Why Governments Trust Oracle

Why Governments Trust Oracle

In August, The Ministry of Education announced its selection of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to revamp the Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing (DIKSHA), the country’s national education technology platform. Moreover, After shifting to Oracle in 2021, Credit Guarantee Fund Trust for Micro and Small Enterprises (CGTMSE) has benefited approximately 12 million borrowers, including 21% women-led entrepreneurs and 92% first-time borrowers.

In 2021, the Bangladesh government selected Oracle Cloud as its partner for hosting all of its cloud services. Not to forget the US government and the military, which were one of the first customers of OCI. The list goes on and on. For 47 years, Oracle has stood as a beacon of trust for governments worldwide. Why is that the case?

The reason: Oracle’s commitment towards data security, which is unlike other providers. Chris Chelliah, senior vice president, technology and customer strategy, Oracle JAPAC told AIM that the reason that the governments across the world trust OCI with their data is because of what the company has embedded in its DNA – openness in the cloud and secure encryption of data.

Cloud should be open

“The number one reason that governments choose us is because they don’t like handcuffs, they want openness” Chelliah explains. Larry Ellison, CTO of Oracle has taken this commitment of openness to the next level. “Cloud should be open,” he said, talking about its partnership with Microsoft, and eventually partnering with other cloud providers, namely AWS and Google.

One of the things that OCI boasts is that it has the most support for hybrid cloud strategies. Customers can run entire OCI regions in their own data centres or move the entire on-premise data to the public cloud. The interconnection with Microsoft Azure with low-latency makes it even better since many governments are trying to integrate generative AI in some or the other way. For the same reason, NVIDIA AI is now also on the OCI marketplace.

Nearly half a century ago, the Oracle database boasted the unique ability to run on any hardware platform, be it IBM, HPI, Sun, Fujitsu, or others. The same idea is also carried over to its cloud services. “This is the tenant of Oracle. If you look at what we’ve done historically, it’s a good indicator of what we’re going to do in the future,” said Chelliah.

Oracle database is the only database that runs on other hyperscale clouds. Chelliah said, “Think about it – if you run your data in the Amazon or Google cloud today, those databases don’t run anywhere else, they are proprietary only to that cloud.” Chelliah explains that it is beneficial for the governments that their data is not locked into one cloud. “They don’t want to be held hostage,” he said.

From its inception, the company has thrived on offering alternatives, ensuring that customers are never locked into a particular technology. This commitment is particularly crucial for governments, who seek openness and reject the idea of being held hostage by any technology provider. “Once they trust us as a platform, they know we’re not gonna lock them in,” said Chelliah.

Secure encryption

Oracle’s commitment to safeguarding data stands out as a testament to its reliability. Recognising that data is akin to gold, Chelliah said that Oracle’s DNA revolves around protecting this precious resource. Oracle ensures physical separation between customer data and the cloud operator or software provider, ensuring that even when managing data, they lack visibility into its contents.

“Even if I’m managing your data, I don’t see your data. I don’t actually see the contents. I see some bits and bytes that are encrypted by you, and only you can decrypt it,” he said.

Cloud providers have been often accused of data leakage and selling of customer data, Oracle’s business model is distinct. Chelliah takes a dig at Oracle’s competitors, “they live and die with it. Their revenues are based on taking data from the public domain. Their whole company and the whole purpose is based on aggregating data and selling it back as marketing data.”

“You can’t put unencrypted data in Oracle Cloud. We won’t let you.” He highlighted how Oracle has taken any data and sold it to anyone, nor for advertisements. “Oracle’s competitors can never claim to do that for the public sector,” exclaimed Chelliah.

Oracle doesn’t lock in customers, and it doesn’t rely on selling data. “The reason for that is simple – we know that the data is gold. And our DNA is protecting the data for our customers. This is all that breeds trust with the governments,” concluded Chelliah.

The post Why Governments Trust Oracle appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Top 8 Free Generative AI Courses 2023

Ever since the debut of ChatGPT powered by GPT-3.5 in December, there has been an emergence of several significant language models, including LLaMA, Llama 2, PaLM 2, GPT-4, Alpaca, Vicuna-13B, and more. Excitingly, this trend is poised to continue expanding. To fully harness the immense potential of generative AI and create customised models, these complimentary training programs will prove invaluable.

