After years of focusing on AI infrastructure, Amazon is plunging into the frontier model business with the Nova series. The new family of generative AI models includes the text-to-text model Amazon Nova Micro and Amazon Nova Lite for fast, mobile-friendly apps, and at the upper echelon the multimodal Amazon Nova Pro and Amazon Nova Premier for processing text, images and video. Amazon, which is heavy into production via Amazon Studios and MGM, is also launched two specialty models focused on “studio quality” output — Amazon Nova Canvas for images and Amazon Nova Reel for video. Continue reading Amazon Dives into Generative AI with Nova Foundation Models

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

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

AI startup Liquid, founded by alums of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), has released its first models. Called Liquid Foundation Models, or LFMs, the multimodal family approaches “intelligence” differently than the pre-trained transformer models that dominate the field. Instead, the LFMs take a path of “first principles,” which MIT describes as “the same way engineers build engines, cars, and airplanes,” explaining that the models are large neural networks with computational units “steeped in theories of dynamic systems, signal processing and numeric linear algebra.” Continue reading MIT Spinoff Liquid Eschews GPTs for Its Fluid Approach to AI

The European Commission has released a list of more than 100 companies that have become signatories to the EU’s AI Pact. While Google, Microsoft and OpenAI are among them, Apple and Meta are not. The voluntary AI Pact is aimed at eliciting policies on AI deployment during the period before the legally binding AI Act takes full effect. The EU AI Pact focuses on transparency in three core areas: internal AI governance, high-risk AI systems mapping and promoting AI literacy and awareness among staff to support ethical development. It is aimed at “relevant stakeholders,” across industry, civil society and academia. Continue reading Amazon, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI Join the EU’s AI Pact

After 50 years of SIGGRAPH, the conference has come full circle, from high-tech for PhDs to AI for everyone. That was Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s message in back-to-back keynote sessions, including a Q&A with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Huang touted Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD), discussing developments aiming to speed adoption of the universal 3D data interchange framework for use in everything from robotics to the creation of “highly accurate virtual worlds for the next evolution of AI.” As Zuckerberg’s interlocutor, he prompted the Facebook founder to share a vision of AI’s personalization of social media. Continue reading Nvidia Debuts New Products to Accelerate Adoption of GenAI

Nvidia and French startup Mistral AI are jointly releasing a new language model called Mistral NeMo 12B that brings enterprise AI capabilities to the desktop without the need for major cloud resources. Developers can easily customize and deploy the new LLM for applications supporting chatbots, multilingual tasks, coding and summarization, according to Nvidia. “NeMo 12B offers a large context window of up to 128k tokens,” explains Mistral, adding that “its reasoning, world knowledge, and coding accuracy are state-of-the-art in its size category.” Available under the Apache 2.0 license, it is easy to implement as a drop-in replacement for Mistral 7B. Continue reading Mistral, Nvidia Bring Enterprise AI to Desktop with NeMo 12B

Nvidia is expanding its substantive influence in the AI sphere with Nemotron-4 340B, a family of open models designed to generate synthetic LLM training data for commercial applications across numerous fields. Through what Nvidia is calling a “uniquely permissive” free open model license, Nemotron-4 340B provides a scalable way for developers to build LLMs. Synthetic data is artificially generated data designed to mimic the characteristics and structure of data found in the real world. The offering is being called “groundbreaking” and an important step toward the democratization of artificial intelligence. Continue reading Nvidia’s Open Models to Provide Free Training Data for LLMs

Leading AI firms spanning Europe, Asia, North America and the Middle East have signed a new voluntary commitment to AI safety. The 16 signatory companies — including Amazon, Google DeepMind, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, OpenAI, xAI and China’s Zhipu AI — will publish outlines indicating how they will measure the risks posed by their frontier models. “In the extreme, leading AI tech companies including from China and the UAE have committed to not develop or deploy AI models if the risks cannot be sufficiently mitigated,” according to UK Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan. Continue reading Global Technology Companies Sign Pledge to Foster AI Safety

France has been pursuing Big Tech and Microsoft and Amazon are among the first to express interest. Microsoft has committed $4.3 billion to expand cloud and AI infrastructure there, sharing plans to bring as many as 25,000 advanced GPUs to France by the close of 2025. The software giant will also train one million people for AI and data jobs while supporting 2,500 AI startups over the next three years. Meanwhile, Amazon announced that it would invest up to $1.3 billion to expand its existing footprint of 35 logistics facilities in the country. The deals were announced Monday during the Choose France summit hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron. Continue reading Microsoft, Amazon Commit to Expanding Operations in France

Amazon Web Services has added Bedrock Studio to the lineup of offerings at Bedrock, its cloud-based managed service for artificial intelligence. Available beginning this week in public preview, Bedrock Studio aims to greatly simplify the development of artificial intelligence apps for its subscribers, allowing them to get going “within minutes,” according to AWS. Developers can log in to the Amazon Bedrock Studio web experience using single sign-on (SSO) company credentials “and instantly start experimenting with Bedrock FMs and tools to build applications,” the cloud giant says, describing the studio as a “rapid prototyping environment” for generative AI. Continue reading AWS Simplifies AI Development with Amazon Bedrock Studio

Microsoft has expanded its Models as a Service (MaaS) catalog for Azure AI Studio, building beyond the 40 models announced at the Microsoft Ignite event last month with the addition of the Llama 2 code generation model from Meta Platforms in public preview. In addition, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision has been added to accelerate generative AI and multimodal application development. Similar to things like Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), MaaS lets customers use AI models on-demand over the web with easy setup and technical support. Continue reading Microsoft Brings Meta’s Llama 2 to Azure Models as a Service