Quora Raises $75 Million for Its Creator Monetization Program

The Q&A website Quora announced this month it raised $75 million from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), destined to accelerate the growth of its AI chat platform ‘Poe,’ which was launched a year ago. With this round — the first in nearly seven years — Quora is valued at $500 million, according to its CEO, Adam D’Angelo [in the picture above]. Despite this decline in valuation, Adam D’Angelo said that the company is cash flow positive. “We expect the majority of the funding to be used to pay creators of bots on the platform through our recently launched creator monetization program,” wrote Adam D’Angelo in a statement. “Our goal is for Poe to enable as many individual developers as possible to make a living, and for as many businesses as possible to operate profitably solely by using the platform.” “This is true whether developers are creating a bot using an existing model with a prompt and any uploaded files, or whether they are training a model themselves,” he added. Poe aggregates a wide range of text and image AI models like ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, Claude 2, Stable Diffusion, Llama, and others, which gives creators a huge playground of tools to access. According to data TechCrunch viewed from Apptopia in October, Poe’s mobile app was downloaded more than 250,000 times in February, its first month open to the public. Through October, Poe saw over 18.4 million installs and grew to nearly 1.22 million monthly active users. “Already, Poe shows signs of increasing returns to scale,” wrote Andreessen Horowitz‘s partner David George in a blog post. “Currently, Poe is one of the top 5 largest generative AI-related properties, and creators have built 1M+ bots on Poe the platform.” .

"Build Domain-Specific Language Models," Said Coursera's CEO in Davos [+Jan 18 Update]

Indian Company Upgrad Education to Acquire Udacity for $80 Million, According to Local Media

An AI-powered Diagnostic Tool Used by Kaiser Permanente Gets a High Valuation

AI-Created Social Avatars May Threat the Business of Human Influencers

Hundreds of AI-generated influencers have broken into the $21 billion content creator economy, threatening human characters. Brands have been quick to engage with virtual influencers as a new way to attract attention while reducing costs. In addition, they have total control versus a real person who comes with potential controversy and their own opinions. These virtual avatars, hyper-realistic created with AI, can be followed by large audiences, as the Financial Times reported. For example, pink-haired, digital Aitana López is followed by over 200,000 people. It was created by the Barcelona-based agency The Clueless, whose creations [in the picture] have been criticized for being overly sexualized. Brands such as Victoria’s Secret have paid $1,000 a post to promote their products. Other virtual influencers like Lil Miquela achieved an audience of 3 million followers and have worked with Burberry, Prada, and Givenchy. The rise of these virtual influencers has been accelerated by the fact that no rule obliges creators to declare that they are generated by AI. India is the only country that forces virtual influencers to reveal their AI origins. H&M said that its virtual influencer Kuki has reached 11 times more people and resulted in a 91 percent decrease in cost per person compared with a traditional ad. .

OpenAI Fires Back at The New York Times' Copyright Lawsuit: "The NYT Manipulated Its Models"

OpenAI responded in a blog post yesterday to The New York Times about its legal action, saying that the paper "manipulated" its models, "is not telling the full story", and its lawsuit is "without merit." • "Training is fair use, but we provide an opt-out because it’s the right thing to do," OpenAI said. • "The principle that training AI models is permitted as fair use is supported by a wide range of academics, library associations, civil society groups, startups, leading US companies, creators, authors, and others that recently submitted comments to the US Copyright Office." • "We have led the AI industry in providing a simple opt-out process for publishers (which The New York Times adopted in August 2023) to prevent our tools from accessing their sites." • "The New York Times is not telling the full story. Our discussions with them appeared to be progressing constructively through our last communication on December 19. (…) Their lawsuit on December 27 came as a surprise and disappointment to us." • "It seems The New York Times intentionally manipulated prompts, often including lengthy excerpts of articles, in order to get our model to regurgitate." • "We regard The New York Times’ lawsuit to be without merit."

Coursera Translated 4,200 Courses Into 17 Languages with AI

The 2024 Open edX Annual Conference Will Take Place in Early July in South Africa

OpenAI Launched Its GPT Store, Which Features Custom Versions of ChatGPT

AI-powered TV Anchors Rapidly Spread in Asia

AI-powered TV anchors are rapidly spreading in Asia. One of the most popular is Lisa, the Indian broadcaster Odisha TV’s anchor [in the picture above]. This robot delivers news bulletins, horoscopes, and weather and sports updates. Also, Delhi-based India Today Group features Sana, an AI agent that presents news and the weather in English, Hindi, and Bangla, and co-anchors programs with other journalists in 75 languages. In the southern state of Karnataka, Power TV is using Soundarya, who introduced herself as a "robot anchor." This growing tribe of AI anchors also collects and analyzes data, converting it into usable and actionable information. Production managers say they save costs, allow channels to deliver news in a country with 22 official languages, and crunch vast amounts of data at phenomenal speed. Critics say the technology is undermining media credibility as they deliver news with a non-human monotonous voice and no hand gestures. China, Malaysia, and Taiwan broadcasters also use virtual presenters. .

Outgoing CEO at SNHI Anticipates that AI Will Be Deeply Disruptive

Paul J. LeBlanc, President and CEO of Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), who will step down on June 30, 2024, anticipates that the next disruptive wave will be AI. "AI means universities must change dramatically," he said to The Boston Globe last week. Paul J. LeBlanc plans to work with a team of six researchers to study emerging AI trends, impacts on education, and opportunities to innovate. He persuaded researcher George Siemens to leave his post and join the team as chief scientist, he revealed to EdSurge. The group is working on a learning platform as well as setting up to build a massive data consortium in higher-ed, scheduled to be launched in April 2024 at the ASU-GSV conference. • "I think AI will do to knowledge work — or white-collar jobs if you prefer — what automation did to blue-collar jobs," he says. "It’s going to be deeply disruptive and displace a lot of people, and we’re going to have to adapt around that." • "There are also bigger questions about what jobs will go away and what jobs will be created, which influences the fields of study schools will offer." • "In the not-so-distant future, professionals will be judged less by what they know and more by what they can do with what they know, LeBlanc said." Paul J. LeBlanc led SNHU through major growth in his two decades, transforming a school with 2,500 students in 2003 to more than 225,000 learners, the vast majority of them online, that it serves today. The Board of Trustees unanimously voted to appoint Lisa Marsh Ryerson as President for a two-year term, effective July 1, 2024. . Always great to chat with Jeff Young at EdSurge News. https://t.co/YEosb9mwQc — Paul LeBlanc (@snhuprez) December 20, 2023    

......

The AI-Native University

Blueprint for the Institution of the Future

A practical guide for leaders reimagining higher education with AI at the core — not as an add-on, but as the foundation for how students learn, faculty teach, and institutions govern.

By Mikel Amigot

Read the book