IBL News | New York

Anthropic released this month Claude 2.1, an upgraded version of its conversational AI assistant, which powers the claude.ai chat experience. It improves its pricing and includes improvements in areas like context length, accuracy, and integration capabilities.

Claude 2.1 can now process up to 200,000 context tokens, equivalent to around 150,000 words or 500 pages of material. That’s twice as much as its previous token limit.

It means that users can now upload technical documentation like entire codebases, financial statements like S-1s, or even long literary works like The Iliad or The Odyssey.

“By being able to talk to large bodies of content or data, Claude can summarize, perform Q&A, forecast trends, and compare and contrast multiple documents,” said the company.

IBL News | New York

Sam Altman will be reinstated as OpenAI’s CEO, successfully reversing his ouster by the company’s board last week after a campaign waged by employees and investors.

Yesterday, OpenAI said it had reached a deal in principle for Sam Altman to return as CEO, with a new board chaired by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor.

The board will be remade without several members who had opposed Mr. Altman.

“We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo,” OpenAI said in a post to X. “We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.”

Altman’s return should quell what was an all-out revolt by OpenAI employees against his removal and mark the beginning of the end of one of the most-watched corporate sagas in tech history.

Adam D’Angelo, the CEO of the website Quora and a former early Facebook employee, was already a member of the OpenAI board, but other previous board members will not remain.

The outgoing members include tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and Helen Toner, director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that the board had been bickering for more than a year on questions about the safe development of AI, including how quickly to roll out the technology while ensuring humans do not lose control of it. Altman was on the side of moving quickly, the newspaper reported.

Altman said in a separate statement on X that he was happy to return as CEO.

“i love openai, and everything i’ve done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together,” he wrote, eschewing traditional punctuation.

Altman added that, with the new board in place, he was “looking forward to returning” and “building on our strong partnership” with Microsoft.

OpenAI and Microsoft have a longstanding partnership, with Microsoft having invested in the startup and OpenAI using Microsoft’s cloud computing services.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a post on X that Microsoft is “encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board. We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance.”

Other OpenAI executives celebrated the decision.

Mira Murati, who was briefly interim CEO after Altman’s ouster, reposted the OpenAI announcement late Tuesday with a simple blue heart emoji. Greg Brockman, the startup’s president, and a co-founder, wrote on X, “Returning to OpenAI & getting back to coding tonight.”

Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who was among the first donors to OpenAI when it was a nonprofit, said that Altman’s return was better than one alternative: Altman and most of OpenAI’s employees going to work for Microsoft.

“Less concentration of power,” Musk wrote on X.

Meanwhile, the company rolled out a new voice feature for ChatGPT on Tuesday with a subtle joke about the situation.

We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo.

We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) November 22, 2023

 

OpenAI is nothing without its people https://t.co/XYKLQ61e6l

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) November 22, 2023

 

i love openai, and everything i’ve done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together. when i decided to join msft on sun evening, it was clear that was the best path for me and the team. with the new board and w satya’s support, i’m…

— Sam Altman (@sama) November 22, 2023

IBL News | New York

In another major shakeup, Microsoft announced through its CEO Satya Nadella on Monday that he hired OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman to lead up a new AI research team.

This move took place after three days of intense discussions following the unexpected decision by OpenAI’s board to fire Sam Altman. Brockmann quit as OpenAI president after Altman was fired.

Meanwhile, the OpenAI board appointed former Twitch chief executive and co-founder Emmett Shear as its interim chief executive. He replaces Mira Murati, who was named interim CEO when Altman was fired. She will return to her role as OpenAI’s chief technology officer.

“We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “And we’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team.”

Satya nadella and Microsoft is the real winner. pic.twitter.com/RrPguiPhBy

— AshutoshShrivastava (@ai_for_success) November 20, 2023

❤️❤️❤️ https://t.co/NL3nqrjKUo

— Sam Altman (@sama) November 20, 2023

IBL News | New York

Talks at OpenAI to reinstate Sam Altman, led by Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, continued on Sunday afternoon.