Generative AI for Everyone

Andrew Ng’s “Generative AI for Everyone,” is an in-depth course on generative AI. It covers its capabilities and boundaries, including practical exercises for everyday use, prompt engineering, and advanced AI techniques. The course focuses on real-world applications, showing generative AI’s common uses and allowing hands-on experience. It also discusses AI’s effect on business and society, preparing students to develop effective AI strategies and understand its real-world implications.

Introduction to LLMs

Google, which is currently building the next LLM Gemini, also provides a series of free courses on master generative AI. In this course, Google provides an overview of LLMs, and their definitions and explains potential applications.

It also delves into the concept of prompt engineering, which can improve the performance of LLMs. Additionally, the module introduces various Google tools that can assist in the development of personalised generative AI applications.

LLMs Application through Production

This course by Databricks is designed for individuals with an intermediate-level proficiency in Python and a working understanding of machine learning and deep learning. It focuses on the practical application of LLMs through various frameworks.

Participants will learn to build LLM-focused applications using popular libraries like Hugging Face and LangChain. The curriculum covers key concepts, including the distinctions between pre-training, fine-tuning, and prompt engineering. Industry experts, including Matei Zaharia (CTO Databricks and Associate Professor of CS at Stanford) and Harrison Chase (Co-Founder and CEO of LangChain), provide insightful lectures.

By the course’s conclusion, participants will have constructed an end-to-end LLM workflow, prepared for production deployment. This course is available for free audit, which means that you can access the course materials without paying any fee. However, if you want to access a managed compute environment for course labs, graded exercises, and a certificate, you need to pay a nominal fee.

Introduction to AI with Python

The introductory free online course “CS50’s Introduction to AI with Python” offered by Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences covers fundamental concepts and algorithms in AI and ML using Python. It spans seven weeks, with a flexible time commitment of 10-30 hours per week and is self-paced.

Participants will explore various topics, including graph search algorithms, reinforcement learning, machine learning, and principles of artificial intelligence. The instructors, professors David J. Malan and Brian Yu, both from Harvard University, guide students through hands-on projects to reinforce theoretical knowledge.

ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers

Again created by DeepLearning.AI, this free course is in partnership with OpenAI and is taught by Isa Fulford (OpenAI) and Andrew Ng. It covers the essentials of prompt engineering for developers, from beginner to advanced levels. Participants will learn to effectively use LLMs, specifically using the OpenAI API, enabling them to swiftly develop innovative applications.

The course explains LLM functionality, offers prompt engineering best practices, and demonstrates the practical application of LLM APIs in various tasks such as summarising, inferring, transforming text, and expanding content.

It also imparts two key principles for crafting effective prompts, systematic prompt engineering, and the creation of custom chatbots. The content is beginner-friendly, requiring only basic Python knowledge, while also catering to advanced machine learning engineers seeking cutting-edge insights into prompt engineering and LLM usage.

Career Essentials in Generative AI

Microsoft and LinkedIn have come up with a free course titled “Career Essentials in Generative AI,” which serves as an introductory resource on generative AI and its practical applications. The course aims to furnish learners with fundamental skills essential for success in the generative AI domain.

It covers key areas such as an overview of AI tools, an exploration of generative AI models and their functioning, differentiation between search engines and reasoning engines within the context of generative AI, using Microsoft Bing Chat for efficient work processes, a preview of Microsoft 365 Copilot, and a segment on the ethical considerations inherent in the generative AI creation and deployment process.

The free course is structured to provide a comprehensive understanding of the subject matter, encompassing both technical aspects and ethical dimensions.

ChatGPT Prompt Book

The ChatGPT Prompt Book consists of over 300 unique writing prompts generated by the ChatGPT language model, designed for creative thinking and finding new ideas and perspectives. The prompts cover a diverse range of subjects and are adaptable to various writing styles and genres, making them useful for writers of all levels of experience, from beginners to professionals.

Generative AI Foundations on AWS

The Generative AI Foundations on AWS is an eight hour course on YouTube offering practical insights and hands-on guidance for pre-training, fine-tuning, and deploying foundational models on AWS. It emphasises breaking down theory, mathematics, and abstract concepts, providing hands-on exercises to build practical intuition. The course progressively explores complex generative AI techniques, enabling participants to understand, design, and apply their models effectively.

