Thursday, November 13, 2025
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Accenture Acquires AWS Premier Partner Nextira

Accenture Acquires AWS Premier Partner Nextira
Image Credits: Nextira

AWS Premier Partner Nextira, which uses AWS to provide clients with predictive analytics, cloud-native innovation, and immersive experiences, has been acquired by Accenture

In addition to assisting clients in using the complete spectrum of cloud tools and capabilities, these services and solutions will strengthen Accenture Cloud First’s strong set of technical capabilities. The deal’s financial details were not made public. 

The almost 70 workers of Nextira, an Austin, Texas-based company founded in 2008, will join the Accenture AWS Business Group, a group of more than 20,000 certified specialists committed to maximizing enterprise-wide transformation at speed and scale.

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With the use of cutting-edge engineering expertise, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics, Nextira creates cloud-based solutions and services that let customers plan, create, roll out, and improve their high-performance computing environments. Additionally, clients have access to a virtual environment to effortlessly create and render 3D models utilizing the most recent rendering technologies, thanks to Nextira’s unique Studio in the Cloud solution on AWS.

The cloud has essentially replaced the operating system for many businesses, providing all operations required for growth, innovation, and success. The rapidly expanding number of applications and services built on AWS will be able to immediately incorporate AI capabilities because of Nextira’s platform engineering experience and AI and machine learning services.

“We will combine Nextira’s AI, machine learning, and data and analytics capabilities with Accenture’s approach to use modern data platforms on cloud,” said Karthik Narain, worldwide head for Accenture Cloud First. “With the help of these, our clients will be able to develop new applications and services, offer cutting-edge consumer and employee experiences, and support the expansion of their upcoming product and market lines.”

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AI-controlled US Air Force Drone Kills Its Operator During Simulated Test

AI-controlled US air force drone kills its operator during simulated test
Image Credits: The Gurdian

An official has revealed that in a simulated test conducted by the US military, an AI-controlled air force drone killed its pilot to stop him from interfering with the drone’s efforts to complete its task. The US military has embraced AI, and an F-16 fighter jet was recently piloted using AI.

During the Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit in London in May, Colonel Tucker Hamilton, the US air force’s chief of AI test and operations, claimed that AI employed highly unexpected strategies to achieve its goal in the simulated test.

Hamilton detailed a mock test in which an artificial intelligence-powered drone was instructed to destroy the air defense systems of an opponent and targeted anyone who got in the way of the command.

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“The system began to realize that even if they were able to identify the threat, the human operator would occasionally instruct it to eliminate that threat even though doing so would increase its score. What did it do then? The operator was killed by it,” he said. According to a blog post, he said that the reason the operator was killed was because they were preventing the machine from achieving its goal.

Outside of the simulation, no actual harm was done to any real people. The test, according to Hamilton, an experimental fighter test pilot, illustrates that “you cannot have a conversation about artificial intelligence, intelligence, machine learning, autonomy if you are not going to talk about ethics and AI.” He warned against over-reliance on AI. 

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Three New Generative Al Short Courses Available for Free for Limited Time by DeepLearning.AI

DeepLearning.AI introduces 3 new Generative Al short courses
Image Credits: TechCrunch

DeepLearning.AI has introduced three new Generative Al short courses to take generative AI skills to the next level. Andrew Ng announced the free courses in a post on LinkedIn. 

The course called Building Systems with the ChatGPT API will be taught by OpenAl’s Isa Fulford and Andrew Ng. Learners will go beyond individual prompts, and learn to build complex applications that use multiple API calls to an LLM. Also they will learn to evaluate an LLM’s outputs for safety and accuracy, and drive iterative improvements. 

Second course titled LangChain for LLM Application Development will be taught by LangChain’s CEO Harrison Chase and Andrew Ng together. Students will learn about LangChain, a powerful open-source tool for building applications using LLMs, including memory for chatbots, question answering over a doc, and an LLM agent that can decide what action to take next. 

