Ernie, the foundation model for Baidu’s generative AI, has been updated with iRAG technology to mitigate visual hallucinations and a no-code tool called Miaoda that creates apps using natural language. The company behind China’s largest search engine says Ernie now handles 1.5 billion daily user queries, up from 50 million circa its March 2023 launch (a 30x increase). Baidu also debuted Ernie-powered smart glasses from its Xiaodu Technology hardware unit. The Xiaodu AI Glasses features built-in voice activation and cameras for taking photos and video. The news was shared at this week’s Baidu World 2024 in Shanghai. Continue reading Baidu’s Ernie AI Gets Improved Text-to-Image and App Builder

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has come up what it thinks is a better way to teach robots general purpose skills. Derived from LLM techniques, the method provides robot intelligence access to an enormous amount of data at once, rather than exposing it to individual programs for specific tasks. Faster and more cost efficient, the approach has been referred to as a “brute force” approach to problem-solving, and machine learners have taken to it in lieu of individualized, task-specific “imitation learning.” Early tests show it outperforming traditional training by more than 20 percent under simulation and real-world conditions. Continue reading MIT Intros LLM-Inspired Teacher for General Purpose Robots

Microsoft next month moves to public preview with a Copilot Studio feature that lets users create autonomous AI agents. The agents had been in private preview since the spring, and the tech giant’s move to take them public comes after Salesforce launched its own agentic program in September. Microsoft also has plans to add 10 autonomous agents to Dynamics 365, an enterprise suite geared toward resource planning and customer relationship management. Microsoft announced the news this week at its “AI Tour” event in London. Copilot is Microsoft’s branded AI assistant, while Copilot Studio lets people customize their Copilot assistants. Continue reading Microsoft Widens Copilot AI Agent Preview, Adds Templates

A new LLM framework evaluates how well generative AI models are meeting the challenge of compliance with the legal parameters of the European Union’s AI Act. The free and open-source software is the product of a collaboration between ETH Zurich; Bulgaria’s Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technology (INSAIT); and Swiss startup LatticeFlow AI. It is being billed as “the first evaluation framework of the EU AI Act for Generative AI models.” Already, it has found that some of the top AI foundation models are falling short of European regulatory goals in areas including cybersecurity resilience and discriminatory output. Continue reading ‘EU AI Act Checker’ Holds Big AI Accountable for Compliance

Anthropic, maker of the the popular Claude AI chatbot, has updated its Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP), designed and implemented to mitigate the risks of advanced AI systems. The policy was introduced last year and has since been improved, with new protocols added to ensure AI models are developed and deployed safely as they grow more powerful. This latest update offers “a more flexible and nuanced approach to assessing and managing AI risks while maintaining our commitment not to train or deploy models unless we have implemented adequate safeguards,” according to Anthropic. Continue reading Anthropic Updates ‘Responsible Scaling’ to Minimize AI Risks

Databricks Apps is a new platform designed to make building internal data and AI applications something that can be done in a few clicks. Available now in public preview on AWS and Azure, the template-based system lets users weave data and frameworks of choice into full-featured apps that can run in the Databricks environment. The company says the system can code and deploy a secure data app with AI integration in five minutes. “Ideal use cases include data visualization, AI applications, self-service analytics and data quality monitoring,” according to the San Francisco-based company. Continue reading Databricks Previews Toolkit for Internal Data, AI App Creation

Intel has released the second iteration of AI Playground, an app it debuted this summer as “a user-friendly AI starter app” designed to simplify artificial intelligence on Intel AI PCs. This latest version works with the new line of Intel Core Ultra 200V series processors, designed for AI under the codename Lunar Lake. The idea is to help those using Intel PCs get comfortable using AI functionality without any special account, or even an Internet connection. Intel also launched two new artificial intelligence chips, the Xeon 6 CPU and Gaudi 3 AI accelerator. Continue reading Intel Updates AI Playground App and Launches New AI Chips

