“What if you could describe a sound and generate it with AI?,” asks startup ElevenLabs, which set out to do just that, and says it has succeeded. The two-year-old company explains it “used text prompts like ‘waves crashing,’ ‘metal clanging,’ ‘birds chirping,’ and ‘racing car engine’ to generate audio.” Best known for using machine learning to clone voices, the AI firm founded by Google and Palantir alums has yet to make publicly available its new text-to-sound model but began teasing it by releasing online demos this week. Some see the technology as a natural complement to the latest wave of image generators. Continue reading ElevenLabs Promotes Its Latest Advances in AI Audio Effects

Stability AI, purveyor of the popular Stable Diffusion image generator, has introduced a completely new model called Stable Cascade. Now in preview, Stable Cascade uses a different architecture than Stable Diffusion’s SDXL that the UK company’s researchers say is more efficient. Cascade builds on a compression architecture called Würstchen (German for “sausage”) that Stability began sharing in research papers early last year. Würstchen is a three-stage process that includes two-step encoding. It uses fewer parameters, meaning less data to train on, greater speed and reduced costs. Continue reading Stability AI Advances Image Generation with Stable Cascade

Apple has released MGIE, an open-source AI model that edits images using natural language instructions. MGIE, short for MLLM-Guided Image Editing, can also modify and optimize images. Developed in conjunction with University of California Santa Barbara, MGIE is Apple’s first AI model. The multimodal MGIE, which understands text and image input, also crops, resizes, flips, and adds filters based on text instructions using what Apple says is an easier instruction set than other AI editing programs, and is simpler and faster than learning a traditional program, like Apple’s own Final Cut Pro. Continue reading Apple Launches Open-Source Language-Based Image Editor

Password management firm 1Password has launched a public beta for a program that implements passwordless logins, joining the trend to eliminate its bread and butter: passwords. Those who sign up to participate, creating a new 1Password account via the public beta, will get “an extended free trial that lasts for the duration of the beta,” the company says. Initially, “the ability to unlock 1Password with a passkey is reserved for new users, but will be made available to those with existing 1Password accounts sometime in 2024. Passkeys let people sign in to accounts without having to memorize a password or manage a secret key. Continue reading 1Password Introduces Passkey Support for Desktop and iOS

GitHub Copilot Chat for enterprise becomes generally available in December, and the GitHub site is integrating the artificial intelligence assistant across its entire platform, promising that AI will infuse every step of the developer lifecycle. “Just as GitHub was founded on Git, today we are re-founded on Copilot,” the Microsoft-owned company announced this month. Powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, the new configuration will offer inline Copilot Chat for code questions, contextual guidance and “slash commands” for /fix and /test. The AI tool is designed to assist coders with their everyday workflows with a series of “one-click” assists and other shortcuts. Continue reading GitHub Copilot Brings AI-Powered Coding Tool to Enterprise

The University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) and Tencent YouTu Lab have released a research paper on a new framework called Woodpecker, designed to correct hallucinations in multimodal large language AI models. “Hallucination is a big shadow hanging over the rapidly evolving MLLMs,” writes the group, describing the phenomenon as when MLLMs “output descriptions that are inconsistent with the input image.” Solutions to date focus mainly on “instruction-tuning,” a form of retraining that is data and computation intensive. Woodpecker takes a training-free approach that purports to correct hallucinations from the basis of the generated text. Continue reading Woodpecker: Chinese Researchers Combat AI Hallucinations

Passkeys — a secure way to login to accounts without passwords — are back in the news as a bevy of companies lend their support to the cryptographic technology. Windows 11, GitHub and Nintendo are among the latest to go passwordless. The standard, which began gaining momentum last year, has also been embraced by companies including Apple, Google, the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium. Each passkey involves two keys — one public and registered with an online service or app, and one private and stored on individual devices, like smartphones or computers. Continue reading Windows 11, GitHub, Nintendo Are Latest to Support Passkeys

Gable.ai is emerging out of stealth mode this week with $7 million in seed funding and a plan to bridge the gap between data gathering and the artificial intelligence applications that rely on that data to function. The startup’s approach is based on the premise that “data modeling is often an afterthought” at the AI stage, where software developers are stuck working with whatever the data crew has handed them. Gable.ai aims to create a more structured workflow between the two, where end-uses are taken into account at the front end resulting in clean data optimized for AI use. Continue reading Gable.ai Aims to Reinvent How Data Engineers and AI Interact