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Third one, How Diffusion Models Work, will be taught by Lamini’s CEO Sharon Zhou. It will teach the technical details of how diffusion models work, which power Midjourney, DALL E, and Stable Diffusion. Learners will also have at the end working code to generate their own video game sprites in a Jupyter notebook.

All of these courses are free for a limited time, and each of them can be completed in around 1-1.5 hours. All of these courses require a basic knowledge of Python. In the case of How Diffusion Models Work course, Python, Tensorflow, or Pytorch knowledge is required. 

Recently, DeepLearning.AI collaborated with OpenAI to offer a course ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers which is designed to help developers effectively utilize LLMs. This course reflects the latest understanding of best practices for using prompts for the latest LLM models.

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Researchers Introduce CoT Collection, an Instruction Dataset with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Researchers Introduce CoT Collection
Image Credits: Stock Images

The CoT Collection, a new dataset created for instruction tuning, was unveiled by a research team recently. 1.88 million CoT rationales from 1,060 tasks are included in the collection. The CoT Collection dataset and the trained models are accessible through the team’s GitHub repository.

The team has carefully considered the trustworthiness, logical coherence, and informativeness of the CoT Collection in comparison to human-authored CoT rationales. The C2F2 model has also been introduced, which was developed by continuously adjusting Flan-T5 LMs with 3B and 11B parameters using the CoT Collection. It has been shown that using the CoT Collection for fine-tuning led to better zero-shot CoT performance on hidden problems.

How effectively C2F2 works in situations where learning happens in a small number of instances, or few-shot learning, is discussed in the research paper. On domain-specific datasets from the legal and medical fields, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) on C2F2 outperforms direct fine-tuning using FLAN-T5. The benefits of utilizing CoT arguments to enhance task generalization and encourage future study have also been highlighted by the authors.

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In order to determine the degree of improvement following the use of the CoT Collection, the researchers assessed the average zero-shot accuracy on 27 datasets of the BIG-Bench-Hard benchmark. The 3B and 11B LMs’ accuracy improved by +4.34% and +2.44%, respectively. The few-shot learning capabilities of the language models were also enhanced by the CoT instruction modification. This resulted in improvements of +2.97% and +2.37% on four domain-specific tasks as compared to Flan-T5 LMs (3B and 11B), respectively.

In comparison to earlier CoT datasets, the CoT Collection contains over 52 times as many CoT justifications and roughly 177 times as many jobs. The CoT Collection dataset, in conclusion, demonstrates the efficacy of CoT justifications for enhancing task generalization in Language Models under zero-shot and few-shot learning conditions. It overcomes the difficulties encountered when applying CoT reasoning in more compact language models.

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Air India Introduces AI-based Upskilling Platform Gurukul.AI for its Employees

Air India AI-based upskilling platform Gurukul.Ai
Image Credits: Air India

In an effort to promote continuous learning within the company, Air India has introduced a cutting-edge learning hub. Known as Gurukul.AI, the hub has been created with Vihaan.AI. 

Through an evaluation of each employee’s job functions, existing abilities, and proficiencies, the airline’s five-year transformation plan intends to establish customized upskilling paths for each employee. According to the airline, the platform incorporates competency frameworks that are tied to key organizational roles and enables access to pertinent courses.

According to the platform’s description, its main goal is to cultivate state-of-the-art, world-class capabilities within Air India, improving employee productivity and skill sets to the highest standards possible. Emerging technologies within the portal will allow employees to view their progress via automated analytics and assist them in performance management. 

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In keeping with it, the platform includes game-like components and hyper-personalization, such as a function that may “talk” to the students. The airline said that doing this would inspire staff to advance, reach milestones, and unlock achievements, ultimately fostering a sense of accomplishment.

In addition, Gurukul.AI offers a collection of more than 70,000 cutting-edge learning resources, such as microlearning, mobile learning resources that are readily accessible, and modules that are engaging and video-based. 

The organization believes that features like a leader board built into the platform, along with a learning wallet and chances to earn rewards, would encourage active engagement in team learning and serve as an incentive for employees to improve their knowledge and skills.

