’s powered bot, named ‘My AI’ free to a global audience. Users’ reaction was negative as they couldn’t remove it from the feed unless they were paid subscribers.

    The company upgraded the tool with new functionalities, such as the ability to add it to group chats with friends with an @mention, get recommendations for places on Snap Map and Lenses, and replay Snaps.

    When it launched in February, it was only available to paid subscribers. It also became problematic as it provided some unsafe answers, such as when it suggested how to mask the smell of alcohol and pot at a birthday party.

    The company has since upgraded the tool with new features, including the ability to generate a visual response and upcoming personalization features that will allow users to name My AI and give it more of an identity.

    The feature remains available only to those with a Snapchat+ subscription, which costs $3.99 per month and could be driving upgrades. Snap also announced that Snapchat+ now has more than 3 million subscribers.

  • Google’s Bard Will Generate, Debug, and Provide Explanations for Code

    Google’s Bard Will Generate, Debug, and Provide Explanations for Code

    IBL News | New York

    Google’s Bard upcoming chatbot will emphasize coding tasks, featuring the ability to generate, debug, and provide explanations for code. This has been one of the users’ — especially, code beginners’ — top requests, according to the tech giant, engadget.com explains.

    Bard will write in 20 programming languages, including C++, Java, and Python. It also will export code to Colab, Google’s cloud notebook environment for Python, and write functions for Sheets.

    However, the code might have errors, and Google advises double-checking.

    ChatGPT has the ability to write and improve existing code in several languages as well.

  • US Homeland Security Creates an Artificial Intelligence Task Force

    US Homeland Security Creates an Artificial Intelligence Task Force

    IBL News | New York

    U.S. Homeland Security will create an AI-focused task force to protect critical infrastructure, and combat criminal activity and disinformation.

    Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas [in the picture above] said yesterday that his department “will lead in the responsible use of AI to secure the homeland and in defending against the malicious use of this transformational technology.”

    Mayorkas said the Artificial Intelligence Task Force would also explore how AI could be used to do work like screening cargo coming into the country for illicit goods, like fentanyl or products made with slave labor.

    Mayorkas also urged efforts to use AI to secure electric grids and water supply systems, both of which have been feared to be potential targets of adversaries.

    He said any move to regulate AI would have to find a “sweet spot” where the government could develop guardrails without stifling innovation.