Google’s NotebookLM is a Personalized Lite Language Model

Google personalized AI assistant NotebookLM is an experimental product that has been in early access since July. Now the company is integrating its new Gemini Pro LLM with NotebookLM and making it available to U.S. residents 18 and older. NotebookLM is engineered “to help you do your best thinking,” Google says, with documents uploaded to the service making it “an instant expert in the information you need,” allowing it to answer questions about your data. Unlike generic chatbots, NotebookLM draws responses from the documents you feed it, meaning it will be hyper-focused — a lite version of a custom trained model. Continue reading Google’s NotebookLM is a Personalized Lite Language Model

Google Announces the Launch of Gemini, Its Largest AI Model

Google is closing the year by heralding 2024 as the “Gemini era,” with the introduction of its “most capable and general AI model yet,” Gemini 1.0. This new foundation model is optimized for three different use-case sizes: Ultra, Pro and Nano. As a result, Google is releasing a new, Gemini-powered version of its Bard chatbot, available to English speakers in the U.S. and 170 global regions. Google touts Gemini as built from the ground up for multimodality, reasoning across text, images, video, audio and code. However, Bard will not as yet incorporate Gemini’s ability to analyze sound and images. Continue reading Google Announces the Launch of Gemini, Its Largest AI Model

Standalone Image Generator Is Among New AI Tools by Meta

Meta Platforms is moving Imagine with Meta from its test bed as a generative AI experience in chats to a standalone experience on the Web that allows users to create high-resolution images using natural language text prompts. That is one of more than 20 generative AI features Meta is deploying to create new business opportunities globally leveraging AI across search, ads, business messaging and more. While most will wind up on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, some say Meta’s popular Facebook and Instagram platforms have plateaued at 2 to 3 billion users per month, circumscribing ad growth. Continue reading Standalone Image Generator Is Among New AI Tools by Meta

AMD’s New AI Chips Get Welcome Reception from Enterprise

AMD is coming to market with a new slate of chips optimized for artificial intelligence, including the AMD Instinct MI300 Series data center AI accelerators, ROCm 6 open software stack with new features for large language models, and Ryzen 8040 Series processors with Ryzen AI. The new offerings have received a welcome reception from customers including Microsoft, Oracle, Meta Platforms and Dell, among others that can benefit from building a strong network of suppliers of AI chips. The market is currently dominated by Nvidia, which is challenged to meet existing demand. Continue reading AMD’s New AI Chips Get Welcome Reception from Enterprise

IBM and Meta Debut AI Alliance for Safe Artificial Intelligence

IBM and Meta Platforms have launched the AI Alliance, a coalition of companies and educational institutions committed to responsible, transparent development of artificial intelligence. The group launched this week with more than 50 global founding participants from industry, startup, academia, research and government. Among the members and collaborators: AMD, CERN, Cerebras, Cornell University, Dell Technologies, Hugging Face, Intel, Linux Foundation, NASA, Oracle, Red Hat, Sony Group, Stability AI, the University of Tokyo and Yale Engineering. The group’s stated purpose is “to support open innovation and open science in AI.” Continue reading IBM and Meta Debut AI Alliance for Safe Artificial Intelligence

Runway Teams with Getty on AI Video for Hollywood and Ads

The Google and Nvidia-backed AI video startup Runway is partnering with Getty Images to develop Runway Getty Images Model (RGM), which it is positioning as a new type of generative AI model capable of “providing a new way to bring ideas and stories to life through video” for enterprise customers using copyright compliant means. Targeting Hollywood studios, advertising, media and broadcast clients, RGM will “provide a baseline model upon which companies can build their own custom models for the generation of video content,” Runway explains. Continue reading Runway Teams with Getty on AI Video for Hollywood and Ads

Meta AI Seamless Translator Converts Nearly 100 Languages

The research division of Meta AI has developed Seamless Communication, a suite of artificial intelligence models that generate what the company says is natural and authentic communication across languages, facilitating what amounts to real-time universal speech translation. The models were released with accompanying research papers and data. The flagship model, Seamless, merges capabilities from a trio of models — SeamlessExpressive, SeamlessStreaming and SeamlessM4T v2 — into a single system that can translate between almost 100 spoken and written languages, preserving idioms, emotion and the speaker’s vocal style, Meta says. Continue reading Meta AI Seamless Translator Converts Nearly 100 Languages

Stability AI Intros Real-Time Text-to-Image Generation Model

Stability AI, developer of Stable Diffusion (one of the leading visual content generators, alongside Midjourney and DALL-E), has introduced SDXL Turbo — a new AI model that demonstrates more of the latent possibilities of the common diffusion generation approach: images that update in real time as the user’s prompt updates. This feature was always a possibility even with previous diffusion models given text and images are comprehended differently across linear time, but increased efficiency of generation algorithms and the steady accretion of GPUs and TPUs in a developer’s data center makes the experience more magical. Continue reading Stability AI Intros Real-Time Text-to-Image Generation Model