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Nvidia Temporarily Becomes $1 Trillion Company after AI Frenzy

Nvidia temporarily becomes a $1 trillion company
Image Credits: Nvidia

On Tuesday, a new member joined the exclusive group of US firms valued at more than $1 trillion, at least for a short time. Nvidia, a chip manufacturer, momentarily joined the group when its share price rose by more than 5% before falling.

Last week, after the company predicted “surging demand” as a result of developments in artificial intelligence, shares had already increased by more than 25%. The other publicly traded US companies valued more than $1 trillion (£800 billion) are Apple, Saudi Aramco, Amazon, Alphabet, PetroChina, Tesla, Meta, and Microsoft. According to sources, Nvidia is the 9th company worldwide till now to hit $1 trillion market value. 

Nvidia was first recognised for producing the kind of computer chips that handle visuals, particularly for video games, when it was founded in 1993. Long before the AI revolution, the company’s co-founder Jensen Huang gambled by investing in new Nvidia chip capability. The long game seems to have paid off.

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According to one assessment, it has a monopoly on 95% of the machine learning business, and its hardware currently powers the majority of AI applications. The chatbot ChatGPT, whose release last year ignited the AI craze, was trained using 10,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) huddled up on a Microsoft supercomputer.

Nvidia’s stock price has more than doubled over the last year as investors think the company will profit when AI ushers in the next wave of technological advancements. The California-based company’s shares concluded Tuesday’s New York trading at roughly $401, or up about 3%, leaving it with a market value of more than $990 billion.

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Italy Plans State-backed Funds to Support Local AI Startups

Italy state-backed funds support local AI startups
Image Credits: CED

Italy is considering creating a state-backed fund to expand its domestic market in an effort to support local AI businesses. In order to encourage startup investments in AI, the Italian government intends to establish an investment fund supported by the state lender Cass Depositi e Prestiti (CDP).

The fund will first start with a small sum initially. It is budgeted for an initial amount of 150 million euros or 165 million dollars, according to a statement to Reuters. 

“This will promote study, research, and programming in AI in Italy,” according to Cabinet Undersecretary Alessio Butti. Despite the fact that a ban on ChatGPT in March may have caused some to change their minds on AI, it makes natural that the government would wish to encourage the creation of native AI.

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The restriction caused a stir throughout the European Union, drawing attention from a number of member states as AI quickly grows ahead of legislative requirements. In light of this, it would appear that the Italian government is worried about the same.

Butti claims that their administration is attempting to strike a delicate balance between the development of AI and human rights. “The government is looking at developments in artificial intelligence, an area where a balance between human rights and technological advancement must be struck,” he added.

It is obvious that the Italian government is trying its best to provide domestic AI businesses a competitive edge. According to Butti, “We aim to increase the independence of Italian industry and cultivate our own national capacity to develop expertise and research in such a strategic sector.”

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UpCodes Launches AI-based Research Assistant for Building Codes Called Copilot

UpCodes AI-based research assistant building codes called Copilot
Image Credits: UpCodes

UpCodes is unveiling a new AI-based tool Copilot that will further streamline the world of writing code. Copilot, based on GPT-4, serves as a research assistant by responding to complex code questions and providing explanations with links to pertinent code sections.

UpCodes’ primary goal prior to the release of Copilot was to create its own database of codes, digitize regulations that were frequently only available in printed reference materials, and make them simple to examine. It contains 160,000 local modifications in addition to five million code parts. Since codes are continually changing, UpCodes releases an average of 7,000 changes per month.

Copilot contains a searchable database and additional tools, like its code check feature, that are intended to make code compliance simpler, but because of the complicated regulations, these are also difficult to use at first. Copilot wants to make the process of finding new codes incredibly simple. Copilot responds to these inquiries and assists users by listing the code source from which it derives the same so they can examine the actual code for themselves.

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For more than seven years, UpCodes has helped both professionals in the industry and amateurs better grasp the complicated world of building codes. On its website, you may explore a library of laws from every state and take advantage of tools like a “spell check” that highlights coding mistakes. 