Topics include the recap of foundation models, selecting the right model for specific use cases, pre-training new models, scaling laws for the model, dataset, and compute sizes, preparing training datasets on AWS at scale, fine-tuning models, and leveraging reinforcement learning with human feedback.

Read more: Harish Sivaramakrishnan: The Creative Pulse of CRED

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Foxconn to Steer The Electronic Wheel 

The shift towards electric vehicles (EVs) has been vividly evident in the last decade. Car companies had been working on clean energy long before Elon Musk from Tesla brought attention to it. But in the recent past, every tech company, whether it’s the phone developers or chipmaker Foxconn, has been trying to put their own model on the road.

The Taiwanese electronics giant announced last week that it is taking a gamble on the EV business.

Diversification opportunities are ample for Foxconn and the company is going all-in on cars next. The Taiwanese company has already set up and plans further expansion through several automotive production sites across the globe — including India.

The Desi Connection

India boasts millions of EV owners, with motorbikes, scooters, and rickshaws constituting over 90% of the auto-motives. As per a Bloomberg report, the sales rose to 75,000 in the nine months through September — that’s more than double the volume during the same period in 2022.

A report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) revealed that in 2022, more than half of India’s three-wheeler registrations were electric-powered.

One of the reasons for the company to embark on an affair with India can be the rise of demand for passenger EVs in the country.

The surge in the EV market can be attributed, in part, to a government initiative, a $1.3 billion scheme aimed at prompting EV manufacturing within the country while offering discounts to customers. Moreover, charging points across the nation have increased tenfold, reported Elizabeth Connolly, an analyst specializing in energy technology and transport at the IEA.

As Foxconn charts a course to become an assembler of electricity powered vehicles in India it has long been indecisive about its relationship with India. The chipmaker company in India has a track record of waging bid wars, misleading state governments and denying deals after governments officially announcing a deal with the chip company.

Machine Hopping

The second reason for Foxconn to shift from making cars to iPhones is the dip in market for smartphones in recent years. It seems that the company plans to diversify its business.

Similar to Foxconn, Apple has also been building an autonomous EV — dubbed Titan — for almost a decade which finally may be on the way. But thanks to its founder Steve Jobs, the company has long maintained its mysterious personality. Hence, no information whatsoever about the project has made it to mainstream media yet.

The last insider information on the internet dates back to almost a year ago which is highly unlikely for similar significant projects in limbo. Interestingly, in a little over two decades, Apple has applied for 248 car-related patents and even hired Lamborghini’s top executive, Luigi Taraborrelli, to help them design their product in the car space.

While Apple has been regularly launching refreshed versions of its slate products, the company’s car project has an uncertain future. Prominent Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says Apple’s car plans have “lost all visibility,” and the Cupertino-based tech company must look at alternate strategies to make headways into a highly competitive automotive space.

As the single largest manufacturer of electronics ambitiously forges in the market, news from Apple should also be expected some time soon. But Foxconn’s leap forward in the EV sector, there are a lot of ‘ifs’ involved. Even though the Apple-Foxconn relationship has long stood the tides of the tech industry, Foxconn’ has a registered history of making plans and backing out at the last moment.

“Foxconn has the reputation for being one of the most opaque companies in an opaque world,” Lawrence Tabak, the author of Foxconned: Imaginary Jobs, Bulldozed Homes, and the Sacking of Local Government described Foxconn’s habit of backing out of deals. “It is very normal for them to make stagey announcements that involve politicians, business executives, pomp, and circumstance purely based on speculation,” Tabak added.

As of now, all that the stakeholders can do is to keep their fingers crossed and hope it does not turn out to be one of the company’s usual false promises to steer the electronic wheel.

The post Foxconn to Steer The Electronic Wheel appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

The OpenAI of Transcription

Microsoft recently introduced Copilot in Teams meetings, a feature that summarises key discussion points in real-time. It identifies speakers, notes agreements and disagreements, and suggests action items. Similarly, Zoom launched Zoom AI Companion, allowing users to ask specific questions about meeting content.

But, in a world of Copilots, how are companies like Otter.ai, Descript and Fireflies.ai making a dent? Our recent interactions with these auto transcription companies indicate that they are clearly not shying away from competition with Windows Copilot or Zoom AI Companion.

“Our focus is building Fireflies for teams, enterprises, whether you’re a two person team or a 2,000 person organisation. We wanted to be really focused on your core workflows, rather than building a consumer product,” said Fireflies.ai chief Krish Ramineni, in an exclusive interview with AIM.

