Category: Views

IBL News | New York

Inflection AI, which has a small team of around 35 employees and is led by ex-DeepMind leader Mustafa Suleyman, closed a $1.3 billion funding this week. The new capital raised by this one-year-old startup values this company at $4 billion.

The round was led by led by Microsoft, Nvidia, GPU cloud provider CoreWeave, and billionaires Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, and Eric Schmidt.

The Palo Alto, California-based Inflection sits now behind OpenAI (which has raised $11.3 billion to date) as the second-best-funded generative AI startup — edging out Anthropic ($1.5 billion). Well behind it are Cohere ($445 million), Adept ($415 million), Runway ($237 million), Character.ai ($150 million), and Stability AI (~$100 million).

This influx of capital will be used to continue expanding its computing capabilities further developing its AI-powered personal chatbot called Pi.

Specifically, Inflection says it’s working with Nvidia and CoreWeave to build what it claims is one of the largest AI training clusters in the world, comprising 22,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs.

“Personal AI is going to be the most transformational tool of our lifetimes. This is truly an inflection point,” Suleyman said in a statement.

According to Inflection, Pi is intended to be a “kind” and “supportive” companion, offering “friendly” advice and info in a “natural, flowing” style.

Pi is available to test via a messaging app or online.

• Instagram: follow @heypi.ai and click here to send Pi a DM.
• Facebook Messenger: click here to get in touch with Pi.
• WhatsApp and SMS: add +1 (314) 333-1111 to your contacts to message Pi.
• Online: talk with Pi at https://heypi.com
• Mobile: download Pi, your personal AI for iPhone or iPad. Pi will be available on Android soon.
  

   

   

   

   

   

   

IBL News | New York

Generative AI startup Cohere, which is developing a model ecosystem for the enterprise, raised $270 million as part of its series C round. A mix of VC and strategic investors, including Nvidia, Oracle, and Salesforce Ventures, among others, participated in the round.

This Toronto – based company has raised a total of $445 million to date. Only OpenAI ($11.3 billion) and Anthropic ($450 million) have raised more, ahead of rivals Inflection AI ($225 million) and Adept ($415 million). This influx of money has resulted in a valuation of around $2.1 billion, according to Bloomberg.

Founded in 2019 and with a workforce of 180 employees, Cohere builds, trains, and customizes large language models for enterprise customers. Corporations can use their proprietary data models — which can be expensive to train — to do things like summarize customer emails or help write website copy.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said of Cohere, “Their service will help enterprises around the world harness these capabilities to automate and accelerate.”

Cohere’s platform is cloud agnostic, allowing companies to use their preferred cloud provider to increase data privacy and make implementation simpler.

The platform can be deployed inside public clouds (e.g., Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services), a customer’s existing cloud, virtual private clouds, or on-site.

Cohere plans to build additional models that can take action and work for customers, like booking a flight, scheduling a meeting, or filing an expense report on a person’s behalf. In that way, it’s chasing after competitors like Adept, Inflection, and OpenAI, all of which are building systems to connect AI with third-party apps, services, and products.

IBL News | New York

Meta, formerly known as Facebook, announced an AI Sandbox for advertisers to help them improve their ad performance for businesses and spend less time and resources on repurposing creative assets.

This AI Sandbox testing background, announced last week, will allow the creation of different variations of the same copy for different audiences, background generation through text prompts, and image cropping in different aspect ratios for Instagram or Facebook posts, stories, or short videos like Reels.

These features, are available today to select advertisers and it will gradually expand to more in July, according to the company.

These features, called Meta Advantage, are available today to select advertisers, and they will gradually expand to more advertisers in July, according to the company

Currently, some startups such as Omneky and Movio are leaning toward DALLE-2, GPT-3, and other generative AI-powered ad tools and marketing videos for advertisers.

IBL News | New York

A WordPress free plugin, AI Engine, allows for the creation of ChatGPT-like chatbots on websites by adding a shortcode.