Altman Reinstated as CEO of OpenAI, Microsoft Joins Board

Sam Altman has wasted no time since being rehired as CEO of OpenAI on November 22, four days after being fired. This week, the 38-year-old leader of one of the most influential artificial intelligence firms outlined his “immediate priorities” and announced a newly constituted “initial board” that includes a non-voting seat for investor Microsoft. The three voting members thus far include former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor as chairman and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers — both newcomers — and sophomore Adam D’Angelo, CEO of Quora. Mira Murati, interim CEO during Altman’s brief absence, returns to her role as CTO. Continue reading Altman Reinstated as CEO of OpenAI, Microsoft Joins Board

Amazon Previews Titan Image Generator for Bedrock Clients

Amazon is debuting its Titan Image Generator in preview for AWS Bedrock customers. The new Titan generative AI model can create new images from a text prompt or existing image, and automatically adds watermarking to protect intellectual property. The move into generative imaging puts Amazon in competition with a growing field that includes large firms like Adobe and Google. Unlike those companies and others, the e-retail giant is at present focusing exclusively on enterprise customers. Amazon Bedrock is a managed service giving developers access to a range of foundation models from companies including Meta Platforms, Anthropic, and Amazon itself. Continue reading Amazon Previews Titan Image Generator for Bedrock Clients

SageMaker HyperPod: Amazon Accelerates AI Model Training

Amazon has launched five new capabilities to its SageMaker service, including Sagemaker HyperPod, which accelerates large language and foundation model training and tuning. Sagemaker HyperPod is said to shorten the training time by up to 40 percent using its purpose-built infrastructure designed for distributed training at scale. By optimizing acceleration, SageMaker Inference reduces foundation model deployment costs by 50 percent and latency by 20 percent on average, Amazon claims. “SageMaker HyperPod removes the undifferentiated heavy lifting involved in building and optimizing machine learning infrastructure,” said Amazon. Continue reading SageMaker HyperPod: Amazon Accelerates AI Model Training

Amazon Unveils Productivity Chatbot, Gets Nvidia Superchip

Amazon Web Services is introducing Amazon Q, an AI chatbot geared toward enterprise clients who can customize it to increase productivity for their specific business needs. AWS also announced that it has updated its homegrown Graviton4 chips for a 30 percent performance boost. AWS confirmed it will be the first Big Tech firm to deploy the latest version of Nvidia’s Grace Hopper Superchip AI accelerator, and additionally will become a data center host for Nvidia’s DGX Cloud service. The announcements were disclosed at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. Continue reading Amazon Unveils Productivity Chatbot, Gets Nvidia Superchip

California Privacy Protection Agency Issues Draft Rules for AI

The California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) is preparing new regulations to protect consumers from how businesses may potentially use AI. The state regulator, whose rulings have an outsized influence on Big Tech given the many large firms that are headquartered there, has issued draft rules for how consumer data can be used in what it is calling “automated decisionmaking technology,” or ADMT. The proposed regulations give consumers the right to opt out of ADMT and entitles the public to on-demand information as how AI is interacting with their data and how businesses plan to use it. Continue reading California Privacy Protection Agency Issues Draft Rules for AI

Newsom Report Examines Use of AI by California Government

California Governor Gavin Newsom has released a report examining the beneficial uses and potential harms of artificial intelligence in state government. Potential plusses include improving access to government services by identifying groups that are hindered due to language barriers or other reasons, while dangers highlight the need to prepare citizens with next generation skills so they don’t get left behind in the GenAI economy. “This is an important first step in our efforts to fully understand the scope of GenAI and the state’s role in deploying it,” Newsom said, calling California’s strategy “a nuanced, measured approach.” Continue reading Newsom Report Examines Use of AI by California Government

Bill Gates Imagines Agents as the Human-Computer Interface

Bill Gates has published his thinking about the future of computing, and fascinatingly, it’s the same as his prediction from decades ago: agents. No mere bots — and certainly not anthropomorphized paperclips — agents (to Gates) will abstract almost all HCI to a natural language conversation with systems that have our permission to take meaningful actions. Gates makes a highly specific prediction: within five years, the very idea of an app itself will seem as outdated as a rotary phone dial does next to an iPhone. A conversational UI will sit on top of a language model that has access to as much of our private data as we wish to give it. Continue reading Bill Gates Imagines Agents as the Human-Computer Interface