Google.org Introduces Digital Futures Project with $20M Grant for Responsible AI

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September 12, 2023

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.

90% People Can Lose Their Jobs to AI within 10 Years, says CRED CEO

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Sahil Pawar

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September 12, 2023

90% people lose jobs AI 10 years Cred CEO — Image Credits: CNBC

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.

IBM Introduces Granite Series LLM Models for Watsonx Platform

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Sahil Pawar

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September 11, 2023

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.

UNESCO Urges Regulations for Use of AI in Schools

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Sahil Pawar

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September 11, 2023

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.

NVIDIA Partners with Reliance and Tata to Boost AI Technology in India

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Sahil Pawar

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September 11, 2023

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.

Tencent Introduces AI Large Language Model Hunyuan

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Sahil Pawar

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September 9, 2023

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 #AI pic.twitter.com/wWhRfzl3km
— Tencent 腾讯 (@TencentGlobal) September 7, 2023

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 Notably Omits Schmidhuber and Bengio from List of 100 Most Influential Figures in AI

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Sahil Pawar

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September 8, 2023

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.

TIME's new cover: The 100 most influential people in AI https://t.co/I0yZ5V1gMu pic.twitter.com/ZrKIZq2veV
— TIME (@TIME) September 7, 2023

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.

TIME Reveals List of World’s Most Influential People in AI

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Sahil Pawar

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September 8, 2023

TIME magazine has revealed its first ever TIME100 AI list, a compilation honoring the 100 most significant individuals influencing the development of artificial intelligence. Some of the most well-known figures in the field of artificial intelligence are at the top of this list, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Demis Hassabis.

The global cover of the 2023 TIME100 AI edition, illustrated by Neil Jamieson, featured 28 remarkable members of the list. Among them are Demis Hassabis, the visionary founder of Google DeepMind, Dario and Daniela Amodei, the dynamic team behind Anthropic, and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, a driving force behind AI breakthroughs.

TIME's new cover: The 100 most influential people in AI https://t.co/I0yZ5V1gMu pic.twitter.com/ZrKIZq2veV
— TIME (@TIME) September 7, 2023

Time said, “In order to compile the list, TIME’s editors and writers asked dozens of professional sources, including industry experts, for nominations and recommendations. The end result is a list of 100 leaders, innovators, thinkers, and pioneers who are reshaping the AI sphere today.”

TIME100 AI listed Rumman Chowdhury, CEO & Co-Founder of Humane Intelligence, Lila Ibrahim, COO of Google DeepMind, Sandra Rivera, General Manager of the Data Centre and AI Group at Intel, and Margaret Mitchell, Chief AI Ethics Scientist at Hugging Face as among the women and nonbinary business leaders who have made outstanding contributions to AI.

The list includes notable politicians and political figures in addition to tech titans. Representatives Anna Eshoo and Ted Lieu from the US, Ian Hogarth from the UK’s AI Foundation Model Taskforce, and Audrey Tang from Taiwan are important individuals who are influencing the regulatory environment for AI.

Additionally, the TIME100 AI list recognises academics, researchers, and activists who are profoundly committed to AI bias, ethics, and safety. Yoshua Bengio, Yoshua Tegmark, Emily M. Bender, Kate Crawford, and Timnit Gebru are a few of the other influential voices advancing critical discussions on AI’s effects.

AI Chip Startup d-Matrix Raises $110 Million in Series B Funding

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Sahil Pawar

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September 8, 2023

d-Matrix raises $110 million Series B funding — Image Credits: d-Matrix

At a time when many chip startups are finding it difficult to secure capital, the Silicon Valley-based artificial intelligence semiconductor startup d-Matrix has raised $110 million from investors that include Microsoft Corp.

The news comes as Nvidia‘s monopoly on the AI chip market as a result of a formidable combination of hardware and software has scared off potential investors in certain companies. Microsoft and Palo Alto venture capital firm Playground Global were also a part of the Series B fundraising round, which was headed by Temasek of Singapore.

According to CEO Sid Sheth, the Santa Clara firm began its fundraising campaign about a year ago. The company has already raised $44 million, but did not disclose the valuation.

D-Matrix creates chips that are well-suited to power generative AI applications like ChatGPT. The business incorporates digital in-memory compute into the chips’ design so that AI computer programmes can operate more effectively. The company’s chip technology consumes less energy when processing the data needed to generate AI responses.

D-Matrix differentiates itself from Nvidia in part because it does not compete with Nvidia by developing technology that trains large AI models. Instead, it focuses on the “inference” portion of AI processing. According to Sheth, when the chip debuts early next year, Microsoft has committed to testing it for its own purposes.

D-Matrix forecasts sales of less than $10 million this year, primarily from customers that buy chips for testing. The company anticipates revenue of between $70 million and $75 million.

OpenAI to Host First-ever Developer Conference in San Francisco

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Sahil Pawar

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September 7, 2023

OpenAI first-ever developer conference San Francisco

OpenAI has announced that it will hold its inaugural developer conference in San Francisco on November 6. A keynote lecture and breakout sessions delivered by members of OpenAI’s technical staff will be part of the daylong OpenAI DevDay event.

During the event, the OpenAI team will be joined by hundreds of developers from around the world to showcase new tools and share ideas. “We’re looking forward to showing our latest work to enable developers to build new things,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

DevDay will primarily take place in person, however some events, including the keynote, will be streamed live. According to OpenAI, registration will start in the upcoming weeks and attendance is anticipated to be upto “hundreds” of engineers.

OpenAI argues in the blog post that its developer community is sizable enough to justify the developer conference. The startup’s wide range of generative AI tools, such as its large language model GPT-4, AI chatbot ChatGPT, text-to-image model DALL-E 2, and automatic speech recognition model Whisper, are used by over 2 million developers.

It is unlikely that OpenAI’s upcoming flagship generative AI model, GPT-5, will be revealed. CEO Sam Altman of OpenAI said in April that the company was not currently training GPT-5 and wouldn’t for some time. But there’s a chance one will find out more about what OpenAI has in store for Global Illumination, the AI design firm it acquired in August and get a status of the release of GPT-4’s image recognition features.