Additionally, Upcodes disclosed that it has closed a $3.5 million Series A round of funding with the intention of developing Copilot and expanding the platform’s AI-based features. UpCodes has now raised $7.6 million in total, including prior funding and a Pre-Series A that was announced in March 2021.

Building Ventures, a VC firm specializing in construction and real estate tech, took the lead in the most recent round. CapitalX, Bragiel Bros., and the co-founders of PlanGrid are other participants.

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University of Hong Kong Introduces Text2NeRF, an AI Framework that Turns Text Descriptions into 3D Scenes

University of Hong Kong Introduces Text2NeRF
Image Credits: arxiv vanity

University of Hong Kong has introduced Text2NeRF, a text-driven 3D scene synthesis system that combines the Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) and the best characteristics of a trained text-to-image diffusion model. 

Researchers picked NeRF as the 3D representation because of its superiority in modeling fine-grained and lifelike characteristics in a variety of circumstances, which may significantly reduce the artifacts generated by a triangular mesh. They replaced older methods like DreamFusion, which used semantic priors to govern the 3D creation, with finer-grained picture priors inferred from the diffusion model. 

Because of this, Text2NeRF can generate realistic texture and delicate geometric shapes in 3D scenes. A pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model is used as the image-level prior, and they constrain the NeRF optimization from scratch without the requirement for additional 3D supervision or multiview training data. 

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Priors for depth and content are used to optimize the NeRF representation’s parameters. To be more explicit, they build a text-related picture as the content prior using a diffusion model and a monocular depth estimation approach to offer the geometric prior of the constructed scene. In order to guarantee consistency across numerous viewpoints, they also recommend a progressive inpainting and updating technique (PIU) for the unique view synthesis of the 3D scene. 

Text2NeRF developed a variety of 3D settings, including artistic, indoor, and outdoor scenes, due to the method’s universality. Text2NeRF can also create 360-degree views and is not limited by the view range. Their Text2NeRF performs qualitatively and statistically better than the preceding approaches, according to numerous tests. 

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Odisha Launches Free ‘Odisha for AI’ and ‘AI for Youth’ Programs with Intel

Odisha Chief Minister Odisha for AI AI for Youth initiative
Image Credits: The Hindu

Odisha for Artificial Intelligence‘ and ‘Artificial Intelligence for Youth‘ programs were introduced by Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Monday in the state capital. International technology company Intel has been enlisted by the State Government for the project. The programme would be put into action in Bhubaneswar, Puri, and Cuttack during the initial phase.

According to Tusharkanti Behera, the state’s minister of electronics and information technology, this Artificial Intelligence project will elevate Odisha to the top tier of Indian states. On the official government website, Intel offers a free 4-hour AI training called Odisha for AI. In addition, it will be available to everyone in Odisha. AI for Youth is for students below 18 in all 2000 schools that fall under the 5-T initiative and Odisha Adarsha Vidyalayas. It will be available to everyone for free in Bhubaneswar, Cuttack, and Puri.

Speaking at the event, the Chief Minister said artificial intelligence has the power to drastically change the way we live and advance society. He said that one of the core elements of the government’s 5-T initiative, technology-driven transformation, has been the focus of his government. He pledged that the effort will increase the general public’s digital literacy and familiarize them with the most cutting-edge technology of the next generation. He continued, “It will also establish an environment that supports research, innovation, and application across sectors.

He praised the State Electronics and IT Department and Intel India for their cooperation and urged all government agencies to benefit from these initiatives and train their employees so they can lead the revolution in artificial intelligence. He expressed optimism that the effort would use artificial intelligence to improve society and the lives of citizens while also fostering economic growth and transforming governance.

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In order to unleash the boundless potential of youth and create a future where artificial intelligence is a tool for the empowerment of citizens and inclusive progress of the state, the CM urged everyone to embrace this new chapter. Moreover, Tusharkanti Behera emphasized how technology is reshaping Odisha in a number of different areas.

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