Twelve Labs has raised $30 million in funding for its efforts to train video-analyzing models. The San Francisco-based company has received strategic investments from notable enterprise infrastructure providers Databricks and SK Telecom as well as Snowflake Ventures and HubSpot Ventures. Twelve Labs targets customers using video across a variety of fields including media and entertainment, professional sports leagues, content creators and business users. The funding coincides with the release of Twelve Labs’ new video foundation model, Marengo 2.7, which applies a multi-vector approach to video understanding. Continue reading Twelve Labs Creating AI That Can Search and Analyze Video

Meta’s FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) team has unveiled recent work in areas ranging from transparency and safety to agents, and architectures for machine learning. The projects include Meta Motivo, a foundation model for controlling the behavior of virtual embodied agents, and Video Seal, an open-source model for video watermarking. All were developed in the unit’s pursuit of advanced machine intelligence, helping “models to learn new information more effectively and scale beyond current limits.” Meta announced it is sharing the new FAIR research, code, models and datasets so the research community can build upon its work. Continue reading Meta Rolls Out Watermarking, Behavioral and Concept Models

Runway is launching Act-One motion capture system that uses video and voice recordings to map human facial expressions onto characters using the company’s latest model, Gen-3 Alpha. Runway calls it “a significant step forward in using generative models for expressive live action and animated content.” Compared to past facial capture techniques — which typically require complex rigging — Act-One is driven directly and only by the performance of an actor, requiring “no extra equipment,” making it more likely to capture and preserve an authentic, nuanced performance, according to the company. Continue reading Runway’s Act-One Facial Capture Could Be a ‘Game Changer’

Nvidia has unveiled the NVLM 1.0 family of multimodal LLMs, a powerful open-source AI that the company says performs comparably to proprietary systems from OpenAI and Google. Led by NVLM-D-72B, with 72 billion parameters, Nvidia’s new entry in the AI race achieved what the company describes as “state-of-the-art results on vision-language tasks, rivaling the leading proprietary models (e.g., GPT-4o) and open-access models.” Nvidia has made the model weights publicly available and says it will also be releasing the training code, a break from the closed approach of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Continue reading Nvidia Releases Open-Source Frontier-Class Multimodal LLMs

During the 10th annual Roblox Developers Conference (RDC 2024) in San Jose, the gaming platform announced it is opening to global currencies in addition to its own Robux, which generates billions in virtual transactions each year. Starting later this year, a small test bed of developers will be able to charge real money for games that charge fees, with a program expected to open “to all eligible creators by mid-2025.” The massively multiplayer online platform that lets users build online game worlds also discussed a project to develop its own AI foundation model to power generative 3D creation on the platform. Continue reading Roblox Adds Real Currency, Teases Its Coming Generative AI

Apple’s iOS 18 public beta 2 has arrived, with new wallpapers for CarPlay, a newly designed Hidden Apps folder in the Apps Library and the ability to use dark mode widgets in broad daylight, among other updates. Public beta 2 includes iPadOS 18, but does not include Apple Intelligence, which is expected this fall. However, a separate Apple Intelligence preview was introduced this week. In addition, a new Apple research paper leads some to believe its Apple Intelligence AI models were pre-trained in the cloud using Google Tensor Processing Units, leading to speculation that Big Tech be considering alternatives to Nvidia. But Apple has always been an AI outlier. Continue reading Apple Intelligence Preview and Updated iOS 18 Beta Released

The U.S. Commerce Department has issued a large package of material designed to help AI developers and those using the systems with an approach to identifying and mitigating risks stemming from generative AI and foundation models. Prepared by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the AI Safety Institute, the guidance includes the initial public draft of its guidelines on “Managing Misuse Risk for Dual-Use Foundation Models.” Dual-use refers to models that can be used for good or ill. The release also includes an open-source software test called Dioptra. Apple is the latest to join the government’s voluntary commitments to responsible AI innovation. Continue reading Apple Joins the Safe AI Initiative as NIST Amps Up Outreach

