Meta Platforms has rebranded its Quest VR operating system Horizon OS and is opening the platform to third parties. While licensing terms have not been publicly disclosed, Asus and Lenovo have said they’re going to be designing hardware using the system. Microsoft and Qualcomm are also in round one of the companies on the inside track as Meta positions Horizon OS along the lines of a universal VR standard, not unlike Microsoft’s Windows OS for computers. All four companies have already been working with Meta on VR for Quest or its predecessor, Oculus. Continue reading Meta Opens Mixed Reality OS to Third-Party Hardware Makers

Microsoft, which has been developing small language models (SLMs) for some time, has announced its most-capable SLM family, Phi-3. SLMs can accomplish some of the same functions as LLMs, but are smaller and trained on less data. That smaller footprint makes them well suited to run in a local environment, which means they’re ideal for smartphones, where in theory they would not even need an Internet connection to run. Microsoft claims the Phi-3 open models can outperform “models of the same size and next size up across a variety of benchmarks that evaluate language, coding and math capabilities.” Continue reading Microsoft Small Language Models Are Ideal for Smartphones

Microsoft has developed VASA, a framework for generating lifelike virtual characters with vocal capabilities including speaking and singing. The premiere model, VASA-1, can perform the feat in real time from a single static image and a vocalization clip. The research demo showcases realistic audio-enhanced faces that can be fine-tuned to look in different directions or change expression in video clips of up to one minute at 512 x 512 pixels and up to 40fps “with negligible starting latency,” according to Microsoft, which says “it paves the way for real-time engagements with lifelike avatars that emulate human conversational behaviors.” Continue reading Microsoft’s VASA-1 Can Generate Talking Faces in Real Time

Meta’s next generation AI silicon is a 5nm chip designed to power the models that provide recommendations to those who use its social network platforms. The new MTIA inference accelerator is part of a “broader full-stack development program for custom, domain-specific silicon that addresses our unique workloads and systems,” Meta says. The next-gen MTIA more than doubles the compute and memory bandwidth of its predecessor, the 7nm MTIA v1 chip introduced in May 2023, resulting in 3x the performance, according to Meta, which says the new silicon is already live in 16 data centers. Continue reading Meta Deploys Gen 2 MTIA AI Accelerator Chip in Data Centers

Microsoft’s LinkedIn social business platform has joined forces with NBCUniversal to enter the connected TV advertising market. At its B2Believe customer event in New York, LinkedIn unveiled three new offerings — LinkedIn CTV Ads, LinkedIn Premiere with NBCUniversal, and Live Event Ads. Advertisers can get their creative in front of the LinkedIn audience against streaming content on connected TVs with LinkedIn CTV, target U.S. decision makers across NBCUniversal’s premium CTV content with LinkedIn Premiere and promote corporate live events before, during, and after with Live Event Ads. Kantar and iSpot are offering measurement insights. Continue reading LinkedIn Gets Advertisers Connected with CTV, NBCUni Deal

Opera has become the first browser to add support for large language models (LLMs). At this point the feature is experimental, and available only on the Opera One Developer browser as part of the AI Feature Drops program. The update offers about 150 LLMs from more than 50 different families, including Meta’s LLaMA, Google’s Gemma, Mixtral and Vicuna. Opera had previously only offered local support for its own Aria AI, a competitor to Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The local LLMs are being offered for testing as a complimentary addition to Opera’s online Aria service. Continue reading Opera Browser Is Experimenting with Local Support for LLMs

There are now more than 600,000 users signed up for OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise, up from 150,000 in January of this year. A surge, by any standards, it has sent OpenAI doubling down on the B2B approach as a way to turn artificial intelligence into a profitable business — something it is under some pressure to do in order to satisfy its obligations to investors. The company is also amping up its Custom Model training program, aimed at helping enterprise clients develop individually tailored generative AI technology for specific use cases and applications. Continue reading OpenAI Hopes ChatGPT Enterprise Will Help Drive B2B Profit

