Microsoft launched a dozen Copilot-branded products this week, such as Pages and Agents. In addition, the software giant announced an improved Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps, especially in Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Microsoft Copilot is built into its Bing search engine, Windows 10 and 11, Edge sidebar, and iOS and Android apps. Fine-tuned versions of OpenAI’s models power it. • Copilot Pages is a canvas designed for multiplayer collaboration. It will be generally available later in September 2024. Users can try it at Microsoft.com/copilot. • Copilot in Excel, generally available, added new features, like Excel with Python. • Copilot Agents makes it easier to automate and execute business processes. These are the videos with Microsoft Copilot reported enhancements:
Dartmouth College and Nvidia's Deep Learning Institute (DLI) launched a new Generative AI Teaching Kit to provide students access to tools, frameworks, and practical exercises. According to Joe Bungo, Deep Learning Institute (DLI) program manager at NVIDIA, "this teaching kit equips students with a deep understanding of generative AI techniques and enables educators to foster future innovation and creativity in the industry." As students transition into the workforce, they will be better prepared to tackle global challenges, from improving healthcare and science to advancing sustainable technologies. Sam Raymond, an adjunct assistant engineering professor at Dartmouth College, said that "empowering students with skills to understand and potentially develop their own GPU-accelerated Generative AI applications is the primary objective. "I believe students who take this course will be at a significant advantage in the job market and help bridge the knowledge gap in industries today." Teaching Kits include lecture slides, hands-on labs, Jupyter notebooks, knowledge checks, and free online self-paced courses that provide students with certificates of competency. They are all comprehensively packaged and ready for classroom and curriculum integration. The kit aims to introduce the foundational concepts of natural language processing (NLP) that are essential for understanding LLMs and generative AI more broadly. Key concepts of LLMs are then examined using NVIDIA GPUs, tools, services, and open-source libraries and frameworks. A simple pretraining exercise of a GPT model shows basic training processes in the cloud. This first release includes these modules: Introduction to Generative AI Diffusion Models in Generative AI LLM Orchestration Select professors — such as Mohadeseh Taheri-Mousavi, assistant professor in the Materials Science and Engineering department at Carnegie Mellon University, and Professor Payam Barnaghi from the Department of Brain Sciences at Imperial College London — have already been given early access to first-release modules. [Disclosure: ibl.ai, the parent company of iblnews.org, has NVIDIA as a client]
OpenAI, which has 1,700 employees, is making substantial changes to its management team and corporate structure to attract large investors in a deal that would value it at $100 billion. However, it has not yet settled on a new structure. According to an elaborate report from The New York Times, the transition has been difficult, and early employees continue to leave. “Rapid growth hasn’t resolved a fundamental question of what OpenAI is supposed to be: Is it a cutting-edge A.I. lab created for the benefit of humanity, or an aspiring industry giant dedicated to profits?" wrote the paper. Only three remain of the 13 people who helped found OpenAI in late 2015 with a mission to create artificial general intelligence (A.G.I). One, Greg Brockman, the company’s president, has taken a leave of absence through the end of the year, citing the need for time off after nearly a decade of work. According to a person familiar with OpenAI's income, its annual revenues have topped $2 billion. ChatGPT has more than 200 million weekly users—twice the number from nine months ago—and more than 1 million paid users for the corporate versions of ChatGPT. San Francisco-based research lab said Thursday that the figure includes the total number of people signed up to use its ChatGPT Team and Enterprise services, which are aimed at companies and universities using its ChatGPT Edu product. The company said just under half of OpenAI’s corporate users are based in the US. Outside the US, the company’s chatbot is most popular with business users in Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. However, it is unclear how much the company spends yearly, though one source puts the figure at $7 billion. Microsoft, already OpenAI’s largest investor, earmarked $13 billion for the AI company. As some employees departed, they were asked to sign legal papers that said they would lose their OpenAI shares if they spoke out against the company. This incited new concerns among the staff, even after the company revoked the practice.
The new start-up, Safe Superintelligence (SSI), co-founded by Ilya Sutskever and currently with ten employees, raised $1 billion in cash on a valuation of $5 billion. Investors included top VC firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global and SV Angel. NFDG, an investment partnership run by Nat Friedman and SSI's Chief Executive Daniel Gross, also participated. The funds will be used to acquire computing power and build a small team of researchers and engineers between Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. SSI plans to spend a couple of years doing R&D on the product before bringing it to market. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's former chief scientist and one of the most influential technologists in AI [in the center of the picture], told Reuters that his company plans to develop safe artificial intelligence systems that surpass human capabilities. AI safety refers to preventing AI from causing harm amid fears that rogue AI could act against humanity's interests or cause human extinction.
Anthropic launched an enterprise subscription plan yesterday for its AI chatbot Claude, Claude Enterprise, an alternative proposal to OpenAI's ChatGPT Enterprise, offers a 500K context window (that can be extended to Projects and Artifacts), SSO and domain capture, role-based permissions, audit logs, increased capacity, admin tools, and GitHub integration to work on codebases with Claude. "GitHub is the first native integration we're building to connect Claude to your most important data sources, enabling Claude to provide more relevant and insightful assistance," said the company. This feature is currently in beta for early Enterprise plan users. Claude Enterprise allows businesses to upload internal knowledge to analyze information and answer questions, create graphics and simple web pages, provide deep function-specific guidance, or act as a company-specific AI assistant. The 500,000 tokens window means that Anthropic’s models can process up to 200,000 lines of code, dozens of 100-page documents, or a two-hour audio transcript in a single prompt. Anthropic refused to disclose the price of Claude Enterprise, encouraging it to "contact sales." The existing Anthropic’s Team plan costs $30 per month per member.