An English developer living in Japan, Jordy Meow, launched this tool through its website.

Users would need to host a WordPress-based website and an account with OpenAI.

The Chatbot builder allows the user to provide the AI assistant with a name and a starting message.

It also allows fine-tuning the robot as the plugin comes with a Dataset Builder used to generate a large number of questions and answers based on the website content. Data is gathered in a Google Sheet with two columns, with a minimum of 500 rows. (According to the OpenAI documentation, numbers of 3,000 and 5,000 rows are recommended. But it ultimately depends on what you’re trying to achieve.)

The developer has added a paid Pro version, starting at $49 per site. This functionality allows the chat to read the WordPress page that’s hosted. This way, customers can ask questions about the webpage.

This plugin is free, although getting access to OpenAI’s server has a cost for heavily trafficked sites.

Another approach is offered by Chatbase.co. This start-up offers an API to create chatbots trained on your data.

Prompts just got more powerful.

Chatbot UI now has prompt templates complete with support for prompt variables.

Come save all of your custom prompts for easy reuse.

GitHub: https://t.co/hQuE8ezCD5 pic.twitter.com/tT2HTp3ojZ

— Mckay Wrigley (@mckaywrigley) March 27, 2023

Chatshape.com allows the implementation of an AI customer support agent from the user’s website content and adds it as a chat bubble.

OFFICIAL LAUNCH ALERT 🚀 🚀

Finally launching https://t.co/rF4drmoCGi on Product Hunt!

Create an AI customer support agent from your website content and add it to your site as a chat bubble!

LIVE LINK: https://t.co/Uz5Vd0bN1d pic.twitter.com/MwGSR22Nxe

— James Pog (@jamescodez) May 1, 2023

Finally, the website espanol.love uses GPT-4 to accurately translate anything into Spanish with an accent.

google translate but with a clone of my voice 💌

this website uses gpt-4 to accurately translate anything into spanish, and say it back like you would with an accent!

check out the demo & github 👇 pic.twitter.com/2fpCf7GyCV

— Aleem Rehmtulla (@aleemrehmtulla) May 1, 2023

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IBL News | New York

Google went all-in on AI during its I/O 2023 developer annual conference on Wednesday.

The search giant publicly unveiled its newest large language model (LLM), PaLM 2, which, according to the company, is better at reasoning, writing, math, and logic, and performs better than OpenAI’s GPT-4 in coding and debugging.

The Mountain View, California-based company also introduced a new multimodal LLM called Gemini, which is currently under training.

PaLM 2 comes in different sizes, which are weirdly named after animal constellations: Gecko, Otter, Bison, and Unicorn.

Google’s new code completion and code generation tool, named Codey is the company’s answer to GitHub’s Copilot.

Codey is specifically trained to handle coding-related prompts and is also trained to handle queries related to Google Cloud in general.

Google also made its chatbot Bard, the equivalent of ChatGPT, officially available for everyone, removing any waitlist.

Built on PaLM2, Bard allows export to Google Docs, Sheets, Replit, and Gmail, among others.

Bard’s users will be able to generate images via Adobe Firefly and then modify them using Express.

In its search business, Google introduced the AI snapshot feature, which takes content from top links and allows for follow-up questions.

Sponsored ads will appear above while traditional links will be placed below.

Google’s productivity suite Workspace was improved with an AI sidekick called Duet, designed to provide better prompts.

It has automatic prompt suggestions and can do a ton of things, such as converting text to tables in Sheets, finding information in Gmail threads, and creating images in Slides.

“The Sidekick panel will live in a side panel in Google Docs and is constantly engaged in reading and processing your entire document as you write, providing contextual suggestions that refer specifically to what you’ve written,” said Google.

Another feature of Google Workplace, particularly in Gmail and Docs, is the ‘help me write’ feature, which allows users to write anything at different lengths.

