In order to provide more than 500,000 students with the knowledge and skills needed to use MongoDB Atlas, MongoDB today announced that it will launch the MongoDB for Academia program in India. MongoDB Atlas is the leading, multi-cloud developer data platform.
The MongoDB for Academia program offers training for students, educational materials for teachers, free credits to use MongoDB technology, and certifications to assist people start careers in the tech sector.
In order to narrow the technology skills gap in India, ICT Academy, a non-profit project of the Tamil Nadu government, and MongoDB are collaborating as part of the introduction of MongoDB for Academia in the country. ICT Academy trains higher education professors and students. The partnership with more than 800 educational institutions will assist MongoDB’s initiatives to upskill students and train more than 1,000 educators.
Participants in MongoDB for Academia in India will have access to credits for MongoDB Atlas worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and free MongoDB certification. They will also have free educational materials and training to assist teachers and students in developing the abilities required to develop, manage, and deploy contemporary, business-critical applications.
The program also provides access to the MongoDB PhD Fellowship programme, which gives exceptional PhD candidates the chance to conduct computer science research, network with MongoDB engineers, and present research at MongoDB events. It also offers an award of up to $50,000, with the goal of significantly advancing computer science or related fields.
MongoDB and ICT Academy will also collaborate on a number of cooperative projects, such as educator enablement sessions, academic summits, learnathons, technical bootcamps, and other educational initiatives. The MongoDB for Academia initiative is a component of MongoDB’s broader plan to support India’s expanding developer community.
Enfabrica, a Silicon Valley chip company developing networking chips for AI data centers, announced on Tuesday that it had raised $125 million in Series B venture funding round. Nvidia joined the round as a strategic investor. The startup was founded by leaders from Broadcom and Alphabet’s Google.
Enfabrica is a part of a larger trend of data centers being totally redesigned to produce generative AI technologies comparable to ChatGPT. The core of that change is a set of chips from Nvidia. The issue with Nvidia’s graphics processing unit (GPU) processors is that they occasionally remain inactive because the networks that connect them cannot provide them with data at a high enough rate.
To address this issue, Enfabrica has created a network chip that seeks to connect the various components of a data center in novel ways. The Enfabrica chip builds a network that resembles a hub and spokes. This enables the Nvidia GPUs performing the data-crunching to draw data from numerous locations without encountering speed roadblocks.
Rochan Sankar, co-founder and CEO of Enfabrica, claimed that this results in a considerably more effective use of GPUs, allowing for the completion of the same amount of computational work with just roughly half as many chips. Such an accomplishment is viewed favorably in the technology sector as these chips are more economical, he said.
Atreides Management served as the round’s lead investor. IAG Capital Partners, Valour Equity Partners, Infinitum Partners, Liberty Global Ventures, and Alumni Ventures were among the new investors added by Enfabrica. Sutter Hill Ventures, an earlier investor, also participated in the round.
In an era where technological advancements continue to reshape industries, startups are at the forefront of revolutionizing the way we approach employee training and hiring processes. With innovation driven by artificial intelligence and a dedication to redefining career growth and talent acquisition, the startup MyWays.ai is making waves in the business world. In this article, we delve into the transformative journey of how MyWays is offering a glimpse into the future of HR and professional development.
MyWays.ai
MyWays.ai is an AI-powered SaaS platform that is revolutionizing hiring and training processes for fast-growing teams. MyWays.ai acts as a career growth platform for job seekers and helps employers to easily discover, screen, interview, and evaluate entry-level candidates. With the help of AI, the platform offers Experienced freshers.
For founders, hiring managers, and Team Leads, Myways provides comprehensive solutions for hiring, training, and deployment. Employers can streamline their HR procedures, save time and effort, and job seekers can acquire relevant skills, industry exposure, and fulfilling career prospects through their offerings.
The Initial Idea
The brains behind MyWays.ai are Samyak Jain, founder and CEO (IIT Delhi) and Tanvi Jain, co-founder and CXO (University of Delhi). According to the co-founders, the concept for MyWays.ai started to take shape when they discovered a substantial mismatch in the job market in 2020. They noticed that there were just too many people applying for technical jobs, but ironically, very few of them had the qualifications to get past even the initial screening. Moreover, countless tech freshmen who were trying to establish themselves in the field actually confronted it as a hurdle. Also, in order to identify the best people, companies had to sort through a mountain of applications, which was a challenge, too.
“Instead of working on the same set of online tasks, we envisioned a system where tech freshers could be taught and developed into seasoned freshers, prepared to tackle real-world problems. We didn’t, however, end there. We learned that the conventional hiring procedure was opaque and frequently biased as we dug deeper. In order to teach IT talent and place them in companies that value their newly acquired skills, we decided to start the MyGurukul Programme,” said Anisha Gupta, Head of Growth and Partnerships at MyWays.
