GSV's AI News & Updates (10/20/23)
Teacher's Union Partners with GPTZero, English Language Learning on Google Search, Stack Overflow Layoffs, Tynker Copilot, OpenAI's $80B Valuation, Arrakis Discontinued, Adept's Fuyu-8B
We announced the inaugural ASU+GSV AIR SHOW: On April 13-15th we're launching ASU+GSV's inaugural AIR (AI Revolution) Show in San Diego, California. Done in conjunction with our 15th Annual ASU+GSV Summit, the AIR Show will be an immersive showcase of the world's most important AI in EDU companies. Tickets are complimentary for Mavericks.
General 🚀
OpenAI:
Thrive Capital to Lead Purchase of OpenAI Employee Shares at $80B+ Valuation: the deal would boost OpenAI’s valuation by at least 3x from a similar transaction the startup made 6 months ago.
OpenAI Dropped Work on New ‘Arrakis’ AI Model in Rare Setback: the Arrakis project was an initiative aimed at enhancing AI efficiency and cost-effectiveness. However, due to its underwhelming performance and failure to achieve anticipated cost reductions, OpenAI has discontinued it.
YouTube launches Spotlight Moments: a new AI-driven package that automatically identifies the most popular, relevant videos, making it even easier for advertisers to own the moment around key events, when viewers are most engaged.
Amazon Introduces Warehouse Overhaul With AI Robotics to Speed Deliveries: Amazon says its new robotics system, named Sequoia after the giant trees, is designed for both speed and safety. Humans are meant to work alongside new machines in a way that should reduce injuries. The new program reduces the time it takes to fulfill an order by up to 25% and can identify and store inventory up to 75% faster.
Introducing The Foundation Model Transparency Index: a multidisciplinary team from Stanford, MIT, and Princeton to design a scoring system called the Foundation Model Transparency Index. The FMTI evaluates 100 different aspects of transparency, from how a company builds a foundation model, how it works, and how it is used downstream.
Less transparency makes it harder for other businesses to know if they can safely build applications that rely on commercial foundation models; for academics to rely on commercial foundation models for research; for policymakers to design meaningful policies to rein in this powerful technology; and for consumers to understand model limitations or seek redress for harms caused.
Baidu Says Its AI as Good as ChatGPT: Robin Li says AI model is finally on par with OpenAI’s GPT-4 as US and China are locked in a race with profound implications.
We're all Stochastic Parrots: what AI can teach us about being human.
Satya Nadella’s annual letter: Leading in a new era.
Education and the Future of Work 📚
American Federation of Teachers partners with AI identification platform, GPTZero: the second-largest teacher's union in the U.S. has partnered with a company that can detect when students use artificial intelligence to do their homework.
Many have expressed opposition to this partnership and a call for it to be reversed, voicing serious concerns that echo findings from multiple studies. There is increasing alarm over GPT-Zero's tendency to generate false positives, an issue that disproportionately affects non-native speakers and poses potential fairness concerns.
After ChatGPT disruption, Stack Overflow lays off 28 percent of staff: the company is working on a direct answer to ChatGPT in the form of Overflow AI. The great irony of ChatGPT hurting Stack Overflow is that a great deal of the chatbot's development prowess comes from scraping sites like Stack Overflow.
English learners can now practice speaking on Google Search: Google Search is already a valuable tool for language learners. Now, learners translating to or from English on their Android phones will find a new English speaking practice experience with personalized feedback.
How AI can make classrooms more accessible: how Google is making sure that everyone, regardless of their background or abilities, can access the information they need to learn, grow, and succeed.
How Tynker Fine-Tuned Llama 2 for Our Block Coding Copilot: Tynker’s behind-the-scenes journey of creating Tynker Copilot, a groundbreaking innovation designed to help kids learn to code faster. Imagine a world where a simple text prompt transforms into a fully-fledged Tynker program, powered by visual code blocks.
Generative AI Is Coming for Sales Execs’ Jobs—and They’re Celebrating: ChatGPT-style AI can tackle the drudge work of responding to RFPs faster than humans. Sales teams at Google, Twilio, and others say productivity is spiking.
Startups and Tools 🛠️
Objective emerges from stealth with $13M in funding to deliver multimodal search to developers as an API platform: a low-code platform that allows developers to build multisearch apps that handle input and output in multiple formats — text, images, video and audio.
CoPilot, a training app that matches users with remote fitness coaches, raises $6.5M
Autoblocks: a full-stack LLMOps platform helping businesses dealing with large-scale user data to better monitor their LLM-powered products. It allows engineering and product teams to debug error types, test code changes, and fine-tune datasets.
Browserbear: AI web scraper.
Marauder World: recall your memories by tracking movement history.
Tech 💻
Adept open-sources Fuyu-8B: A Multimodal Architecture for AI Agents: the Fuyu-8B model can see pictures and read text - you can feed images into its transformer decoder without a separate image encoder or complex training. IT works with charts, diagrams and documents as well, and outperforms on many common benchmarks. The model is available on HuggingFace.
Towards a Real-Time Decoding of Images from Brain Activity: Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), a non-invasive neuroimaging technique in which thousands of brain activity measurements are taken per second, Meta can decode the unfolding of visual representations in the brain with an unprecedented temporal resolution.
PlayHT 2.0 Turbo: a new fast conversational AI text-to-speech model with <300ms latency.
How to talk to an LLM (with your voice): code for building real-time AI WebRTC applications.
How QLoRA lets you fine-tune models that have billions of parameters on a relatively small GPU
GPT-4 is Getting Faster: GPT-4 is catching up in speed, closing the latency gap with GPT 3.5.
Regulation and Policy ⚖️
Anthropic Explores Democratizing AI Alignment Using Public Input: working with the Collective Intelligence Project, Anthropic used the perspectives from 1,000 Americans to define the principles that should govern AI behavior.
EU Plans Stricter Rules for Most Powerful Generative AI Models: the EU is considering a three-tiered approach to regulating generative AI models and systems.
A Thread on China’s AI Red Teaming: a key Chinese standards body released a draft standard on how to comply with China's generative AI regulation. It tells companies how to red team their models for illegal or "unhealthy" information.
Mustafa Suleyman and Eric Schmidt: We need an AI equivalent of the IPCC: “To support the discussions and to build towards a practical outcome, we propose an International Panel on AI Safety (IPAIS), an IPCC for AI. A body that does the same for AI, one rigorously focused on a science-led collection of data, would provide not just a long-term monitoring and early-warning function, but would shape the protocols and norms about reporting on AI in a consistent, global fashion.”
OpenAI has quietly changed its ‘core values’: putting a greater emphasis on the development of AGI — artificial general intelligence. CEO Sam Altman has described AGI as “the equivalent of a median human that you could hire as a co-worker.”
How a billionaire-backed network of AI advisers took over Washington
Other
To Track a Forest’s Recovery, Artificial Intelligence Just Listens: by “listening” to forest soundscapes and identifying animal species, AI can be used to evaluate biodiversity efforts, according to a new study.
Acquired interviews NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang: get a peek into Jensen’s mindset and calculus behind “betting the company” multiple times, and his surprising feelings about whether he’d go on the founder journey again if he could rewind time.
Resources
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