Accenture announced it will acquire Udacy as part of an effort to build its own technology learning platform focused on AI, in which it will invest $1 billion. This platform, called LeanVantage, will provide Accenture's clients with learning and training services to upskill their workforce in technology, data, and AI. Udacity’s team of more than 230 professionals will join Accenture LearnVantage, Accenture didn't disclose how much it paid for Udaciy. The completion of the acquisition is subject to regulatory review and antitrust clearance. "The addition of Udacity to Accenture LearnVantage will enable us to bring Accenture’s deep capabilities as a world-class learning organization to clients at scale, helping them build the skills of their people to achieve greater business value," said Kishore Durg, global lead of Accenture LearnVantage. This year, Udacity seemed it was to be acquired by Indian edtech company Upgrad, with an asking price of $80 million. Apparently, that deal fell through, and Accenture ended up buying them instead. .
Paris-based Mistral AI — which is trying to build an alternative to OpenAI's GPT-4 and Anthropic's Claude 2 — released yesterday a new LLM named Mistral Large. The model was not released under an open-source license. In addition, the French start-up is launching its alternative to ChatGPT with a new service called Le Chat, now available in beta. Le Chat can’t access the web. Founded by Mensch, Timothée Lacroix, and Guillaume Lample, a trio of former Meta and Google researchers, has now a valuation of €2 billion. [People working at Mistral in the picture above.] It supports context windows of 32k tokens (generally more than 20,000 words in English) in English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian. As a comparison, GPT-4 Turbo has a 128k-token context window. Mistral AI made Mistral Large available through Microsoft's Azure, its first distribution partner, after signing a "multi-year partnership." As part of the deal, Microsoft said it would invest in Mistral, although the financial details were not disclosed. The partnership will include a research and development collaboration to build applications for governments across Europe. Microsoft has already invested about $13 billion in San Francisco-based OpenAI, which is estimated to be worth $86 billion. .
Since the Release of ChatGPT Upwork freelance website’s postings data — publicly available in the form of an RSS feed — show an increase in the number of jobs since ChatGPT was released in November 2022, according to the analysis of an expert posted at Bloomberry.com. However, three categories showed a large decline in jobs: writing, translation, and customer service jobs. The number of writing jobs declined by 33%, translation jobs declined by 19%, and customer service jobs declined by 16%. Since November 2022, video editing/production jobs were up 39%, graphic design jobs 8%, and web design jobs 10%. Software development jobs were also up, with backend development jobs at 6% and frontend/web development jobs at 4%. "Generative AI tools are already good enough to replace many writing tasks, whether it’s writing an article or a social media post. But they’re not polished enough for other jobs like video and image generation," said Henley Wing, the author of the analysis. Jobs like generating AI content, developing AI agents, integrating OpenAI/ChatGPT APIs, and developing chatbots and AI apps are becoming the norm. However, the vast majority of companies are not yet developing their own LLM models or tuning them with training data. They seem to be integrating OpenAI’s API into their existing products and developing chatbots to replace their customer service agents.
Google Meet announced last month an upcoming gesture detection feature called “Raise hand” for Q&A sessions and other moderation. This is a button in the toolbar available for enterprise accounts on Google Workplace, which lets people know when you have something to say, as the webcam recognizes hands up. The feature turns off gesture detection when someone is an active speaker. Until now, raising your hand to ask a question in Google Meet was done by clicking the hand-raise icon. This feature is toggled off by default and can be enabled from More Options > Reactions > Hand Raise Gesture. It’s similar to how Google Camera in Pixel phones can start a selfie timer when you raise your palm. .
Adobe introduced this week an AI assistant in beta in Reader and Acrobat, which instantly generates summaries and insights from long PDF documents. It also recommends and answers questions based on a PDF’s content through an intuitive conversational interface. The AI assistant generates citations with the source, and as an output, it formats the information for sharing in emails, reports, and presentations. Clickable links help quickly find information in long documents. This feature will be sold through a new add-on subscription plan when AI Assistant is out of beta. "Our AI Assistant is bringing generative AI to the masses, unlocking new value from the information inside the approximately 3 trillion PDFs in the world," stated Adobe. This assistant leverages the same AI and machine learning models behind Acrobat Liquid Mode, the technology that supports responsive reading experiences for PDFs on mobile. PDF was invented by Adobe thirty years ago Adobe, and today remains the standard for reading, editing, and transforming PDFs. Currently, the new AI Assistant features are available in beta for Acrobat Standard and Pro Individual and Teams subscription plans on desktop and web in English, with features coming to Reader desktop customers in English over the next few weeks – all at no additional cost. Other languages will follow. A private beta is available for enterprise customers. • Adobe: How people are using AI Assistant (YouTube videos)
