A digital avatar may soon join the talent lineup on ESPN’s college football show “SEC Nation.” Called FACTS, the AI-generated character was developed at the ESPN Edge Innovation Center as “a way to help foster engagement and educate fans on complex sports analytics,” according to ESPN. The avatar was unveiled last week at the 4th Annual ESPN Edge Conference. Built on Nvidia’s Omniverse platform, using the company’s ACE microservices, FACTS integrates with Azure OpenAI for natural language processing and ElevenLabs for text-to-speech integration. Continue reading ESPN Readies a Data-Filled Sports Talk Host Generated by AI

Anthropic has launched the Claude Enterprise subscription plan to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise business solution. Focused on security and administrative controls, Claude Enterprise is designed to help organizations securely collaborate with artificial intelligence using proprietary internal data. Pricing will vary based on the number of seats and how Claude is used but is expected to be more expensive than Claude Pro and Claude Teams ($20 and $25 per month, respectively). An expanded 500K context window, more usage capacity, and a native GitHub integration for work on entire codebases are advantages Anthropic touts for Claude Enterprise. Continue reading Anthropic Announces Enhanced Claude Enterprise Plan for AI

Bozeman, Montana-based DaaS firm Snowflake has partnered with Nvidia to let clients customize LLMs (large language models) using proprietary data in the Snowflake Data Cloud. Nvidia’s NeMo platform and GPU-accelerated computing will power the effort to tailor models to specific business use cases, such as chatbots with category expertise as opposed to generalists, search engines attuned to context or generative text deep knowledge. Since most companies are eager to harness brand-specific AI without having to build a model from scratch, this category of service is generating a lot of interest. Continue reading Nvidia’s NeMo Delivers AI Customization to Snowflake Cloud