Researchers at the South China Normal University in Guangzhou, highly focused on teacher education and training, explored how AI-driven visual reports can transform assessment in K12. A 13-week study analyzed the performance of half of the students who received personalized reports with clear visuals, personalized feedback, and actionable insights versus the other half who received oral feedback from instructors.
The “AI reports” group demonstrated a 12.8% improvement in test scores over those only receiving oral.
In addition, the vast majority expressed interest in using the report for other classes.
Experts highlighted that AI tools get learners more efficient and faster personalized feedback and actionable feedback.
Students can see their learning journey in these reports and act on it. They review areas of strength, identify learning gaps, and plan where to focus their effort.
OpenAI announced yesterday the launch of its video model Sora, an AI tool for creating realistic clips from text. It lets users generate videos up to 20 seconds long. It includes dropping images in as prompts and a timeline editor that allows users to add new prompts at specific moments in a video.
“We don’t want the world just to be text,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a live-streamed announcement Monday. “Video is important to our culture,” Altman added.
The San Francisco-based research lab, backed by Microsoft, said that this current version of Sora, named Sora Turbo, is faster than the model showed in February.
Sora has been released as a standalone product at Sora.com to ChatGPT Plus and Pro users.
ChatGPT Plus offers up to 50 videos at up to 480p resolution, up to 20 seconds long, or fewer videos at 720p monthly. These videos are in widescreen, vertical, or square aspect ratios at no additional cost. Users bring their assets to extend, remix, and blend or generate entirely new content from text.
Meanwhile, ChatGPT Pro offers up to 500 monthly videos at up to 1080p resolution and longer duration.
OpenAI developed new interfaces to make it easier to prompt Sora with text, images, and videos. Its storyboard tool lets users precisely specify inputs for each frame.
OpenAI acknowledged that “the version of Sora we are deploying has many limitations, and it often generates unrealistic physics and struggles with complex actions over long durations.”“Although Sora Turbo is much faster than the February preview, we’re still working to make the technology affordable for everyone.”
The Sora model is blocking particularly damaging forms of abuse, such as child sexual abuse materials and sexual deepfakes.
Sora could also violate many creators’ rights, experts said.
Linda McMahon, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for education secretary, will work on “sending Education back to the states” while reducing or eliminating the federal Department of Education. This was one of Trump’s key education campaign pledges.
With a slimmer educational résumé than typical of candidates for the Secretary of Education position, she served 16 years on the board of trustees for Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, where a student center is named for her.
She also spent just over a year on the Connecticut State Board of Education, where she was one of fifteen members overseeing all public education in the state, including its technical high school system. Later, in 2010, she would resign to run as a Republican for a Senate seat.
Linda McMahon, a leader of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team, is known for her many years in wrestling as the former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE).
According to President Trump’s statement, her approach to education is based on advocating for parents’ and families’ rights and universal school choice. This means that money typically flowing to public schools will instead go to families so they can spend it on private education.
“As Secretary of Education, Linda will fight tirelessly to expand ‘Choice’ to every State in America and empower parents to make the best Education decisions for their families,” Mr. Trump said.
On Tuesday, Ms. McMahon posted a message on social media praising “apprenticeship programs” and highlighting their examples in Switzerland, which is often cited as a high-performing country whose model the United States should follow.
She also has backed a House bill to make federal Pell Grants available for those pursuing skills training programs and technical education, not just traditional college degrees.
The for-profit college sector applauded Ms. McMahon’s selection.
“Under her leadership, we are confident that the new Department of Education will take a more reasoned and thoughtful approach in addressing many of the overreaching and punitive regulations put forth by the Biden administration, especially those targeting career schools,” Jason Altmire, president of Career Education Colleges and Universities, a trade group that represents the for-profit sector, said in a statement.
AI’s integration into learning environments, research, administrative functions, and campus operations reshapes how institutions operate, faculty teach, students learn, and staff perform their roles.
It’s not about blindly accepting AI in higher education or banning its use.
It is crucial to thoughtfully examine AI’s impact on higher education, specifically on student success, financial sustainability, accountability, and equity.
This is the main conclusion of researcher Joe Sabado, who shared research titled “AI in Higher Education—Frameworks for Critical Inquiry and Innovation.”
This document, created using AI, guides institutions through AI’s transformative process, helping them leverage this technology. It provides ten frameworks, offering valuable insights for all stakeholders: educators, administrators, policymakers, students, staff, and journalists.
Apple announced yesterday that its Generative AI suite, Apple Intelligence, will start rolling out in beta in October 2024 in the U.S. with iO 18.1, iPad 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1.
In addition, Apple introduced the new iPhone 16 lineup (iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, iPhone 16 Pro Max, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max), built for Apple Intelligence and features more advanced A18 and A18 Pro chips.
This AI suite, available as a free software update, will include improved Siri, which will have a brand-new design and a glowing light that wraps around the edge of the screen when active on an iPhone, iPad, or CarPlay.
