Рубрика: AI

Mira Murati, the chief technology officer of OpenAI, during a recent interview at the AI Everywhere event at Dartmouth College, said that OpenAI gives the government early access to new AI models, and they have been in favour of more regulation.

“We’ve been advocating for more regulation on the frontier models, which will have these amazing capabilities and also have a downside because of misuse. We’ve been very open with policymakers and working with regulators on that,” she said.

Mira Murati says OpenAI gives the government early access to new AI models and they have been advocating for more regulation of frontier models pic.twitter.com/akubHLq28M

— Tsarathustra (@tsarnick) June 20, 2024

The discussion, moderated by Dartmouth trustee Jeffrey Blackburn, covered both the potential benefits and the inherent challenges of AI advancements.

“In terms of safety, security, and the societal aspects of this work, I think these things are not an afterthought. It can’t be that you sort of develop the technology and then you have to figure out how to deal with these issues,” said Murati.

“You have to build them alongside the technology and actually in a deeply embedded way to get it right. And for capabilities and safety, they’re actually not separate domains. They go hand in hand,” she added.

Notably, OpenAI recently appointed retired US Army General Paul M Nakasone to its board of directors. As a priority, Nakasone will join the board’s Safety and Security Committee, which is responsible for making recommendations to the board on critical safety and security decisions for all OpenAI projects and operations.

Murati’s optimism about AI is in the belief that smarter AI can lead to safer and more beneficial outcomes. She emphasised that the future of AI lies in creating systems that are not only more intelligent but also more secure. This dual focus on capability and safety is crucial as AI becomes increasingly integrated into various aspects of society.

Murati’s Perspective

According to Murati, OpenAI prioritises safety, usability, and reducing biases, aiming to democratise creativity and free up humans for higher-level tasks.

In a recent post on X, she said that to make sure these technologies are developed and used in a way that does the most good and the least harm, they work closely with red-teaming experts from early stages of research.

“We also use an iterative approach, gradually releasing tools and carefully studying how they impact the real world to guide future development. Protecting and strengthening the most valuable aspects of creativity is fundamental to our human experience,” she said.

This is a positive step towards ensuring the responsible use of AI. This allows governments to better understand the capabilities and limitations of the technology, and develop appropriate regulations to minimise potential risks.

Meanwhile, OpenAI’s former chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, recently started his own company called Safe Superintelligence. He left the company in May 2024 amid reports of tension with CEO Sam Altman over AGI safety and the rapid pace of advancements at OpenAI.

After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI. The company’s trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial under the leadership of @sama, @gdb, @miramurati and now, under the…

— Ilya Sutskever (@ilyasut) May 14, 2024

Seemingly in response to this, and for safety concerns, OpenAI formed its Safety and Security Committee led by directors Bret Taylor (Chair), Adam D’Angelo, Nicole Seligman, and Altman.

This committee recommends critical safety and security decisions for OpenAI projects and operations as the company trains its next frontier model, which is expected to advance AGI capabilities.

Exploring AI’s Potential

When asked how OpenAI’s safety work aligns with the development, and if she believes it falls within their domain or requires external regulation, Murati candidly replied, “My perspective on this is that this is our technology. So it’s our responsibility [to see] how it’s used.”

She added that it’s also a shared responsibility of the society, civil society, government, content makers, media, and so on, to figure out how it’s used. “But in order to make it a shared responsibility, you need to bring people along. You need to give them access, and tools to understand and to provide guardrails,” she said.

Furthermore, the discussion highlighted the transformative impact of ChatGPT in bringing AI into the public consciousness. By providing people with a tangible, interactive experience of AI, ChatGPT has simplified the technology and made its capabilities and risks more comprehensible.

Moreover, when people are aware of the potential and limitations of AI, they are better equipped to advocate for appropriate uses and safeguards.

There is a need for a comprehensive and collaborative approach to AI regulation and safety. By focusing on risk minimisation, involving governments and fostering public awareness, we can better prepare for the transformative impact of AI on society.

