Google Search Competitor Neeva is Shutting Down

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May 23, 2023

Google Search competitor Neeva shutting down — Image Credits: Neeva

Neeva, once hailed as a Google Search rival, made the decision to shut down its search engine on Saturday. The search engine was created by co-founders Vivek Raghunathan and Sridhar Ramaswamy, who also worked on making Google become a major player in the advertising industry.

While announcing the shutdown, Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan stated in a blog post that getting users to try a new search engine in the first place was actually a less difficult problem than convincing them to pay for a better experience. They said that maintaining the business has been challenging due to the addition of new users and a different economic environment.

When Neeva was introduced during the pandemic, Google Search was viewed as a potential rival. Neeva was promoted as an ad-free, privacy-focused search engine by two former Google executives. The search engine was free to use for the first three months, but after that, users had to pay $4.95 per month to use it.

After leaving Google, where he was in charge of the company’s ad division, Ramaswamy founded Neeva in 2019. He claimed that Google was overly preoccupied with sustaining growth at the time of the launch rather than user experience.

Due to the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the large language chatbot that captivated the public last year, Neeva is shutting down at a time when the core search engine business is upside down. According to the blog post, Neeva will utilize huge language models and generative AI scenarios in search moving ahead.

Over the coming weeks, Neeva.com and its consumer search offering will be shut down. The business announced that it will delete all user data and issue refunds to customers for any unused portions of their Neeva subscriptions.

Access Bank and Udacity Launches Scholarships in 2023. Apply Now.

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Sahil Pawar

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May 22, 2023

Access Bank Udacity 1000 Nanodegree program scholarships 2023 — Image Credits: Udacity

Access Bank and Udacity are awarding 1,000 Nanodegree program scholarships in 2023. Through the Advance Africa Scholarship Program, Udacity is collaborating with Access Bank, a multinational commercial bank, to empower people in Africa who are interested in learning tech-forward skills to kick-start careers.

The program will provide hands-on learning opportunities in fields such as Data Science, Product Management, Business Analytics, Programming, and Digital Marketing. Scholarship recipients will finish a portfolio of real-world projects that demonstrate expertise in highly sought-after tech skills.

The applications will be accepted from May 9, 2023 to June 13, 2023. On June 19, 2023 challenge winners will be announced. After that, the challenge course will run from June 22, 2023 to August 3, 2023. On August 13, 2023, Nanodegree winners will be announced and finally, on August 17, 2023 Nanodegree program will begin.

The scholarship will create upskilling opportunities for many and give them the skills required in the digital world. As the world gets increasingly reliant on digital tools, the need for tech-fluent talent grows as well-making this program a chance to begin a long-term career.

Anyone from 20 to 30 years of age and above is eligible to apply. Scholarship recipients must be prepared to invest about 5 to 10 hours per week during the Nanodegree programs. The program takes place completely online.

New AI Editing Tool DragGAN Lets You Photoshop With Simple Drag Controls

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Sahil Pawar

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May 22, 2023

DragGAN photoshop with simple drag controls — Image Credits: Research Paper

Anybody can now learn Photoshop without having to worry about the underlying technicalities, thanks to a new tool that harnesses the power of generative AI. DragGAN is a user-friendly application that lets anyone significantly alter photos using straightforward point-and-drag controls.

DragGAN allows users to drop a point on a picture and change the structure and entire pixels, as described in a paper by researchers from Google, the Max Planck Institute of Informatics, and the MIT CSAIL. This distinguishes it from other well-known generative AI image programmes like Dall-E and Midjourney, which, despite being able to comprehend extremely particular cues, are unable to exactly create specified poses or layouts.

GANs are still the king at latent space exploration.

DragGAN looks amazing. pic.twitter.com/KT3AEtdBJK
— Marko 🎩 (@markopolojarvi) May 19, 2023

Examples in the study include a photo of an automobile that has been altered to look like it was taken from an entirely other angle and a mountain that has been stretched to double its original height. The strength of generative AI allows the image to look realistic despite such substantial modifications.

The DragGAN research article highlights the tool’s primary advantage, which is its interface’s simplicity and intuitiveness, in addition to its amazing capabilities. Users do not need to understand the underlying technology in order to understand the functionality in a matter of seconds.

The interface focuses on giving an image a starting point and an ending point. Users can place two points at the corners of the mouth and two more points that are a little further away, for instance, to make someone smile. When you press the Start button, the mouth of the tool stretches animatedly from the start points to the end points.

In the meanwhile, generative AI fills in any gaps that may occur while maintaining realism. “Our approach can hallucinate occluded content, like the teeth inside a lion’s mouth, and can deform following the object’s rigidity, like the bending of a horse leg,” according to the research article. Additionally, DragGAN has a masking tool that enables users to draw attention to only the portions of a picture they want to change while leaving the rest alone.