Fireflies has taken notes for over 10 million people across 200,000 organisations. People inside 70% of Fortune 500 have invited Fireflies to take notes for them,” he added. Meanwhile, Otter.ai has transcribed about 1 billion meetings till date.

Going beyond transcribing meeting notes

Fireflies.ai told AIM that it is planning to come up with its own AI App Store soon, similar to something like OpenAI’s GPT Store, which was announced recently at DevDay, OpenAI’s first developer conference.

“It’s already live, but we haven’t announced our own AI AppStore,” said Ramineni.

Simply put, users would be able to build many other apps on top of Fireflies, which means that AI notetaker is just one app of their conversational data platform. “You can build an app that listens to a conversation and then creates a blog post,” he added, in addition to creating follow-up emails based on meeting discussions.

“We’re focusing on conversational data, and like leveraging a lot of the OpenAI technology and API’s to power these apps that customers are going to be able to use or build for themselves.” he added.

Interestingly, Fireflies.ai earlier this year introduced AskFred which is integrated with the tech that also powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT. AskFred lets users simply ask questions about what happened during the meeting and receive answers in a conversational style.

“We also have a mobile app that is in beta right now. So that you can now record in-person meetings, not just video conferencing calls,” he said, explaining that the goal of the company is to capture every conversation for users’ convenience.

Fireflies vs the world

“The beauty of Fireflies is that it’s able to work across all of these platforms without any sort of change,” said Ramineni. He believes that although Microsoft Copilot and some of these other platforms will be out there doing rudimentary stuff like transcription. He feels the market has moved far beyond transcription at this point in time. “It’s about the workflow. It’s about the integrations. It’s about the use cases,” he added.

Ramineni told AIM that Fireflies.ai is enterprise-friendly. They have launched private storage, allowing people to own their data and store it on their own servers in their designated locations. “We don’t train our customer conversations by default, we have a special policy in place with OpenAI, which says you cannot retain or train on any of our data,” he added.

Fireflies is not alone in this space, there are tons of new startups and companies mushrooming using GPT-wrapper, and there is a need for strong differentiation. Citing Otter.ai, Ramineni said it is catering to the most common denominator—voice notes and transcription, and they’re going to see a lot more commoditisation disruption in the space.

“I think, at the end of the day, it’s just like when cloud storage came out in the past, or when mobile apps came out, basic functionality is going to get wiped out and you need to have something that’s more than a basic wrapper, or a basic function,” said Ramineni, adding that SaaS companies need to build real solutions that are more than just a shiny object or hook.

Another biggest USP for fireflies is that it is backed by prominent players in the tech industry. “We work very closely with OpenAI and our investors are also investors in OpenAI, so we have had an opportunity to go really deep on that partnership and bring some of that core technology to customers today,” said Ramineni.

Khosla Ventures‘ investments in both Fireflies.ai and OpenAI enabled Fireflies to integrate ChatGPT’s technology into their platform over the past year.

The post The OpenAI of Transcription appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Why India is Qualcomm’s Next Big Bet

Qualcomm

As the 5G race intensifies globally, Qualcomm, a key supplier of 5G chips for Apple, is grappling with geopolitical tensions, regulatory challenges, and the need to adapt to a rapidly evolving technological landscape in the Chinese ecosystem. Moreover, Qualcomm’s future in China, a market contributing over 60% of its global revenue, remains uncertain as the company, once a dominant player, now faces intense competition from Chinese firms like Huawei and ZTE.

In the face of new challenges, the fabless chip maker standing at a crossroads is now eyeing India as the next destination for its technology proliferation.

The country has emerged as one of the fastest-growing 5G markets with total users standing at over 100 million just after a year of the technology rollout. Experts also believe that 5G will add $1 trillion to the global economy by 2035 and can add $150 billion to the Indian economy between 2025-40.

Exploring New Frontiers

In several interviews Savi Soin, Qualcomm’s newly-appointed India President, disclosed the company’s plans to replicate its successful China model in India. Qualcomm is all set to support the burgeoning local semiconductor ecosystem by licensing technologies to Indian firms and startups contingent upon the establishment of semiconductor fabrication units in the country.

“Our CEO has said that if fabs or Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Testing (OSATs) come to India, we are going to bring business here,” said Soin.