This balanced approach can help ensure that AI is developed and used responsibly, benefiting individuals, businesses, and society as a whole.

The post OpenAI Doesn’t Need Safety Lessons from Safe Superintelligence appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Using the review site Yelp is a great way to learn important details about a business, such as its sustainability, inclusivity, and accessibility practices. Now, Yelp is adding new attributes and more artificial intelligence (AI) to make its offerings more holistic.

On Tuesday, Yelp announced it has teamed up with Disability:IN, the American Association of People with Disabilities, Open to All, and The Arc to launch new accessibility features ahead of Disability Pride Month in July. These features include new searchable accessibility attributes that let you find businesses that meet your needs more easily and eight new attributes geared toward mobility, hearing, and vision accessibility requirements.

Also: ChatGPT vs. ChatGPT Plus: Is a paid subscription still worth it?

The new attributes designate whether a business has parking near the entrance, an ADA-compliant main entrance, an ADA-compliant restroom, no steps or stairs, at least one ASL-proficient staff member, closed captioning on TVs, braille menus, and QR code menus.

You can find the attributes under the new accessibility section in a business's info tab. To make connecting to the right business even easier, you can search for the attributes by typing in queries such as "QR code menus available" to find organizations that have adopted that attribute.

Business owners can add those attributes to their Yelp page for free by editing the Business Information section in their Yelp for Business account. You can also share insights about the attributes through "Update the community" questions on Yelp business pages.

Yelp is also updating its app and website to be more inclusive. For example, the company has added AI-powered alternative text descriptions for photos, allowing screen readers to provide better photo details to visually impaired Yelp users. This feature is available on the desktop now and will roll out to other platforms later.

The company has also introduced improved color contrast to make content more readable to users with low vision or colorblindness, and it has enhanced the overall screen reader experience.

Also: Can governments turn AI safety talk into action?

Lastly, to help businesses access the things they need to create more inclusive spaces, Yelp has added a new Accessibility Resource Hub with information, tools, tips, and more.

Artificial Intelligence

In May, when OpenAI first demoed an eerily realistic, nearly real-time “advanced voice mode” for its AI-powered chatbot platform ChatGPT, the company said that the feature would roll out to paying ChatGPT users within a few weeks. Months later, OpenAI says that it needs more time. In a post on OpenAI’s official Discord server, OpenAI […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Every major upheaval in business or technology sends ripples through the job market. When mergers and acquisitions and junk bonds were hot in the '80s and '90s, corporate finance was the sparkly new job to get after college. Consequently, droves of students brushed up on the subject with a class or two.

Similarly, when the internet boom descended upon us, undergraduates and MBAs pored over case studies of Amazon and eBay with the hope of impressing prospective dot-com employers.

Flash forward to now. Considering the rapid increase in businesses embracing generative AI and large language models, this is indubitably the dawn of the AI era.

There is an emerging consensus that AI will be crucial in core business applications ranging from customer acquisitions and interactions to dynamic or real-time pricing. Sixty-five percent of US executives surveyed by consultancy KPMG in 2024 said AI will have "an extremely high impact" on their organization in the next few years.

Also: What's stranger than AI? These new job roles — with titles that are so TBD

"I think young people need to know that AI is going to touch absolutely everything, and you do need to have some degree of AI competence in almost any field," Julia Pollack, chief economist at ZipRecruiter, told ZDNET. "Across all sorts of business functions, you're seeing a greater need for business analytics."

Still, these are early days filled with a large degree of ambiguity — as is common at the beginning of all transformative epochs — around how exactly to fuse this technology into businesses.

For prospective entrants into the job market, that ambiguity can have bigger repercussions.

Not knowing how companies are reacting to this tectonic shift, especially when it comes to hiring, adds a layer of uncertainty and anxiety on top of the usual worries about landing a job and paying off student loans.

Who needs AI?

Nick Drydakis, a labor economist at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK and director of the Centre for Inclusive Societies and Economies, took a stab at figuring out what kind of background enables a candidate to be successful in landing an interview and then a job in today's turbulent job market.