It will also include Writing Tools for rewriting, proofreading, and summarizing text nearly everywhere they write, including Mail, Notes, Pages, and third-party apps.
In Photos, the Memories feature now enables users to create movies by simply typing a description. In addition, natural language can be used to search for specific photos and videos.
The new Clean Up tool can identify and remove distracting objects in a photo’s background without accidentally altering the subject.
Users can record, transcribe, and summarize audio in the Notes and Phone apps. The phone app automatically notifies participants when a recording is initiated while on a call. Once the call ends, Apple Intelligence generates a summary to help recall key points.
Across a user’s inbox, summaries convey the most important information of each email instead of simply previewing the first few lines.
Smart Reply in Mail provides users with suggestions for a quick response and identifies questions in an email to ensure everything is answered.
Priority Notifications surface what’s most important.
More Apple Intelligence features will roll out later this year and in the months following.
Users can access ChatGPT for free without creating an account, and ChatGPT’s data-use policies apply—for example, IP addresses are obscured, and requests are stored.
Cognition AI, which builds AI teammates, introduced this week an autonomous AI software engineer called Devin.
This AI agent can independently write entire software projects from scratch based on simple text prompts.
Devin can plan and execute complex coding tasks with hundreds of steps.
The autonomous agent can code while learning, recall relevant context at every step, fix errors, and collaborate with users in real time.
“With our advances in long-term reasoning and planning, Devin can plan and execute complex engineering tasks requiring thousands of decisions,” said the company.
Cognition AI has equipped Devin with common developer tools including the shell, code editor, and browser within a sandboxed compute environment.
This agent can report on its progress in real-time, accept feedback, and work together with the user through design choices as needed.
In the demos shown below, Devin built complete websites and apps in under 10 minutes. It also successfully completed real gigs posted on Upwork by itself.
On a coding benchmark, the AI agent solved 13.86% of real-world GitHub issues end-to-end, crushing the previous SOTA benchmark of 1.96%.
Funded with a $21 million Series A led by Founders Fund, Cognition AI is dedicated to building AI teammates with capabilities far beyond today’s existing AI tools by solving reasoning.
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Today we’re excited to introduce Devin, the first AI software engineer.
Devin is the new state-of-the-art on the SWE-Bench coding benchmark, has successfully passed practical engineering interviews from leading AI companies, and has even completed real jobs on Upwork.
This is the first demo of any agent, leave alone coding, that seems to cross the threshold of what is human level and works reliably. It also tells us what is possible by combining LLMs and tree search algorithms: you want systems that can try plans, look at results, replan, and… https://t.co/Afj6Gvukan
Figure AI, a startup working to build humanoid robots that can perform dangerous and undesirable jobs, got support from OpenAI and other large names in AI, such as NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Jeff Bezos’ venture fund.
The Sunnyvale, California-based company announced on Thursday that it raised $675 million in Series B funding at a $2.6 billion valuation with investments from Microsoft, OpenAI Startup Fund, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions), Parkway Venture Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures, and ARK Invest.
Focused on deploying humanoid robots to assist people with real-world applications addressing labor shortages, Figure recently announced its first commercial agreement with BMW Manufacturing to bring humanoids into automotive production.
The Figure team, made up of top AI robotics experts from Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Google DeepMind, and Archer Aviation, has made remarkable progress in the past few months in the key areas of AI, robot development, robot testing, and commercialization. Founded 21 months ago, Figure currently has a team of 80 employees and is led by serial entrepreneur Brett Adcock.
The new capital will be used to accelerate the timeline for humanoid commercial deployment as AI training, robot manufacturing, and expanding engineering headcount will be scaled up.
The collaboration with OpenAI will help to accelerate “Figure’s commercial timeline by enhancing the capabilities of humanoid robots to process and reason from language,” stated the company.
Peter Welinder, VP of Product and Partnerships at OpenAI, said: “We’ve always planned to come back to robotics and we see a path with Figure to explore what humanoid robots can achieve when powered by highly capable multimodal models. We’re blown away by Figure’s progress to date and we look forward to working together to open up new possibilities for how robots can help in everyday life.”
Figure will use Microsoft Azure for AI infrastructure, training, and storage.
To date, Figure AI has developed a general-purpose robot, called Figure 01, that looks and moves like a human. The company sees its robots being put to use in manufacturing, shipping and logistics, warehousing, and retail, where labor shortages are the most severe.
Earlier this week, the company released a video showing Figure 01 in action (see below). The robot, attached to a tether, walks on two legs, and uses its five-fingered hands to pick up a plastic crate, then walks several more steps before placing the box on a conveyor belt.
Figure’s ultimate aim is for Figure 01 to be able to perform “everyday tasks autonomously.” The company says getting there will require it to develop more robust AI systems.
There is a crowded field of companies vying to make humanoid robots a reality, although the market is nascent. Amazon-backed Agility Robotics plans to open a factory that can produce up to 10,000 of its bipedal Digit robots per year.