Maharashtra Government Approves Operations of Universal AI University in Karjat

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Sahil Pawar

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May 21, 2023

The creation of Universal AI University, which is based in Karjat near Mumbai, has received formal approval from the Maharashtra government’s Higher and Technical Education Department.

The provision of undergraduate and graduate programmes with an emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI) will be led by this university. According to a press release, it has the distinction of being India’s first university to provide degree and specialized courses in the subject of AI.

On August 1, 2023, Universal AI University will begin its first academic year. Beginning with. The institution for AI-driven education, Universal AI University, is launching a meticulously developed curriculum with an emphasis on artificial intelligence.

According to the document, Universal AI University also aspires to produce cutting-edge courses in a variety of modern subjects, such as Liberal Arts and Humanities, International Relations and Diplomacy, Law, Environment and Sustainability, and Sports Sciences.

In January, Arundhati Bhattacharya (Salesforces’ CEO and Chairperson) and Bharat Puri (Managing Director of Pidilite Industries) unveiled the Universal AI University, claiming it to promote AI-driven skill development in the upcoming generation.

Tarun Anand, Universal Business School’s Chairman, elaborates that Universal AI University will be a management school where students will get excellent industrial training with placement assistance. Universal AI University will also have labs for students to learn and experiment with IT 4.0 technologies like augmented reality, mixed reality, IoT, blockchains, and more.

OpenAI Releases Free ChatGPT App for iOS

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Sahil Pawar

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May 20, 2023

OpenAI releases free ChatGPT app for iOS — Image Credits: Stock Images

Many people will now find it much simpler to access ChatGPT, thanks to OpenAI’s new announcement. With intentions to eventually expand to additional nations, OpenAI on Thursday announced the release of the free ChatGPT app for iOS users in the United States.

The viral chatbot tool’s features are carried over to the new ChatGPT app, which could increase its appeal. Instead of just typing out prompts, users will be able to speak to the app using their phone’s microphone. Additionally, users can sync their history between devices. “The ChatGPT app syncs conversations, supports voice input, and brings the latest model improvements to one’s fingertips,” according to the blog.

Just launched the ChatGPT iOS app! https://t.co/QC2Ec7Jshs
Now in the US, world soon. Android next.
— Mira Murati (@miramurati) May 18, 2023

ChatGPT Plus subscribers receive more features on the app, including access to GPT-4 capabilities, the newest iteration of the technology that powers the application, for $20 per month. The next release from OpenAI will be on Android, according to the CTO Mira Murati.

Six months have passed since OpenAI initially made ChatGPT available to the public online. The release spurred an immediate new AI arms race in the IT sector to create and implement systems that can produce engaging written content and pictures in response to user suggestions.

Recently, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, spoke before Congress about the dangers that AI may bring to society. He called the present surge in the field a possible “printing press moment” but warned that it also required safeguards.

CMU and Meta AI Researchers Propose Reinforcement Learning Approach HACMan

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Sahil Pawar

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May 19, 2023

CMU Meta AI Reinforcement Learning Approach HACMan — Image Credits: meta ai

A method has been put forth by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Meta AI to carry out challenging non-prehensile manipulation tasks and generalize across item geometries with flexible interactions. They offer a reinforcement learning (RL) method for non-prehensile manipulation based on point cloud data called Hybrid Actor-Critical Maps for Manipulation (HACMan).

HACMan’s first technical innovation suggests an object-centric, spatially anchored, and temporally abstracted action representation. The agent selects a set of motion parameters to guide its subsequent behavior after deciding where to make contact. The location of the contact is determined by the point cloud of the seen object, providing a firm spatial foundation for the conversation. They separate the most contact-rich portions of the action for learning, but this unintendedly results in the robot’s decisions being more abstract in terms of time.

The suggested action representation is implemented using an actor-critic RL framework, which is the second technological development produced by HACMan. Since motion parameters are specified over a continuous action space, the action representation is in a hybrid discrete-continuous action space.

Contrarily, the position of a contact is determined over a discrete action space (by selecting a contact point from the object point cloud’s points). HACMan’s critic network forecasts Q-values at each pixel over the object point cloud while the actor-network creates continuous motion parameters for each pixel.

In contrast to conventional continuous action space RL algorithms, the per-point Q-values are used to update the actor and score while selecting the contact position. They modify a conventional off-policy RL algorithm’s updating method to take into account this new hybrid action space. With random initial and target postures and different item forms, they employ HACMan to perform a 6D object pose alignment assignment.

ChatGPT Needs 500ml Water to Answer 20-50 Questions, Says Research

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Sahil Pawar

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May 19, 2023

ChatGPT 500ml water answer 20-50 questions — Image Credits: Windows Central

According to a recent study, the water use of data centers is extremely large to support the ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot, which is used by billions of people globally.