For a study published in May in the Oxford Economic Papers, Drydakis conducted a research experiment where he had two groups of students with identical backgrounds apply for the same jobs across 10 industries by submitting cover letters and resumes.

The students — 1,360 men and 1,316 women — were not exactly slouches. They all had achieved a 2:1 (upper second-class) grade in mathematics, statistics, and econometrics, which is a high distinction in the UK.

The only difference between the groups was that half of the students had taken an AI module, which consisted of lectures and computer-based seminars. Topics included AI's role in strategy and decision-making, AI tools for the economy, machine learning and its role in econometric approaches, challenges and biases in AI tools, and ethical and legal considerations related to AI.

The other half had no AI experience.

Also: How AI lies, cheats, and grovels to succeed — and what we need to do about it

To gauge the level of employer interest in students with AI experience, Drydakis ensured the cohort that took the AI module included a paragraph highlighting the course content in a few lines.

Over the next five months, Drydakis' research team sent job openings to each participant that matched their course of study and tracked the ensuing correspondence.

Findings on the AI factor

The experiment's results are an eye-opener on how industry is adapting to this new landscape and a powerful indicator of how college graduates should begin looking at their course content, irrespective of their field of study.

Fifty-four percent of male applicants and 50% of female applicants with AI "capital"— a term that Drydakis coined to reflect "knowledge, skills, and capabilities related to AI technologies which could boost individuals' productivity, employment, and earnings" — received interview callbacks versus only 28% and 32%, respectively, who did not take the AI module.

Also: AI isn't necessarily taking your job: 12 reasons to ease those worries

Most stunningly, the research revealed that those with the AI module were 36% more likely to be asked to interview in large firms where more hiring takes place.

Plus, male job aspirants with the AI module listed on their resume were shortlisted for jobs that had a 12% higher starting salary on average than those who didn't. For women, the corresponding figure was 13%.

Every job sector will be impacted in some fashion.

"The finance industry, leveraging AI for financial modeling, fraud detection, and algorithmic trading, also demands AI expertise," Drydakis told ZDNET via email. "Marketing and e-commerce businesses utilize AI for customer targeting, personalized marketing, and sales optimization. Additionally, the manufacturing and logistics sectors use AI for automation, predictive maintenance, and supply chain optimization."

Also: From AI trainers to ethicists: AI may obsolete some jobs but generate new ones

Students or professionals who aren't aiming for roles in a data-crunching industry — and therefore don't believe they need any AI arrows in their quivers — could come to regret it.

"Increasing AI skills among non-experts is considered as important as training AI experts," Drydakis said. "The former group will most likely use AI or collaborate and coexist with it."

So, for college students planning their courses of study, learning about AI, regardless of major, could help them gain an edge and land that first job.

Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI recently acquired Rockset, a data analytics company co-founded in 2016 by former Meta engineers Dhruba Borthakur and Venkat Venkataramani, for $105 million (INR 905 crore). This acquisition aims to leverage Rockset’s advanced analytics to enhance OpenAI’s retrieval infrastructure.

Venkataramani, a graduate of NIT Tiruchirappalli, played a crucial role in scaling Meta’s data infrastructure to handle billions of queries per second with high reliability and contributed to the development of technologies like TAO, Dragon, Memcache, McRouter, MySQL, RocksDB, HBase, MongoRocks, and MyRocks.

Dhruba Borthakur and Venkat Venkataramani founded ROCKSET was acquired by OpenAI reportedly at $105 million (Rs 905 crore). ROCKSET was founded in 2016 by the above Facebook engineers. It is analytics startup, to power retrieval infrastructure across products. Dhruva is CTO. pic.twitter.com/AbdGi0EB5M

— Mrinal Talukdar (@mrinaltalukdar8) June 22, 2024

“AI has the opportunity to transform how people and organisations leverage their own data. That’s why we’ve acquired Rockset, a leading real-time analytics database that provides world-class data indexing and querying capabilities,” said OpenAI in its blog post.

“Rockset’s infrastructure empowers companies to transform their data into actionable intelligence. We’re excited to bring these benefits to our customers by integrating Rockset’s foundation into OpenAI products,” said OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap.