“Any conversation we’re having with partners or government is that we bring tech and volumes. We’re very interested just like we did in China, in bringing the technology. We have a programme on mentorship (for startups), and we also bring scale,” he added.

Furthermore, Qualcomm is exploring the Indian government’s Rs 76,000 crore design-linked incentive (DLI) and Rs 80,000 crore production-linked incentive (PLI) schemes, which are aimed at developing the chip-making ecosystem in the country.

Qualcomm’s President and CEO, Cristiano R Amon, seems to reiterate the same and had earlier said, “If our suppliers are motivated to build and they have the right incentives to build in India, we’re going to use their fab.” Amon highlighted the importance of cooperation between the US, Europe, and India to build a geographically diversified and resilient semiconductor supply chain.

The talks are advanced as Qualcomm is also exploring a partnership with Tata Group and the Indian government to potentially package its latest AI PC chip locally. The collaboration aims to leverage Indian manufacturing facilities for chip packaging.

Qualcomm’s CFO, Akash Palkhiwala, highlighted the significant opportunity in chip packaging and emphasised the close working relationship with Tata Group. The company recently introduced the redesigned Snapdragon Elite X chip optimised for AI tasks, set to be available in laptops next year. The company also introduced Snapdragon Seamless, a cross-platform technology enabling integration across Android, Windows, and Snapdragon devices.

Palkhiwala has disclosed the company’s intentions to lead the 6G market in India in collaboration with major Indian telecom operators Airtel and Jio. Palkhiwala highlighted discussions on spectrum allocation and network deployment requirements for 6G implementation. While currently focused on 5G deployment, Qualcomm’s proactive initiatives reflect a strategic approach to the future of telecommunications in India.

These plans seem to align with the fact that the country has seen an explosion in investment to bolster chip fabrication infrastructure. Firms like Micron are already constructing a $2.75 billion semiconductor factory in Gujarat, while Foxconn’s $8 billion investment in India is expected to increase fivefold in the coming three years.

By working closely with Indian OEMs, Qualcomm aims to help them fast-track the integration of telematics, digital cockpits, entertainment systems, and more, mirroring the rapid developments seen in China.

A Shift of Focus

Qualcomm’s search for a new market to reduce their dependence on China has been a long time coming.

Recently, the company has been under constant pressure due to challenges, from fending off a hostile takeover by Broadcomm to the blocked acquisition of NXP, which are not merely collateral damage from the US-China trade war.

Instead, this reflects a larger battle between companies and China’s rising technological ambitions. Companies like Foxconn, Micron, NVIDIA amongst others have also tried to diversify their business to other geographies including India.

While Jensen’s search for new markets to re-route supply after restrictions on its A800 led to India and a meeting with PM Modi and other local business leaders—Micron sees new fabrication opportunities in the country and so does Apple supplier and Qualcomm counterpart Foxconn.

The post Why India is Qualcomm’s Next Big Bet appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Elon Musk Wants to Open Source Grok

Elon Musk’s xAI To Launch AI Model

In the recent podcast with Lex Fridman, Elon Musk suggested that he likes the idea of open source AI. “I am generally in favour of open sourcing, like biassed towards open sourcing.”

Musk’s xAI has recently released Grok, its own based chatbot. It took just four months for the team to build it. He is also planning to double the compute at xAI every month. Currently, Grok is trained on 8,000 NVIDIA A100 GPUs.

On the contrary, Sam Altman just built Grok with a single prompt on GPT Builder, taking a dig at Musk’s dream project.

GPTs can save a lot of effort: pic.twitter.com/VFIrGzPuMN

— Sam Altman (@sama) November 10, 2023

Musk further adds that the whole idea of him founding OpenAI was about open sourcing AI. He highlighted his discussion with Larry Page, the former CEO of Google, who was Musk’s friend then. “I sat in his house and talked about AI safety, and Larry did not care about AI safety at all.”

The discussions with Larry were the reasons that Musk founded OpenAI. “At one point Larry called me a ‘speciest’, for being pro-human,” Musk added. He mocked Page for being on the team of robots.

“The breaking of the friendship was because of OpenAI,” Musk said when Fridman asked him if he can be friends again with Page. “The key moment was recruiting Ilya Sutskever. He is brilliant, a good human, and has a great heart” he added about the co-founder and chief scientist at OpenAI.