Sam Altman, CEO at OpenAI, spent the weekend waging a pressure campaign on the start-up’s four-person board of directors who ousted him on Friday afternoon, according to The New York Times. In his countertop to retake control, Altman obtained a groundswell of support from investors, employees and OpenAI executives.

He himself entered with a guest badge on Sunday at the company headquarters to negotiate his future. He posted on X: “first and last time i ever wear one of these.”

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.

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

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.
.

This is the Humane Ai Pin https://t.co/ytUSGF3y55 pic.twitter.com/Zrcoaf49u7

— Humane (@Humane) November 9, 2023

IBL News | San Francisco

OpenAI shared yesterday several new additions and improvements, including GPT-4 Turbo, an improved version of its flagship model, during its first DevDay conference in San Francisco. [OpenAI’s CEO in the picture above].

The company also introduced GPTs, which allow developers to create custom versions of ChatGPT that combine instructions, extra knowledge, and any combination of skills.

“Anyone can easily build their own GPT — no coding is required. Creating one is as easy as starting a conversation, giving it instructions and extra knowledge, and picking what it can do, like searching the web, making images, or analyzing data,” explained OpenAI.

Example GPTs are available today for ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise users, including Canva and Zapier AI Actions.

More innovations announced at DevDay included:

• New GPT-4 Turbo with a 128k context window, equivalent to more than 300 pages in text in a single prompt.GPT-4 Turbo has knowledge of world events up to April 2023.OpenAI is offering it at a 3x cheaper price for input tokens and a 2x cheaper price for output tokens compared to GPT-4.It will be a stable, production-ready model in the coming weeks.

• New Assistants API, which is intended to make it easier for developers to build their own assistive AI apps.

• New multimodal capabilities in the platform, including vision and image creation (DALL·E 3). Developers can now generate human-quality speech from text via the text-to-speech API.

• Release of Whisper large-v3, the next version of OpenAI’s open-source automatic speech recognition model (ASR)

• Open-sourcing the Consistency Decoder, a drop-in replacement for the Stable Diffusion VAE decoder.
• 

BOOM OpenAI changes the world of app economy.

Meet GPTs user developed agents that ANYONE can make and sell in the GPTs Store. pic.twitter.com/yGRDfR6WT6

— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) November 6, 2023

OpenAI announces Assistant API, which lets developers build “assistants” in their apps that can call OpenAI generative AI models and tools to perform tasks (@kyle_l_wiggers / TechCrunch)https://t.co/z1OKEfofD4

📫 Subscribe: https://t.co/OyWeKSRpIMhttps://t.co/xC4vB8BidL

— Techmeme (@Techmeme) November 6, 2023

OpenAI introduces a no-code way for ChatGPT Plus subscribers to create custom AI agents for a wide range of tasks and then share them via the GPT Store (@alexeheath / The Verge)https://t.co/A58zaiecL9

📫 Subscribe: https://t.co/OyWeKSRpIMhttps://t.co/Fwntqmfz6z

— Techmeme (@Techmeme) November 6, 2023

A new version of ChatGPT will allow you to create your own “bot” allowing you to:

Name it.
Share it.
Produce a simple welcome message.
Samples of useful prompts.
Upload related reference files.
Define plugins and actions like web browsing, DALL-E, code interpreter. pic.twitter.com/3m33eLVJU4

— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) November 5, 2023

Official Press Release to the Media from OpenAI:

A few key stats we announced on stage as it’s been a big year for OpenAI:

• We have more than 2 million developers building on our API for a wide range of use cases.
• Over 92% of Fortune 500 are building on our products.
• And we have about 100M weekly active users on ChatGPT.

Introducing GPTs: 

We’re introducing GPTs – custom versions of ChatGPT. Anyone can easily build GPTs to help with specific tasks, at work, or at home. We think GPTs take a first step towards an agent-like future. For third-party developers, we’re showing them how to build these agent-like experiences into their own apps as well. Example GPTs are available today for ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise users to try out including Canva and Zapier AI Actions.