AI Agents To Lead the Way

Rockset will help OpenAI build AI agents capable of taking actions on the users’ behalf. “In the future, assistants will become agents to whom you will delegate certain data access rights and permissions to act on your behalf. It might start with simple tasks like booking a meeting or making a reservation, and then they will quickly get better from there,” posted Rockset founder Venkatramani on LinkedIn a month ago.

This is similar to what Microsoft chief Mustafa Suleyman recently said about GPT-6’s ability to take actions, which is most likely to come out in two years.

OpenAI CTO Mira Murati said in an interview that the next generation of GPT will be ‘PhD-level’ compared to GPT-3 (toddler) and GPT-4 (high school). She also said the next model will be released in a year and a half.

Rockset, based in San Mateo, California, employs approximately 88 people. The company has secured $109 million in funding from prominent investors, including Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Glynn Capital.

This funding, through a Series B, implies a $300-$500 million valuation. Despite substantial backing over eight years, the business has struggled to gain significant traction, with public figures indicating $10-20 million in revenue.

But why Rockset?

Borthakur said there are two sets of companies: one builds the latest AI models and the second comprises traditional data companies that store enterprise data to power business analytics and applications.

“And they (AI companies) want AI models to be able to leverage the data to power intelligent assistants and agents. So, the AI world and the data world are converging towards the same end goal,” he said

Rockset announced that it will join OpenAI to enhance the retrieval infrastructure for OpenAI’s product suite. “We will help OpenAI solve the complex database challenges that AI applications face at a massive scale,” the post said.

OPENAI acquired Rockset, but what makes it so special ??? pic.twitter.com/aeNj8JM1Jg

— Jaydeep (@_jaydeepkarale) June 22, 2024

Rockset’s main product features real-time indexing, SQL-based search, and analytics capabilities that can process data from sources such as Kafka, MongoDB, and DynamoDB.

Its technology is optimised for quick search, filtering, aggregations, and joins, making it an excellent tool for applications that need real-time data processing and analytics.

Integrating SQL with advanced search capabilities will allow OpenAI to streamline its data workflows, reducing the complexity of data management and improving overall efficiency. This is particularly beneficial for research and development, where quick and accurate data analysis is essential.

OpenAI Loves RAG

Moreover, Rockset augments the capabilities of LLMs through Rockset’s retrieval augmented generation (RAG) feature. This would be a nice addition for OpenAI enterprise customers who want to use models with their proprietary data and aim to reduce hallucination.

By incorporating their data, customers can enhance LLMs to provide contextual and more accurate results. This integration expands the possibilities of LLMs in various applications, from content generation to information retrieval.

Rockset uses a converged indexing approach that combines row, columnar, and search indexes, enabling fast searches across multiple data types and formats. Currently, no other database company (MongoDB, Elasticsearch, or Amazon Redshift), offers this specific service.

While Elasticsearch excels in keyword search and Weaviate and Pinecone specialise in vector search, Rockset merges these capabilities to provide both precise keyword matches and semantically rich search results.

Rockset’s hybrid vector search combines traditional keyword search with vector search, allowing for more relevant and context-aware search results. This hybrid approach is particularly beneficial for OpenAI, which deals with massive volumes of unstructured data, including text, images, and audio.

Unlike some other solutions that require complex infrastructure management, Rockset offers a fully managed, serverless architecture. This reduces operational overhead and simplifies scalability. It eliminates the need for manual infrastructure management, allowing OpenAI to scale its operations seamlessly and efficiently.

This scalability is crucial for handling the vast amounts of data required for training large AI models, ensuring that OpenAI can continue to push the boundaries of AI research without being hindered by infrastructure limitations.

OpenAI is Not Alone

Databricks acquired MosaicML in 2024 for $1.3 billion to enhance its capabilities in generative AI and LLMs. Most recently, Databricks acquired Tabular as well to leverage Apache Iceberg, a leading open-source table format for data lakes.