The new AI features for Slides and Meet include the ability to type in what kind of visualization the user is looking for, and the AI creates that image. Specifically for Google Meet, that means custom backgrounds.

Google introduced the Magic Editor in Google Photos.

Google also announced new AI models heading to Vertex AI, its fully managed AI enterprise service, including a text-to-image model called Imagen.

Another interesting project introduced by the search giant is Project Tailwind, an AI-powered notebook tool that takes a user’s free-form notes and automatically organizes and summarizes them.

Essentially, users pick files from Google Drive, then Project Tailwind creates a private AI model with expertise in that information, along with a personalized interface designed to help sift through the notes and docs.

The tool is available through Labs, Google’s refreshed hub for experimental products.

Project Tailwind takes your notes and makes it into a AI study tool, an AI first notebook #GoogleIO
This is amazing! pic.twitter.com/dyhVImbtkN

— Analie✨ (@AnalieNYC) May 10, 2023

Google’s offering a platform to custom fine tune their models on your own dataset.

The platforms called Vertex AI. Many startups are under risk.

Current Partners: @Replit @Uber @DeutscheBank

Here are some images:

1. Choose a foundation model from Text, Image & more
🧵 pic.twitter.com/eNZGgvdj1E

— Farhan H (@FarhanSoftware) May 10, 2023

Google Workspace has 3 billion users.

Gen AI will be the biggest change to Workspace in years.

Here are the best gen AI features that Google announced today to improve productivity: pic.twitter.com/8E7ZEXALbM

— Peter Yang (@petergyang) May 11, 2023

Googles new LLM (bison) is approx 7.5x cheaper than gpt4

Basic napkin math:
1 token ~ 4 characters

Gpt4: $0.03/1000 tokens

Bison: $0.004/1000 tokens

Chat bison is 15x cheaper (0.0005/1k)

You can also batch requests!

Smaller models are the way to go pic.twitter.com/KhjgxCVchu

— Sully (@SullyOmarr) May 11, 2023

Google just released ChatGPT’s strongest competitor yet – Bard

It’s free to use and comes with 10X more features.

Here are some of the craziest things only Bard can do ( ChatGPT cannot) 🧵

— Rez Karim (@rezkhere) May 11, 2023

Google Vertex vs OpenAI GPT3.5!
🚀 At the recent #GoogleIO, Google launched Vertex AI models for language generation, stepping into the ring with OpenAI’s API. I decided to pit OpenAI’s GPT3.5 and Vertex AI’s text-bison@001 against each other in a knowledge retrieval task pic.twitter.com/VWdLbuKlDK

— Dhiraj Nambiar (@dhirajnambiar) May 12, 2023

IBL News | New York

Meta/Facebook announced a new open-source multisensory model that links together six types of data (text, audio, visual data, thermal infrared images, and movement readings), pointing to a future of generative AI that creates immersive experiences by cross-referencing this info.

This model is a research model, a paper, with no immediate consumer or practical applications, and speaks in favor of Meta/Facebook since OpenAI and Google are developing these models secretively, according to experts.

For example, AI image generators like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney all rely on systems that link together text and images during the training stage, as they follow users’ text inputs to generate pictures. Many AI tools generate video or audio in the same way.

Meta’s underlying model, named ImageBind, is the first one to combine six types of data into a single embedding space.

Recently, Meta open-sourced LLaMA, the language model that started an alternative movement to OpenAI and Google. With ImageBind, it’s continuing with this strategy by opening the floodgates for researchers to try to develop new, holistic AI systems.

• “When humans absorb information from the world, we innately use multiple senses, such as seeing a busy street and hearing the sounds of car engines. Today, we’re introducing an approach that brings machines one step closer to humans’ ability to learn simultaneously, holistically, and directly from many different forms of information — without the need for explicit supervision (the process of organizing and labeling raw data),” said Meta in a blog-post.