Recruiting Sutskever was a battle between Musk and Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind. “Ilya went back and forth between staying at Google or joining OpenAI. Finally, he agreed to join OpenAI. That was the toughest recruiting battle we have ever had.” Musk said that Sutskever is the linchpin of OpenAI.

Musk said that he was crucial in recruiting a lot of other people at OpenAI and providing almost all the funding in the beginning, around $40 million dollars.

“The ‘open’ in OpenAI is all about open source,” said Musk, highlighting that the company has become a closed source for maximum profit company, which according to him is “not good karma.”

Only solution is Musk buying back OpenAI.

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NVIDIA RTX 4080 Super Might be Announced at CES 2024

NVIDIA RTX 4080 Super Might be Announced at CES 2024

NVIDIA has commenced the distribution of press invitations for a “special address” scheduled at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January. The timing of these invitations aligns closely with circulating rumours hinting at the potential debut of NVIDIA’s RTX 40-series Super cards during CES 2024, including models such as the RTX 4070 Super and RTX 4080 Super.

Despite the absence of specific details of GeForce or information on the keynote presenter on the January 8th event, it is anticipated to be a focal point for significant announcements. Taking place amidst a flurry of press conferences at CES, NVIDIA event is poised to deliver crucial updates.

Read: NVIDIA RTX Brings Alan Wake 2 to Life

Hardware leaks preceding the event have already disclosed specifications of the RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 Super cards. Notably, the RTX 4080 Super is rumoured to boast 20GB of VRAM, an increase from the current 16GB featured in standard RTX 4080 models.

Both the speculated RTX 4070 and RTX 4080 Super cards are expected to exhibit a higher memory bus compared to their existing counterparts.

The leaks were started by a serial hardware leaker called Kopite7kmi on X.

CES

— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) November 5, 2023

If NVIDIA indeed unveils the new Super cards for the RTX 40-series, it will mark the first instance of Super versions for NVIDIA GPUs since the 20-series in 2019. The company did not release the Super series in its RTX 30 series.

The industry is now eagerly awaiting details on the pricing of these GPUs and the potential performance enhancements compared to the current models.

The post NVIDIA RTX 4080 Super Might be Announced at CES 2024 appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Customisable GPTs Now Live on ChatGPT Plus 

OpenAI chief Sam Altman announced that GPTs are now live for all ChatGPT+ subscribers. GPTs are essentially customised chatbots that anyone, regardless of their technical expertise, can create using ‘Natural Language’ which is very much a part of Conversational AI.

GPTs are now live for all ChatGPT+ subscribers!

— Sam Altman (@sama) November 9, 2023

Furthermore, once users create their GPT, they can share them publicly on the upcoming GPT Store, set to launch later this month. The GPT Store is going to be pretty much similar to the Google Play Store or Apple’s App Store.

The GPT Store will feature creations by verified builders, making it easy for others to discover and utilise these tailored AI agents. GPTs in the store will be searchable, and they may climb leaderboards based on their utility and popularity. Additionally, creators will have the opportunity to earn money based on the number of people using their GPTs.

At DevDay, Altman provided a brief example of how to approach building your own GPT using natural language on GPT Builder. He demonstrated this with the assistance of a GPT named ‘Startup Mentor’ which offers advice to startup founders

Furthermore, OpenAI has enabled developers to connect GPTs to the real world by defining custom actions through APIs. These actions allow GPTs to integrate external data sources, interact with databases, manage emails, or assist with e-commerce tasks. The flexibility provided by these actions empowers users to design AI agents that cater to specific needs, both at home and in business settings.

For enterprise customers, OpenAI has introduced internal-only GPTs, enabling businesses to create customised versions of ChatGPT tailored to specific departments, use cases, or proprietary datasets. Companies like Amgen, Bain, and Square have already leveraged internal GPTs to streamline various processes, such as crafting marketing materials, supporting customer inquiries, and aiding software engineers in their onboarding process.

The post Customisable GPTs Now Live on ChatGPT Plus appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Watch out: Generative AI will level up cyber attacks, according to new Google report

Cybersecurity threat illustration

As technology gets smarter with developments such as generative AI, so do cybersecurity attacks. Google's new cybersecurity forecast reveals the rise of AI brings new threats you should be aware of.

On Wednesday, Google launched its Google Cloud Cybersecurity Forecast 2024, a report put together through a collaboration with numerous Google Cloud security teams that deep dives into the cyber landscape for the upcoming year.