Last year, ThoughtSpot, an AI-powered analytics platform last valued at $4.5 billion, acquired Mode Analytics, a business intelligence startup, for $200 million in cash and stock.

Recently, IBM acquired HashiCorp in a deal valued at $6.4 billion, aiming to expand its portfolio of cloud-based software products to capitalise on the growing demand for AI-powered solutions. The deal will be closed by the end of 2024.

HashiCorp’s technology will complement IBM subsidiary Red Hat, IBM AI platform Watsonx, the vendor’s consulting arm, and its offerings in data security and IT automation.The trend of acquisition of data and AI companies is likely to continue in 2024 as well.

The post How These Indian Startup Founders will Help OpenAI Build GPT-6 appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Equinix, a data center co-location giant, today announced its expansion into Chennai with its first International Business Exchange (IBX) data center, called CN1.

The facility is designed to support the needs of enterprises and hyperscalers, including AI deployments, to help businesses capitalise on the digital opportunity in India and accelerate the country’s goal of becoming a $1 trillion digital economy by 2027-2028.

With an initial investment of $65 million, CN1 spreads over nearly 6 acres of land at Chennai’s thriving tech landscape in Siruseri and is expected to open in Q4 2024.

The data center will be connected to Equinix’s three existing high-performance data centers in Mumbai, providing robust digital infrastructure and ecosystems to drive innovation and digital transformation in India.

“We are witnessing India’s growing prominence as a pivotal data center hub in South Asia, driven by strong interest from major global players looking to anchor and expand their operations here, along with Indian enterprises expanding their digital infrastructure to support the growth of one of the fastest growing economies in the world,” said Manoj Paul, Managing Director, Equinix India.

CN1 will serve as a hub for startups, enterprises, network and cloud service providers, fostering a vibrant environment for groundbreaking initiatives. This move will elevate Chennai’s status on the global stage and unlock new opportunities for international customers seeking to capitalise on the city’s strong tech ecosystem.

Chennai presents customers with a dual-city redundancy option, enhancing resilience and ensuring uninterrupted business operations. The city showcases vigorous infrastructure development, attracting investment in the digital sector, bolstered by proactive government initiatives and a thriving business ecosystem.

CN1 will be strategically located in the SIPCOT land in Siruseri, approximately 28 km from the bustling Central Business District and near anticipated submarine cable landing sites. The four-story data center will ultimately provide a total capacity of 4,950 cabinets when fully built, with the first phase scheduled to open in Q4 2024, offering 850 cabinets.

Equinix’s commitment to expanding its presence in India is further demonstrated by the recent opening of the MB4 IBX data center in Mumbai, adding 350 cabinets, and the announcement of MB3, set to open in Q4 2024 with an initial capacity of over 1,375 cabinets. The company hosts over 300 companies in Mumbai, including around 200 network providers, 5 internet exchanges, and the densest cloud ecosystem in India with on-ramps to 8 cloud service providers.

In line with Equinix’s global goal to achieve climate neutrality by 2030, the company’s facilities in India, including CN1 and MB3, are expected to be 100% covered by renewables. In 2023, Equinix achieved an impressive 96% renewable energy coverage across its worldwide operations.

Globally, Equinix operates 260 data centers across 71 metros in 33 countries. In the Asia-Pacific region, the company currently has 56 data centers in key metros across 8 countries, solidifying its position as a leading digital infrastructure provider.

The addition of the Chennai data center extends Equinix’s ecosystem to customers in a new key metro area, complementing its Mumbai campus. This expansion supports India’s rapid digital transformation and growing prominence as a strategic data center hub in South Asia.

The post Equinix to Launch First IBX Data Center CN1 in Chennai appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Every major upheaval in business or technology sends ripples through the job market. When mergers and acquisitions and junk bonds were hot in the '80s and '90s, corporate finance was the sparkly new job to get after college. Consequently, droves of students brushed up on the subject with a class or two.

Similarly, when the internet boom descended upon us, undergraduates and MBAs pored over case studies of Amazon and eBay with the hope of impressing prospective dot-com employers.