ChatGPT has attracted notice for its capacity to provide thorough responses to a variety of inquiries, when given prompts. It is the fastest-growing consumer application in history with over 100 million monthly active users, and it has also passed a few tests.

Meanwhile, experts pointed out that these successes might have been at the cost of the chatbot using a lot of water. While past research focused on the carbon footprint of these AI models, experts asserted that the large-scale water usage required to run them has “remained under the radar.”

According to recent research, a conversation with an AI chatbot in a single system may consume a “500ml bottle of water” for 20 to 50 questions. In order to conduct the research, a new framework was developed to determine how much freshwater that is pure is used for cooling servers that run AI models as well as for generating electricity to power data center servers.

Scientists gave an example to illustrate their point by stating that just for the GPT-3 training, Microsoft is estimated to have used 700,000 liters (185,000 gallons) of water, enough to build 370 BMW vehicles. Scientists noted that Google’s LaMDA is supposed to consume a “stunning” quantity of water in the range of millions of liters.

In the study, researchers stated that AI models can, and also should, take social responsibility and set an example in the collective efforts to combat the global water scarcity challenge by reducing their own water footprint. Given ChatGPT’s billions of users, they said that although a 500ml bottle of water might not seem like much, the entire cumulative water footprint for inference is still very enormous.

Meta Announces Inference Chip Project Developing In-house

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Sahil Pawar

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May 19, 2023

Meta announces inference chip project — Image Credits: Meta

On Thursday, Meta Platforms revealed fresh information about the initiatives it was pursuing to improve the suitability of its data centers for supporting artificial intelligence work, including a proprietary chip family that it claimed to be developing in-house.

In a series of blog posts, the owner of Facebook and Instagram claimed that as part of the Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) programme it designed a first-generation chip in 2020. The programme aimed to increase the effectiveness of the recommendations models it uses to serve ads and other content in news feeds.

In a prior story from Reuters, it was stated that the corporation was already developing a replacement and had no plans to extensively deploy its first in-house AI processor. The initial MTIA chip was presented in the blog articles as a teaching tool.

“From this initial programme, we have learned invaluable lessons that we are incorporating into our roadmap,” the statement read.

According to the posts, the initial MTIA chip was only focused on the AI technique known as inference, in which computers trained on vast quantities of data make decisions about whether to display, for example, a dancing video or a cat meme as the next item in a user’s feed.

A Meta representative declined to comment on deployment schedules or go into further detail about the company’s aspirations to create chips that could also train the models.

Telecom Giant BT To Cut 55,000 Jobs With Up To A Fifth Replaced By AI

By

Sahil Pawar

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May 18, 2023

Telecom giant BT to cut 55,000 jobs — Image Credits: BT

Due to cost-cutting measures, telecom giant BT plans to eliminate up to 55,000 positions by the end of the decade, primarily in the UK.

As labor is replaced by technology like artificial intelligence, up to a fifth of those cuts will be made in customer support. Staff and contractors are also included in the headcount reduction from the existing workforce of 130,000.

“Whenever you get new technologies, you can get big changes,” stated CEO Philip Jansen. According to him, “generative AI” tools like ChatGPT, which can compose screenplays, poems, essays, and computer code in a manner akin to a human, “gives us confidence we can go even further.”

Even while BT has stated that by the end of the 2020s, it will have a “much smaller workforce,” Mr. Jansen continued, “new technologies drive new jobs.”

The leading internet and mobile provider in the UK, BT, is actively expanding its fiber network as it transitions away from copper. The business said that once the work was over, fewer employees would be required to create and maintain its networks.

In addition, it claimed that fewer workers will be required to serve clients in the future due to newer, more effective technology, such as artificial intelligence.

Meta to Face Privacy Fine Over Facebook Data Transfer from EU to US

By

Sahil Pawar

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May 18, 2023

Meta privacy fine Facebook data transfer EU US — Image Credits: Meta

According to two persons familiar with the situation, Meta Platforms is likely to receive a record-breaking European Union privacy penalties for failing to heed a top EU court’s warning about the transfer of Facebook user data from EU to US servers.

According to the sources, the fine will be larger than the previous record 746 million euros ($821.20 million) charged to Amazon.

Meta declined to comment. Also, the requests for comment from the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) and the European Commission were not immediately answered.

Because they were concerned that American spy agencies would gain access to the data, EU regulators under the direction of Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner Helen Dixon have been working to finalize a prohibition on the legal mechanism used by Facebook to transfer European user data.

They had stated in April that the Irish DPC had a month to issue a ruling banning Facebook’s transatlantic data flows. Mid-May may see the implementation of the ban.

A data transfer agreement between the EU and the US was declared unconstitutional in 2020 by the highest court in Europe, citing privacy concerns. A prohibition on the method Meta employs to send data from Europe to the US could compel it to halt Facebook services in Europe, Meta said last year.