• “For instance, while Make-A-Scene can generate images by using text prompts, ImageBind could upgrade it to generate images using audio sounds, such as laughter or rain.”

• “Imagine that someone could take a video recording of an ocean sunset and instantly add the perfect audio clip to enhance it, or when a model like Make-A-Video produces a video of a carnival, ImageBind can suggest background noise to accompany it, creating an immersive experience.”

• “There’s still a lot to uncover about multimodal learning. We hope the research community will explore ImageBind and our accompanying published paper to find new ways to evaluate vision models and lead to novel applications.”

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.

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.”

 

40 seconds to understand why the human species might go extinct and why if we race towards AGI, everyone will lose, by @geoffreyhinton pic.twitter.com/eoQ92WHj3B

— Siméon (@Simeon_Cps) May 3, 2023

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.

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.”
.

Super cool chat bot tutor appearing in @khanacademy! Prompts students through a learning exercise independently. #ChatGPT #AI https://t.co/rdcN9mPGBO

— Becky Keene 🦋 (@BeckyKeene) April 21, 2023

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.”

 

IBL News | New York

Stability AI, the startup behind the generative AI art tool Stable Diffusion, released this week an open-source LLM with 15 to 65 billion parameters to follow.

StableLM can generate text and code and is an alternative to proprietary OpenAI. “It’s a massive deal, that has the potential to change up everything in AI,” said an expert.

It can be used for commercial or research purposes, under the CC BY-SA-4.0 license.

This release is available in “alpha” on its GitHub and Hugging Spaces, a platform for hosting AI models and code.

It builds on the company’s open-sourcing record with EleutherAI, a nonprofit research hub.

In 2022, it released the image model Stable Diffusion. Earlier releases included GPT-J, GPT-NeoX, and the Pythia suite, which were trained on The Pile open-source dataset — a mix of internet-scraped text samples from websites including PubMed, StackExchange, and Wikipedia.

These open-source models, including Cerebras-GPT and Dolly-2, might demonstrate that small and efficient models can deliver performance with appropriate training, according to experts.

StableLM is trained on a new experimental dataset built on The Pile, but three times larger with 1.5 trillion tokens of content.

“The richness of this dataset gives StableLM surprisingly high performance in conversational and coding tasks, despite its small size of 3 to 7 billion parameters (by comparison, GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters),” said the company in a blog post.

Stability is also releasing a set of research models that are instruction fine-tuned. They use a combination of five recent, noncommercial, research-only, open-source datasets: Alpaca, GPT4All, Dolly, ShareGPT, and HH.

“Language models will form the backbone of our digital economy, and we want everyone to have a voice in their design,” said Stability AI.

In addition, Stability is working on a crowd-sourced RLHF program and an open-source dataset for AI assistants, Open Assistant.

Stability AI didn’t say whether StableLM hallucinates and includes offensive language and views. “Given that The Pile contains profane, lewd, and otherwise fairly abrasive language, it wouldn’t be surprising if that were the case,” wrote TechCrunch.

“This is expected to be improved with scale, better data, community feedback, and optimization,” responded Stability.

Even commercialized models like GPT-4, which have filters and human moderation teams in place, have been shown to spout toxicity.

Some researchers have criticized the release of open-source models, arguing that they could be used for unsavory purposes like creating phishing emails or aiding malware attacks.

According to Semafor, Stability AI — which raised over $100 million at a valuation of $1 billion — is under pressure to monetize its efforts. Its CEO Emad Mostaque has hinted at plans to IPO.

The company is facing legal cases that allege that it infringed on the rights of millions of artists by developing AI art tools using web-scraped, copyrighted images.

Stability just released their new LLM.

It’s open-source, has 7bparameters, and its entirely free to use commercially.

And its a MASSIVE deal, that has the potential to change up everything in AI

Here’s why: pic.twitter.com/10CONPz1R8

— Sully (@SullyOmarr) April 20, 2023