Flash forward to now. Considering the rapid increase in businesses embracing generative AI and large language models, this is indubitably the dawn of the AI era.

There is an emerging consensus that AI will be crucial in core business applications ranging from customer acquisitions and interactions to dynamic or real-time pricing. Sixty-five percent of US executives surveyed by consultancy KPMG in 2024 said AI will have "an extremely high impact" on their organization in the next few years.

Also: What's stranger than AI? These new job roles — with titles that are so TBD

"I think young people need to know that AI is going to touch absolutely everything, and you do need to have some degree of AI competence in almost any field," Julia Pollack, chief economist at ZipRecruiter, told ZDNET. "Across all sorts of business functions, you're seeing a greater need for business analytics."

Still, these are early days filled with a large degree of ambiguity — as is common at the beginning of all transformative epochs — around how exactly to fuse this technology into businesses.

For prospective entrants into the job market, that ambiguity can have bigger repercussions.

Not knowing how companies are reacting to this tectonic shift, especially when it comes to hiring, adds a layer of uncertainty and anxiety on top of the usual worries about landing a job and paying off student loans.

Who needs AI?

Nick Drydakis, a labor economist at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK and director of the Centre for Inclusive Societies and Economies, took a stab at figuring out what kind of background enables a candidate to be successful in landing an interview and then a job in today's turbulent job market.

For a study published in May in the Oxford Economic Papers, Drydakis conducted a research experiment where he had two groups of students with identical backgrounds apply for the same jobs across 10 industries by submitting cover letters and resumes.

The students — 1,360 men and 1,316 women — were not exactly slouches. They all had achieved a 2:1 (upper second-class) grade in mathematics, statistics, and econometrics, which is a high distinction in the UK.

The only difference between the groups was that half of the students had taken an AI module, which consisted of lectures and computer-based seminars. Topics included AI's role in strategy and decision-making, AI tools for the economy, machine learning and its role in econometric approaches, challenges and biases in AI tools, and ethical and legal considerations related to AI.

The other half had no AI experience.

Also: How AI lies, cheats, and grovels to succeed — and what we need to do about it

To gauge the level of employer interest in students with AI experience, Drydakis ensured the cohort that took the AI module included a paragraph highlighting the course content in a few lines.

Over the next five months, Drydakis' research team sent job openings to each participant that matched their course of study and tracked the ensuing correspondence.

Findings on the AI factor

The experiment's results are an eye-opener on how industry is adapting to this new landscape and a powerful indicator of how college graduates should begin looking at their course content, irrespective of their field of study.

Fifty-four percent of male applicants and 50% of female applicants with AI "capital"— a term that Drydakis coined to reflect "knowledge, skills, and capabilities related to AI technologies which could boost individuals' productivity, employment, and earnings" — received interview callbacks versus only 28% and 32%, respectively, who did not take the AI module.

Also: AI isn't necessarily taking your job: 12 reasons to ease those worries

Most stunningly, the research revealed that those with the AI module were 36% more likely to be asked to interview in large firms where more hiring takes place.

Plus, male job aspirants with the AI module listed on their resume were shortlisted for jobs that had a 12% higher starting salary on average than those who didn't. For women, the corresponding figure was 13%.

Every job sector will be impacted in some fashion.

"The finance industry, leveraging AI for financial modeling, fraud detection, and algorithmic trading, also demands AI expertise," Drydakis told ZDNET via email. "Marketing and e-commerce businesses utilize AI for customer targeting, personalized marketing, and sales optimization. Additionally, the manufacturing and logistics sectors use AI for automation, predictive maintenance, and supply chain optimization."

Also: From AI trainers to ethicists: AI may obsolete some jobs but generate new ones

Students or professionals who aren't aiming for roles in a data-crunching industry — and therefore don't believe they need any AI arrows in their quivers — could come to regret it.

"Increasing AI skills among non-experts is considered as important as training AI experts," Drydakis said. "The former group will most likely use AI or collaborate and coexist with it."

So, for college students planning their courses of study, learning about AI, regardless of major, could help them gain an edge and land that first job.