Artificial Intelligence is not angling to steal jobs, according to Big Tech, which is galvanizing its forces to push back against that perception by forming a new consortium that addresses the effect of AI on the workforce. Called the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium, it will “assess AI’s impact on technology jobs and identify skills development pathways for the roles most likely to be affected by artificial intelligence,” according to Cisco, which leads the initiative. Accenture, Eightfold, Google, IBM, Indeed, Intel, Microsoft and SAP are also participating. Continue reading Big Tech Launches Consortium to Address AI Impact on Jobs

Microsoft and Quantinuum have improved the logical error rate in quantum computing by 800x, a breakthrough the partners say has the potential to usher in a new era of qubit processing. Using ion-trap hardware from Quantinuum and a qubit-virtualization system from Microsoft, the team ran more than 14,000 experiments with no errors — a huge feat in the notoriously fickle realm of qubits. The system has error diagnostics and corrections built in, identifying which errors need to be fixed and correcting them without destroying the underlying logical qubits, according to the companies. Continue reading Microsoft, Quantinuum Tout Advance in Quantum Computing

Apple has developed a large language model it says has advanced screen-reading and comprehension capabilities. ReALM (Reference Resolution as Language Modeling) is artificial intelligence that can see and read computer screens in context, according to Apple, which says it advances technology essential for a true AI assistant “that aims to allow a user to naturally communicate their requirements to an agent, or to have a conversation with it.” Apple claims that in a benchmark against GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, the smallest ReALM model performed “comparable” to GPT-4, with its “larger models substantially outperforming it.” Continue reading Apple’s ReALM AI Advances the Science of Digital Assistants

Microsoft and OpenAI are contemplating an AI supercomputer data center that may cost as much as $100 billion. Called Stargate, the aim would be to have it operational by 2008 to drive OpenAI’s next generation of artificial intelligence. According to reports, the Stargate complex would span hundreds of U.S. acres and use up to 5 gigawatts of power, which is massive (the equivalent of a substantial metropolitan power grid). In light of those power needs, a nuclear power source is said to be under consideration. The project is not yet green-lit, and no U.S. location has been selected. Continue reading Microsoft, OpenAI Considering a Supercomputer Data Center

Amazon has added $2.75 billion to its initial September 2023 investment of $1.25 billion in Anthropic, completing its announced $4 billion stake in the artificial intelligence startup formed in 2021 by former members of OpenAI. As part of the resulting strategic collaboration, Anthropic’s most powerful models, including the Claude 3 series, are available on Amazon Bedrock, a service providing fully managed foundation models. Anthropic is using Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider and Amazon says Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips “to build, train, and deploy its future models.” Continue reading Amazon Increases Its Investment in Anthropic AI to $4 Billion

Microsoft-owned business and employment-focused social platform LinkedIn plans to add games and a vertical-scroll feed of short videos. But the career-centric platform will still be all work, even as it adds play. The intent is to have the TikTok-like video feed filled with professionally themed content, and the games will be geared toward relationship building, while also potentially getting people to spend more time using LinkedIn. The video feed is in the test phase, while code hinting at the direction of the gaming feature has been discovered by some astute app watchers. Continue reading LinkedIn Tests Vertical Video Feed, Experiments with Games

Adobe’s upcoming GenStudio for marketers and an expanded agreement with Microsoft to integrate the Adobe Experience Cloud’s customer insights and generative AI from Firefly directly into Copilot were the big buzz at Adobe Summit 2024, which wrapped Thursday after four days in Las Vegas. Currently in beta, GenStudio will allow advertisers and brands to quickly plan campaigns and create ads, then activate, manage and measure the results with native integrations across Adobe Experience Cloud and Creative Cloud. General release is expected later this year, with pricing to be announced. Continue reading Adobe Promos GenStudio for Brands and New Microsoft Deal

Microsoft is making improvements to the way its Copilot AI assistant works in Microsoft Teams and is using artificial intelligence to further integrate hybrid meetings. As the company leans deeper into AI, it continues to push hardware manufacturers to build an AI-optimized PC, making sure to include a dedicated Microsoft Copilot key. Microsoft joins Intel, Qualcomm and AMD in championing purpose-built AI PCs. In the meantime, the tech giant continues to build out features for existing PCs. The company is adding new ways to tap into the Copilot tool for meetings, chats, summaries and more. Continue reading Microsoft Improves Meetings and Messaging with Copilot, AI