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

Accenture is forming an internal Nvidia Business Group staffed with 30,000 global employees trained to help clients “reinvent processes and scale enterprise AI adoption with AI agents,” the consulting firm announced. Accenture will also use its AI Refinery platform to help companies customize AI models and agents using the full Nvidia AI stack including AI Foundry, AI Enterprise and Omniverse. “With generative AI demand driving $3 billion in Accenture bookings in its recently closed fiscal year, the new group will help clients lay the foundation for agentic AI functionality,” Accenture said. Continue reading Accenture Has Plans for Scaling Enterprise AI with Nvidia Unit

Meta’s Llama 3.2 release includes two new multimodal LLMs, one with 11 billion parameters and one with 90 billion — considered small- and medium-sized — and two lightweight, text-only models (1B and 3B) that fit onto edge and mobile devices. Included are pre-trained and instruction-tuned versions. In addition to text, the multimodal models can interpret images, supporting apps that require visual understanding. Meta says the models are free and open source. Alongside them, the company is releasing “the first official Llama Stack distributions,” enabling “turnkey deployment” with integrated safety. Continue reading Meta Unveils New Open-Source Multimodal Model Llama 3.2

Cloudflare has released AI Audit, a free set of new tools designed to help websites analyze and control how their content is used by artificial intelligence models. Described as “one-click blocking” to prevent unauthorized AI scraping, Cloudflare says it will also make it easier to identify the content bots scan most, so they can wall it off and negotiate payment in exchange for access. Helping its clients toward a sustainable future, Cloudflare is also creating a marketplace for sites to negotiate fees based on AI audits that trace cyber footprints on server files. Continue reading Cloudflare Tool Can Prevent AI Bots from Scraping Websites

Alibaba Cloud last week globally released more than 100 new open-source variants of its large language foundation model, Qwen 2.5, to the global open-source community. The company has also revamped its proprietary offering as a full-stack AI-computing infrastructure across cloud products, networking and data center architecture, all aimed at supporting the growing demands of AI computing. Alibaba Cloud’s significant contribution was revealed at the Apsara Conference, the annual flagship event held by the cloud division of China’s e-retail giant, often referred to as the Chinese Amazon. Continue reading Alibaba Cloud Ups Its AI Game with 100 Open-Source Models

OpenAI is previewing a new series of AI models that can reason and correct complex coding mistakes, providing a more efficient solution for developers. Powered by OpenAI o1, the new models are “designed to spend more time thinking before they respond, much like a person would,” and as a result can “solve harder problems than previous models in science, coding, and math,” OpenAI claims, noting that “through training, they learn to refine their thinking process, try different strategies, and recognize their mistakes.” The first model in the series is being released in preview in OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT and in the company’s API. Continue reading OpenAI Previews New LLMs Capable of Complex Reasoning

China’s largest cloud computing company, Alibaba Cloud, has released a new computer vision model, Qwen2-VL, which the company says improves on its predecessor in visual understanding, including video comprehension and text-to-image processing in languages including English, Japanese, French, Spanish, Chinese and others. The company says it can analyze videos of more than 20 minutes in length and is able to respond appropriately to questions about content. Third-party benchmark tests compare Qwen2-VL favorably to leading competitors and the company is releasing two open-source versions with a larger private model to come. Continue reading Alibaba’s Latest Vision Model Has Advanced Video Capability

An AI-powered coding app called Cursor is building a fanbase, with everyone from hobbyists to engineers subscribing to the service. The platform reportedly has 30,000 paying customers, among them employees at OpenAI, Midjourney and Perplexity. Referred to as “the ChatGPT of coding,” Cursor uses popular models including GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet to automate building apps and other coding tasks. Cursor was launched by two-year-old startup Anysphere, which has raised more than $60 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital. Continue reading New AI Coding App Cursor Gains Following and $60M in Funds