Also: ChatGPT down for you yesterday? OpenAI says DDoS attack was to blame

The report found that generative AI and large language models (LLMs) will be utilized in various cyber attacks such as phishing, SMS, and other social engineering operations with the purpose of making content and material, such as voice and video, appear more legitimate.

For example, dead giveaways of phishing attacks such as misspellings grammar errors, and lack of cultural context will be more challenging to spot when generative AI is employed since it does a great job at mimicking natural language.

In other instances, attackers can feed an LLM legitimate content and generate a modified version that suits the attacker's goals but keeps the same style of the original input.

Also: Australia to investigate Optus outage that impacted millions

The report also predicts how LLMs and other generative AI tools that are offered as a paid service to help attackers deploy their attacks more efficiently with less effort involved will be increasingly developed.

However, malicious AI or LLMs won't even be entirely necessary since using generative AI to create content, such as drafting an invoice reminder, isn't in itself malicious, but it can be exploited by attackers to target victims for their own goals.

For instance, ZDNET has previously covered how scammers are using AI to impersonate the voices of family members or friends in need to swindle money from them.

Another potential generative AI threat includes information operations. Simply by using AI prompts, attackers can use generative AI models to create fake news, fake phone calls, and deepfake photos and videos.

Also: What are passkeys? Experience the life-changing magic of going passwordless

According to the report, these operations could enter the mainstream news cycle. The scalability of these operations could reduce the public trust in news and online information, to the point where everyone becomes more skeptical or stops trusting the news they consume.

"This could make it increasingly difficult for businesses and governments to engage with their audiences in the near future," says the report.

Although attackers are using AI to make their attacks stronger, cyber defenders can also leverage the technology to counter with more advanced defenses.

Also: 3 ways Microsoft's new Secure Future Initiative aims to tackle growing cyber threats

"AI is already providing a tremendous advantage for our cyber defenders, enabling them to improve capabilities, reduce toil, and better protect against threats," said Phil Venables, CISO, Google Cloud on AI. "We expect these capabilities and benefits to surge in 2024 as the defenders own the technology and thus direct its development with specific use cases in mind."

Some use cases of generative AI for defenders include leveraging it to synthesize large amounts of data, yield actionable detections, and take action at a quicker speed.

Artificial Intelligence

Google’s Performance Max gets new AI tools to help automate ad creation even further

Google's Performance Max smart shopping ad platform has been integrating AI to enhance the campaign creation process since 2021. Now, Google is stepping up Performance Max's offerings a notch with new generative AI features.

Following Google I/O in May, the company announced how generative AI would be implemented in its ads platform to help the campaign creation process, and today, those features are beginning to be rolled out to users in beta.

Also: How to change the task overdue sound on Google Calendar so you never miss a deadline

Google received customer feedback that creating and scaling assets is one of the hardest parts of building a campaign. As a result, Google released a solution that will combine the user's knowledge and expertise, performance data, and Google AI.

With Performance Max, users can now have AI-generated campaign assets such as headlines, descriptions, and images in seconds right in the platform with just a few prompts.

"For businesses with fewer creative resources, you can bring your creative vision to life in a few prompts and generate high-quality assets in seconds to build out your campaign's assets from scratch," said Google in the blog post.

Google reassures users that its AI will never create two identical images and that all images generated will be unique to the specific business or client. Users ultimately have full control of which assets make the final campaign.

Also: 5 ways Google can help you score deals this holiday season

If users would prefer to stay away from the generated image, they can also use it to spruce up some of their own assets with new AI-powered image-editing capabilities in Google Ads. This tool is beneficial for brands to test new variations of their typical hero images, according to Google.

For example, the demo showcases a brand using an AI-powered image generator to overlay the model on a different background, changing it from an open field to one that fits the holiday season by using a prompt that generated different festive options, as seen below.

Google shares that all accounts will have access to image editing by early 2024 through the Google Ads asset library, and shareable previews for all assets are coming soon.

Also: Google urges EU regulators to make Apple open up iMessage

Performance Max's AI-powered asset generation will be available as a beta to all advertisers in the US by the end of the year.

To ensure responsible AI use, all images created with generative AI in Google Ads, including Performance Max, will have an identification designating that they were AI-generated. Google is using SynthID to watermark the images invisibly and include open standard metadata that indicates the use of AI in creating the image.