MyGurukul’s placement and training programme seeks to revive traditional Indian schooling for Gen Y students in accordance with market demands through NEP, apprenticeship, and practical training. “We subsequently expanded our reach by working with these businesses as tech partners and hiring facilitators, leading to development of our suite of SaaS tools,” she added.
AI-powered Offerings
The company uses a variety of AI techniques, including Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Computer vision, to deliver personalized career guidance and development resources. For example, MyWays.ai’s Profile Analyser uses machine learning to assess a user’s skills, interests, and personality traits to identify their ideal career path. The Hiring Tests feature uses natural language processing to analyze a user’s answers to job interview questions to assess their readiness for a particular role. Moreover, the JobFinder tool uses computer vision to scan job postings and identify those that are a good fit for a user’s profile.
The Upward Climb
MyWays.ai, a promising startup, embarked on its journey in 2019 when it was incubated by IIT Delhi Design Innovation Cell. The following year, in May 2020, the company marked a significant milestone with the successful launch of its product, attracting a growing user base that reached an impressive 10,000 registered users by August. In 2021, the startup continued to strengthen its foundation by hiring a dedicated founding team. By November of that year, MyWays.ai secured a spot in the prestigious CIIE.CO Incubation program, reaffirming its potential for growth and innovation. In 2022, the company reached another major milestone when it successfully raised funding through a pre-seed round, positioning itself for further expansion and development in the years to come.
Recent Funding
“Through CIIE.CO (IIM Ahmedabad), AUM VC, Knimbus, RTAF, and other Angels, we have raised $330k so far in the previous two years,” said Ms. Gupta. Ways.ai recently secured a substantial investment in a recent seed funding round. The funding was led by Realtime Angel Fund (RTAF), an angel fund registered with SEBI and known for its early-stage investments in pioneering startups. “This investment will help MyWays expand its user base and extend offerings to become a comprehensive software solution supported by dedicated services,” she continued.
“With the soft launch of the hiring tool suite, we witnessed a four times surge in weekly product access requests. This fresh infusion of funds will help us expand the user base and extend our offerings to become a comprehensive software solution backed by dedicated services,” said CEO Samyak Jain.
Pranay Mathur, CEO of Realtime Angel Fund (RTAF) said, “We are proud to have invested in MyWays, an innovative venture steered by the visionary leaders, Samyak Jain and Tanvi Jain. Their pioneering work in the deployment of AI-based solutions is set to streamline the corporate training, hiring, and deployment process, significantly cutting down the timeframes from months to a few weeks. At this exciting juncture, we are elated to empower the future of tech talent transformation through MyWays.ai.”
Future Plans
When talking about their future plans, Ms. Gupta said, “In order to attract more and more customers, we intend to improve our sales funnel and raise the top line. We intend to expand through the introduction of our SaaS technologies, which assist in automating various hiring processes and improve recruiters’ productivity.”
“Innovation, growth, customisation, and effective solutions will be our primary concerns,” she said. According to the founders, MyWays’ goal is to lead the world in tech recruiting and training, aspiring to become the largest tech-based plug-and-play HR tool in India, and consequently allowing data-backed hiring and training for white collar jobs.
Google unveiled the Digital Futures Project, a new project focused at assisting researchers and public policy issues surrounding AI. A $20 million fund will be established by Google’s charity organization Google.org as part of the initiative to support think tanks and academic institutions working to advance AI.
The tech giant claims it wants to support independent thinkers who are researching issues such as how artificial intelligence will affect global security; how it can be used to improve the security of institutions and businesses; how AI will affect employment or how we can transition the workforce to the AI jobs of the future; and how governments can use AI to boost productivity and economic growth.
Director of Google.org Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink said, “Artificial intelligence has the potential to improve our lives and address some of society’s most complicated concerns, like avoiding disease, making cities function better, and forecasting natural disasters. However, it also raises concerns about security, the future of work, and fairness, bias, and false information.”
The Aspen Institute, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Leadership Conference Education Fund, MIT Work of the Future, R Street Institute, Institute for Security and Technology, Brookings Institution, Centre for a New American Security, and SeedAI are among the inaugural grantee organizations for the Digital Futures Project.
Google claims that the fund would help organizations all across the world, and not just those in the United States. More information on this front will be available soon. The launch of the project comes ahead of a private meeting later this week where US Congress will meet with leading AI industry leaders, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai, among others.
According to Kunal Shah, founder and CEO of financial unicorn CRED, around 90% of employees would lose their jobs as a result of artificial intelligence over the course of the next ten years. Such comments from industry leaders have sparked discussion across the industry regarding the potential impact of AI on employment.