New models and developer products announced at DevDay, including: 

• ChatGPT gets a new UI.
• GPT-4 Turbo: a new model that includes longer context length, better world knowledge because we’re updating the cutoff to April 2023, and other improvements.
• New Assistants API makes it easier for developers to build their own GPT-like experiences into their own apps and services.
• New modalities to the API, including vision, DALL·E 3, and text-to-speech with six preset voices to choose from.
• Dropping the price of all of our models across the board so it’s easier for developers to build and scale on our platform.

See details in our blog posts, GPTs, and new models/products, for more info. Press images are here, and we’ll add more throughout the day.

IBL News | New York

OpenAI released and made it available its image model DALL-E 3 to ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise users. DALL-E 3 can create unique, crisper-in-detail images from a simple conversation, providing a selection of visuals for users to refine and iterate upon.

This model can render intricate details, including text, hands, and faces. It also responds efficiently to extensive and detailed prompts, and it supports both landscape and portrait aspect ratios, as explained in this research paper.

IBL News | Chicago

“Educational institutions must expand beyond growth and innovation to address risk and to prepare for what may be ahead,” said Susan Grajek, Vice President of Partnerships, Communities, and Research at Educause, last week in Chicago during the association’s annual conference.

Grajek presented, in a much-awaited session, the “2024 Educause Top 10” IT issues list, in the main auditorium of the McCormick Convention Center in Chicago, filled with thousands of educators, administrators, and IT managers who attended the three-day event.

Educause’s annual list, a classic report, addresses how higher education IT leaders can contribute to their institution’s overall success.

These are the 2024 Educause Top Ten Issues:

1. Cybersecurity as a Core Competency. Adopting a formal risk management framework can help institutions to balance cost, risk, and opportunity.

2. Driving to Better Decisions. Improving data quality and governance can help lead to more informed decision-making. Data is a strategic asset now.

3. The Enrollment Crisis. Data can empower decision-makers to determine course offerings, identify prospective students, or spot opportunities and tap into new markets.

4. Diving Deep into Data. Analytics can help institutions to harness actionable insights to improve learning and student success.

5. Administrative Cost Reduction. Streamlining processes, data, and technologies can lead to cost savings.

6. Meeting Students Where They Are. Providing students with universal access to institutional services can lead to better outcomes.

IBL News | New York

To create a corporate chatbot for customer support, generate personalized posts and marketing materials, or develop a tailored automation application, the Large Language Model (LLM), like GPT-4 has to include the ability to answer questions about private data.

However, training or retraining the model is impractical due to the cost, time, and privacy concerns associated with mixing datasets, as well as the potential security risks.

Usually, the approach taken is “content injection,” a technique called “embedding” that involves providing the model with additional information from a desired database of knowledge alongside the user’s query.

This data collection can include product information, internal documents, or information scraped from the web, customer interactions, and industry-specific knowledge.

At this stage, it’s essential to consider data privacy and security, ensuring that sensitive information is handled appropriately and in compliance with relevant information, as expert Shelly Palmer details in a post.

The data to be embedded has to be cleaned and structured to ensure compatibility with the AI model.

Also, it has to be tokenized and converted into a suitable format by setting the correct indexes.

After data is preprocessed, the AI model has to be fine-tuned and pre-trained.

The next step is to interact with the API. Query vectors will be matched to the database, pulling the content that will be injected.

The number of tokens is calculated to know the cost. Usually, each token corresponds to four or five English-language words.

To run an effective content injection schema, a prompt must be engineered. This is an example of a prompt:

“You are an upbeat, positive employee of Our Company. Read the following sections of our knowledge base and answer the question using only the information provided here. If you do not have enough information to answer the question from the knowledge base below, please respond to the user with ‘Apologies. I am unable to provide assistance.’

Context Injection goes here.

Questions or input from the user go here.”

There are three more considerations for the right implementation: Any personally identifiable information (PII) must be anonymized in order to protect the privacy of your customers and also ensure compliance with data protection regulations like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).

Robust access control measures will help prevent unauthorized access and reduce the risk of data breaches.

Continuous monitoring is in place in order to check for any signs of bias or other unintended consequences before they escalate.

• Blog Replit: How to train your own Large Language Models

• Andreessen Horowitz: Navigating the High Cost of AI Compute