Tesla also trying to build a humanoid robot, called Optimus, while robotics company Boston Dynamics has developed several models. Norwegian humanoid robot startup 1X Technologies recently raised $100 million with backing from OpenAI.
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OpenAI shared yesterday a new AI technology called ‘Sora’ that instantly generates eye-popping videos and can speed up the work of moviemakers while replacing less experienced digital artists.
The San Francisco-based start-up shared this tool with a small group of academics and researchers.
In an interview with The New York Times, the company said that it had not yet released Sora to the public because it was still working to understand the system’s dangers.
OpenAI calls its new system Sora, after the Japanese word for sky. It chose the name because it “evokes the idea of limitless creative potential.”
In April 2023, a New York start-up called Runway AI unveiled technology that lets people generate videos simply by typing a prompt. Ten months later, OpenAI has unveiled a similar system that creates videos with a significantly higher quality.
A demonstration included short videos created in minutes, like the ones shown below.
OpenAI, which owns the still-image generator DALL-E, is now in the race to improve the AI video generator. Google and Meta are in this business, too.
OpenAI declined to say how many videos the system learned from or where they came from, except to say the training included both publicly available videos and videos that were licensed from copyright holders. The company says little about the data used to train its technologies, most likely because it wants to maintain an advantage over competitors — and has been sued multiple times for using copyrighted material.
The company is already tagging videos produced by the system with watermarks that identify them as being generated by AI. But it acknowledges that these can be removed.
DALL-E, Midjourney, and other still-image generators have improved so quickly that they are now producing images nearly indistinguishable from photographs. Many digital artists are complaining that it has made it harder for them to find work.
Examples:
An AI-generated video by OpenAI was created with the following prompt: “Several giant wooly mammoths approach treading through a snowy meadow, their long wooly fur lightly blows in the wind as they walk, snow covered trees and dramatic snow capped mountains in the distance, mid afternoon light with wispy clouds and a sun high in the distance creates a warm glow, the low camera view is stunning capturing the large furry mammal with beautiful photography, depth of field.”
This video’s AI prompt: “Beautiful, snowy Tokyo city is bustling. The camera moves through the bustling city street, following several people enjoying the beautiful snowy weather and shopping at nearby stalls. Gorgeous sakura petals are flying through the wind along with snowflakes.”
“Animated scene features a close-up of a short fluffy monster kneeling beside a melting red candle. The art style is 3D and realistic, with a focus on lighting and texture. The mood of the painting is one of wonder and curiosity, as the monster gazes at the flame with wide eyes and open mouth. Its pose and expression convey a sense of innocence and playfulness, as if it is exploring the world around it for the first time. The use of warm colors and dramatic lighting further enhances the cozy atmosphere of the image.”
This video’s AI prompt: “A gorgeously rendered papercraft world of a coral reef, rife with colorful fish and sea creatures.”
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OpenAI: Launched Sora
Meta: Launched V-JEPA
Google: Launched Gemini 1.5 PRO
Perplexity AI: Launching on Arc Browser
Magic Dev: Launching AI Software Engineer
and these sophomore kids are still looking for HTML, CSS, and Javascript roadmaps.
NVIDIA introduced yesterday a personalized demo chatbot app called Chat With RTX that runs locally on RTX-Powered Windows PCs providing fast and secure results.
This early version allows users to personalize a LLM connected to their own content—docs, notes, videos, or other data. It leverages retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), TensorRT-LLM, and RTX acceleration so users can query a custom chatbot to quickly get contextually relevant answers.
Available to download, with 35GB’s installer, NVIDIA’s Chat With RTX requires Windows 11 and a GPU with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 or 40 Series GPU or NVIDIA RTX Ampere or Ada Generation GPU with at least 8GB of VRAM.
With this app tailored for searching local documents and personal files, users can feed it YouTube videos and their own documents to create summaries and get relevant answers based on their own data analyzing collection of documents as well as scanning through PDFs.
Chat with RTX essentially installs a web server and Python instance on a PC, which then leverages Mistral or Llama 2 models to query the data. It doesn’t remember context, so follow-up questions can’t be based on the context of a previous question.
The launch was coincident with a Super Bowl ad (see below). It also marked one year since the entry of Microsoft into the consumer AI sphere with Bing Chat.
Powered by OpenAI’s DALL-E 3, the new Copilot comes with a cleaner, sleeker look UI with a cleaner look, more white space, less text, and a visual carousel of cards.
In addition, it includes Microsoft Designer, which allows users to customize the generated images right inside Copilot without leaving the chat.
Images can be regenerated between square and landscape, resized, or enhanced with color, blurred background, and different effects like pixel art, resize and regenerate images without leaving chat.
Microsoft announced that it will soon roll out a Designer GPT inside Copilot.
Here are images of the old Bing Chat and the new Microsoft Copilot design, one after another.
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