In an interview with CNBC-TV18 at the Global Fintech Fest 2023, Shah said, “We are not aware of the risk posed by AI. I can say with confidence that 90% of people who have jobs right now may not have their jobs relevant in 10 years.”
While others contend that upskilling can keep jobs, according to Shah, individuals cannot upskill at such a rapid pace. He said, “The time to upskill is going to be a real challenge. Unless you are a very curious compounding person, everyone’s job is at risk.”
The conversations around AI replacing jobs were sparked after the release of OpenAI’s AI chatbot ChatGPT, which is based on its LLMs GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. According to a recent report from IBM, almost 40% of workers or 1.4 billion of the 3.4 billion people in the global labor force will need to reskill over the next three years as a result of automation and artificial intelligence.
Recently, the CEO of an Indian startup called Dukaan received criticism after replacing almost all of its staff with AI. According to a tweet from Co-founder and CEO Sumit Shah, the enterprise ecommerce startup has replaced 90% of its support workers with an AI chatbot.
For its data and AI platform, Watsonx, which was released in July, IBM has announced new generative AI models Granite.13b.instruct and Granite.13b.chat. The Granite series models are large language models (LLM) that support insight extraction, content creation, and summarization.
The “Decoder” architecture is used by IBM’s Granite series multi-size foundation models, which were unveiled on September 7. These models apply generative AI to language and coding applications.
For the Granite series, which should be ready this month, IBM intends to provide a thorough list of the data sources as well as a description of the data processing and filtering methods carried out to obtain training data.
For code generation on Watsonx.ai on IBM Cloud, IBM is also providing models from third parties, such as Meta’s Llama 2-chat 70 billion parameter model and the StarCoder LLM (large language model).
The enterprise-focused data lake of IBM is utilized to train the Watsonx.ai models. In order to deploy models and applications for governance, risk assessment, compliance, and bias mitigation, the company claimed to have built a training process that includes rigorous data collecting and makes use of control points.
According to IBM, every dataset that is used for training goes through a specified governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) assessment procedure because the Granite models will be made accessible to clients for customization to fit their specific applications. Governance practices are in line with IBM AI Ethics guidelines for adding data to the IBM Data Pile, said the company.
In order to ensure a human-centered approach towards employing generative AI in education, UNESCO has urged governments to enact suitable regulations and teacher training as students return to school following the summer break in some parts of the world.
To address the disruptions brought on by generative AI technologies, UNESCO produced the first-ever global Guidance on Generative AI in Education and Research.
The recommendations include seven crucial actions that governments must take in order to control generative AI and provide legal frameworks for its moral application in research and education, including the adoption of international, regional, or national privacy and data protection norms.
For the use of AI tools in the classroom, students must be at least 13 years old, and UNESCO also demands that teachers receive training. On September 7, 2023, during UNESCO’s Digital Learning Week, the guidelines were made public at the organization’s headquarters.
A UNESCO report quotes Audrey Azoulay, director-general of UNESCO, as saying that while generative AI presents enormous potential for human advancement, it can also lead to harm and prejudice. Without public support and the required government safeguards and restrictions, it cannot be incorporated into education. She thinks that this guidance will help educators and policymakers navigate AI’s potential for the benefit of students.
Yoshua Bengio, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the University of Montreal; Stuart Russel, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley; and Yann LeCun, vice president and chief AI scientist at Meta, were among the many key speakers.
On September 8, NVIDIA announced partnerships with two enormous Indian conglomerates, Reliance Industries and Tata Group. This represents a significant effort to reskill and upskill a large portion of India’s tech workforce in addition to building India’s AI infrastructure.
NVIDIA said that it would work with Reliance Industries to create an India-specific large language model with training in a variety of languages. According to a statement from Jio Platforms, the new AI cloud infrastructure will give researchers, developers, startups, scientists, and other professionals access to accelerated computing and high-speed, secure cloud networking, so that workloads can be carried out in a secure and extremely energy-efficient manner throughout India.
Jio will manage and maintain the AI cloud infrastructure, while NVIDIA will give Jio end-to-end AI supercomputer technology, including CPU, GPU, networking, and AI operating systems and frameworks for constructing the AI models.
NVIDIA has a three-pronged strategy with the Tata Group. First is developing and processing generative AI applications, and upskilling the six lakh+ employees of India’s largest IT services company, TCS, in AI. Second, collaborating with Tata Motors to deploy AI across design, styling, engineering, simulation testing, and autonomous vehicle capabilities. And third is assisting Tata Communications in the development of AI infrastructure.
N Chandrasekharan, chairman of Tata Sons said, “Our partnership with NVIDIA will democratize access to AI infrastructure, speed up the development of AI solutions, and enable at-scale talent upgradation in AI. The extensive capabilities of NVIDIA and the presence of Tata Group across industries present multiple chances for cooperation to promote India’s AI ambition.”