Microsoft says it will assume legal responsibility for commercial customers who get sued for copyright infringement as a result of the company’s AI Copilot product services. A new initiative called the Copilot Copyright Commitment is designed to provide peace of mind to Microsoft business users as more copyright holders challenge the handling of protected works by the companies building AI models. “If a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement for using Microsoft’s Copilots or the output they generate, we will defend the customer” and pay any resulting fees, including settlements, Microsoft says. Continue reading Microsoft Copilot AI Customers Shielded from Legal Exposure

Hugging Face has collected $235 million in an investment round that includes contributions from Amazon, IBM, Google, Nvidia, Salesforce, AMD, Intel and Qualcomm. The New York-based startup creates and distributes open-source tools for artificial intelligence development, carving an AI-centric niche similar to the more general programming approach taken by the Microsoft-owned GitHub. The incoming cash infusion — earmarked for talent recruitment — gives Hugging Face a lofty $4.5 billion valuation that experts say indicates momentum for open source in what has to date been a highly competitive AI sector. Continue reading Big Tech Firms Propel Hugging Face to $4.5 Billion Valuation

Blockchain startup Aptos Labs will use the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to “explore innovative solutions” in blockchain and Web3 for technologies involving artificial intelligence, tokenization and payments. As part of the deal Aptos describes as a “partnership,” the company is launching Aptos Assistant, which will enable natural language prompts, making Web3 applications like smart contracts and decentralized apps more “user-friendly and secure” for “everyday Internet users and organizations” as well as developers. Aptos offers what is known as Layer 1 blockchain, technology designed to facilitate transactions at scale. Continue reading Aptos Teams with Microsoft Azure OpenAI on Web3 Solutions

Google has debuted Project IDX, an AI-enabled development environment for building full-stack web and multiplatform apps. Comparing app development that works across mobile, web, and desktop platforms to “building a Rube Goldberg machine” with a duct-taped tech stack, Google says Project IDX smooths the process of compiling, testing, deploying and monitoring apps. The browser-based Project IDX is built on the Google Cloud using the Codey family of AI foundation models built on PaLM 2. Currently, IDX supports the JavaScript and Dart languages, with plans for Python, Go and more. Continue reading Google’s Project IDX Offers Full-Stack Dev in a Web Browser

Microsoft is launching Bing Chat Enterprise, a business-focused version of Bing Chat with data privacy and governance controls. The company is also introducing Visual Search in Bing Chat and new AI features for Azure, revealed at its Inspire 2023 conference this week. In addition, the cloud-based Copilot plan “combines the power of large language models with your data in the Microsoft Graph and Microsoft 365 apps” for a new way of working using only natural language prompts. Currently in early access, Copilot will be priced at $30 per user per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium subscribers. Continue reading Microsoft Intros Bing Chat Enterprise, New AI Tools for Azure

Based on the premise that it is impractical to deploy an all-purpose LLM for specific use cases, a group of researchers from Google, Baidu, DeepMind and Meta founded Reka AI in July 2022. A year later the company has emerged from stealth mode with news of $58 million in Series A funding led by DST Global and Radical Ventures. Strategic partner Snowflake Ventures also participated, along with angel investor Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub. The Sunnyvale, California-based startup says it is building “enterprise-grade state-of-the-art AI assistants for everyone, regardless of language and culture.” Continue reading Reka AI Raises $58 Million to Customize LLMs for Enterprise

Meta Platforms has debuted what’s being called “ChatGPT for audio.” MusicGen is an AI music generator that can create tunes from natural language or song snippets. The company says MusicGen was trained on 20,000 hours of music, including 10,000 hours of “high-quality” licensed songs and 390,000 instrumental tracks. Meta released MusicGen on GitHub this past weekend, and is currently demoing the app on Facebook’s Hugging Face page. Visitors can generate tunes by describing the sound they want. Among Meta’s prompts: “80s driving pop song with heavy drums and synth pads in the background.” Continue reading Meta’s MusicGen AI Works with Language and Song Prompts