Artificial Intelligence

Meta, Hugging Face and Scaleway have partnered up to launch an AI accelerator programme geared towards European startups.

Meta’s GenAI VP Ahmad Al-Dahle announced on Tuesday that the programme would aim to “accelerate innovation, drive business growth and strengthen the European tech ecosystem.” The programme is based out of Station F in Paris, the world’s largest startup campus, and is supported by the Parisian business school HEC Paris’ incubator, Incubateur HEC Paris.

This seems to be one of the first AI accelerator programmes with a focus on startups from the EU. Last week, AWS announced an accelerator programme for startups in the Asia Pacific and Japan regions, with 40 startups coming from India.

Similarly, earlier this year, GitHub also announced $400,000 in funding for ten startups specifically focusing on open-source AI-based solutions. This was a part of their 10-week GitHub Accelerator programme.

Who, When, And Why?

The Meta-backed programme will run for four months, with a focus on European startups that are using open-source foundation models to develop advanced AI solutions. This is in alignment with Meta’s overall focus towards open-source AI models.

Applications are currently open for startups to sign up and will close on August 16. A total of five startups in the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or product stage will be selected to undertake the programme, which is scheduled to start on October 1, 2024, and go on till early February 2025.

According to the programme details, startups will be selected by a panel of experts from Meta, Hugging Face, Scaleway and HEC Paris Incubator. Due to a focus on open-source models, startups will be picked based on their use of foundation models and integration plans.

The partnership also means that startups will gain benefits from each of the partners in different areas. According to the programme overview, “Selected startups will benefit from technical mentoring by Meta, access to Hugging Face’s tools and Scaleway’s computing resources to develop services based on open-source AI technology.”

The post Meta, Hugging Face Launch EU-Focused AI Startup Accelerator Programme appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pumped $2.7 million into PalmPilot’s co-creator Jeff Hawkins’ company, Numenta, to further its work on AI inspired by the human brain. Hawkins has long believed that understanding the brain, particularly the neocortex, is key to developing true AGI.

The neocortex, responsible for complex thought and action, processes sensory inputs and movements to learn about the world.

Even though PalmPilot, was once a popular and one of the earliest successful handheld devices, Hawkins gained widespread recognition for its invention in 1996. It was discontinued in 2010 and eventually replaced with smartphones.

Fast forward to years later, the genius is now venturing into AI. His approach, encapsulated in his 2021 book “Thousand Brains Theory,” stated that AI should mimic the brain’s sensorimotor learning.

Why is this development important?

Unlike traditional neural networks, which have deviated from biological models, Hawkins advocates for AI systems that learn through interaction with their environment, much like the brain.

This theory is set to be tested through Numenta’s new software, funded by the Gates Foundation. In a previous interview, Hawkins stated that “The Gates Foundation approached us because they were also interested in the theory, and they felt that current AI systems have limitations,”

Current AI models, particularly LLMs like GPT-4 or Claude 3 rely on sheer data volume and statistical correlations rather than true understanding. While these models excel at tasks like language processing, they require massive computational resources and may hit performance limits. Hawkins’ brain-based AI aims to overcome these limitations by developing more efficient and intelligent systems.

“They thought that sensorimotor-type AI systems would be very, very helpful for global health issues,” he added. His goal is to create AI that truly understands and interacts with the world, paving the way for a new era of intelligent machines.

Founded in 2005, Numenta was established to bolster Hawkins’ research on the human brain. The company’s objective is to reverse engineer the neocortex and develop machines based on biological principles.

Numenta’s forthcoming open-source release of its AI models will enable further development and testing by the broader research community. Hawkins compares this phase of AI development to the early days of computing, where foundational work laid the groundwork for future technological breakthroughs.

Currently, all the AI players in the market, including the likes of Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI, among others, are on a mission to achieve AGI. So it would be interesting to see how Hawkins’ work contributes to this goal.

The post Gates Foundation Pumps Over $2 Mn in PalmPilot Inventor Jeff Hawkins’ New AI Project appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.