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday, underscoring the company’s expanding ties to the world’s budding technological superpower India. “Had an excellent meeting with Mr. Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA. We talked at length about the rich potential India offers in the world of AI,” Modi said in a Twitter post.
At the Global Digital Ecosystem Summit in Shenzhen on September 7, Chinese technology company Tencent introduced their Hunyuan artificial intelligence system, a multimodal large language model (LLM) akin to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Tencent’s foundation model enables a wide range of operations, including the generation of images, copywriting, text recognition, and customer service, to name a few. Hunyuan is designed to work as a comprehensive suite of AI tools. Key businesses like finance, public services, social media, e-commerce, transportation, games, and many more will benefit from it, according to the company.
Say hi to Hunyuan! Our large foundation model, unveiled at the Global Digital Ecosystem Summit. The platform is now available to enterprises in China, supporting a heap of functions, from image creation, copywriting, customer service and more. https://t.co/ifLfc9yCVQ#AIpic.twitter.com/wWhRfzl3km
The AI system is connected to Tencent Games, Tencent Fintech Services, Tencent Meeting, Tencent Cloud, Tencent Marketing Solutions, Tencent Docs, Weixin Search, and QQ Browser as part of Tencent’s ecosystem of applications and services.
According to Tencent, Hunyuan is purportedly comparable to GPT3 (OpenAI’s main model, around 2022) in terms of raw numbers and capacity. The LLM is among the most potent LLMs in the world with 100 billion parameters and 2 trillion tokens.
According to the company, Hunyuan benefits from having received training on a big corpus of Chinese language text. Theoretically, when it comes to operations in the Chinese language environment, this would put it ahead of models trained primarily on non-Chinese texts.
The debut occurs at a time when ties between the United States and China are still tense following the Biden administration’s imposition of an export embargo on specific categories of computer chips, including gear frequently used to train and create AI systems, in October 2022.
TIME magazine recently published its first ever list of the 100 most influential figures in the growth of artificial intelligence. Titled ‘TIME 100 AI‘, the list includes prominent CEOs, researchers, scientists, activists, academics, politicians, musicians, and many more.
Some of the well known names in the artificial intelligence industry, such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, founder of various AI initiatives Elon Musk, COO of Google DeepMind Lila Ibrahim, Chief AI Ethics Scientist at Hugging Face Margaret Mitchell, and various others are mentioned in the list.
One might think that the list has managed to include everyone who has made massive contributions or dedicated their life’s work to the lucrative field of artificial intelligence which is advancing by leaps and bounds every day. However, two prominent figures in the AI industry seem to be conspicuously missing from the list, viz. Jürgen Schmidhuber and Yoshua Bengio.
Jürgen Schmidhuber is a German computer scientist who is known for his foundational work on recurrent neural networks (RNNs), including backpropagation and long short-term memory (LSTM). Schmidhuber’s work on RNNs has had a major impact on the field of artificial intelligence. These technologies are now used in a wide variety of applications, including self-driving cars, virtual assistants, and spam filters.
Schmidhuber is also a co-founder of the company Nnaisense, which is developing artificial general intelligence (AGI). In addition to his work on RNNs, Schmidhuber has also made significant contributions to other areas of artificial intelligence, such as genetic programming, reinforcement learning, and artificial curiosity. He is a highly cited researcher and has won numerous awards for his work, which reinforces the argument of his name not being in the list.
Yoshua Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist and a professor at the University of Montreal, who is also known as one of the godfathers of AI. He earned the title along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun after winning the Turing Award as a group. He is one of the pioneers of deep learning, a type of artificial intelligence that uses neural networks to learn from data. Bengio’s work has had a major impact on the field of artificial intelligence, and he is credited with helping to make deep learning the dominant approach to AI today.
Some of Bengio’s most important contributions to artificial intelligence include the backpropagation algorithm. He also showed that deep neural networks could be used to recognize images and speech, making him another deserving candidate for the list.
In an article titled ‘How We Chose the TIME 100 Most Influential People in AI’, the magazine said, “TIME’s most knowledgeable editors and reporters spent months fielding recommendations from dozens of sources, to put together hundreds of nominations that we whittled down to the group you see today. We interviewed nearly all of the individuals on this list to get their perspective on the path of AI today.” Despite this brief explanation from the magazine, the selection process for the TIME 100 AI list comes off as rather ambiguous.
Considering all this, it still remains unclear as to why TIME chose to exclude Schmidhuber and Bengio from the list. Either the list has been subjected to personal bias or there has been a serious lack of research on the part of “TIME’s most knowledgeable editors and reporters”. It remains for only time to tell whether objections will be raised as to the credibility of the list, and if so, whether TIME will entertain any of those objections.