OpenAI has partnered with the Los Alamos National Laboratory to study the ways artificial intelligence frontier models can assist with scientific research in an active lab environment. Established in 1943, the New Mexico facility is best known as home to the Manhattan Project and the development of the world’s first atomic bomb. It currently focuses on national security challenges under the direction of the Department of Energy. As part of the new partnership, the lab will work with OpenAI to produce what it describes as a first-of-its-kind study on the impact of artificial intelligence and biosecurity. Continue reading OpenAI Teams with Los Alamos for Frontier Model Research

Apple has released a public demo of the 4M AI model it developed in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). The technology debuts seven months after the model was first open-sourced, allowing informed observers the opportunity to interact with it and assess its capabilities. Apple says 4M was built by applying masked modeling to a single unified Transformer encoder-decoder “across a wide range of input/output modalities — including text, images, geometric and semantic modalities, as well as neural network feature maps.” Continue reading Apple Launches Public Demo of Its Multimodal 4M AI Model

Meta Platforms has unveiled its first natively multimodal model, Chameleon, which observers say can make it competitive with frontier model firms. Although Chameleon is not yet released, Meta says internal research indicates it outperforms the company’s own Llama 2 in text-only tasks and “matches or exceeds the performance of much larger models” including Google’s Gemini Pro and OpenAI’s GPT-4V in a mixed-modal generation evaluation “where either the prompt or outputs contain mixed sequences of both images and text.” In addition, Meta calls Chameleon’s image generation “non-trivial,” noting that’s “all in a single model.” Continue reading Meta Advances Multimodal Model Architecture with Chameleon

Apple researchers have gone public with new multimodal methods for training large language models using both text and images. The results are said to enable AI systems that are more powerful and flexible, which could have significant ramifications for future Apple products. These new models, which Apple calls MM1, support up to 30 billion parameters. The researchers identify multimodal large language models (MLLMs) as “the next frontier in foundation models,” which exceed the performance of LLMs and “excel at tasks like image captioning, visual question answering and natural language inference.” Continue reading Apple Unveils Progress in Multimodal Large Language Models

Amazon has launched five new capabilities to its SageMaker service, including Sagemaker HyperPod, which accelerates large language and foundation model training and tuning. Sagemaker HyperPod is said to shorten the training time by up to 40 percent using its purpose-built infrastructure designed for distributed training at scale. By optimizing acceleration, SageMaker Inference reduces foundation model deployment costs by 50 percent and latency by 20 percent on average, Amazon claims. “SageMaker HyperPod removes the undifferentiated heavy lifting involved in building and optimizing machine learning infrastructure,” said Amazon. Continue reading SageMaker HyperPod: Amazon Accelerates AI Model Training

In a move to put “generative AI at the fingertips of every business, from startups to enterprises,” Amazon Web Services is commercially rolling out the Bedrock service it announced in April. Bedrock offers a wide range of foundation models from Amazon’s own Titan to products from Anthropic, Stability AI and soon Meta Platforms. The fully managed Bedrock service makes its generative FMs operable through a single, simple API. This means customers can experiment with various leading FMs and customize simple apps in-house, without the need for a third-party diving into their proprietary data. Continue reading AWS Rolls Out Bedrock Generative AI Service, Adds Llama 2

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has issued a report featuring seven proposed principles that aim to “ensure consumer protection and healthy competition are at the heart of responsible development and use of foundation models,” or FMs. Ranging from “accountability” and “diversity” to “transparency,” the principles aim to “spur innovation and growth” while implementing social safety measures amidst rapid adoption of apps including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion. The transformative properties of FMs can “have a significant impact on people, businesses, and the UK economy,” according to the CMA. Continue reading UK’s Competition Office Issues Principles for Responsible AI

Walmart is putting generative AI in the hands of roughly 50,000 non-store U.S. employees who will have access to My Assistant, an LLM trained on information. From speeding the drafting process to serving as a creative partner and summarizing documents, “My Assistant has the potential to change how our associates work and solve problems,” Walmart said, emphasizing the launch goes beyond productivity gains. “We believe the key to unlocking transformation lies in the creativity and innovation of our associates. Ideally, this technology will free them from monotonous, repetitive tasks, allowing more time and focus for improving the customer/member experience.”  Continue reading Walmart Is ‘Empowering’ 50,000 U.S. Associates with GenAI