With artificial intelligence development dating back to the 1950s, IBM was clearly ahead of its time. The company has quietly built a commercial portfolio, with more than 100 million customers across 20 industries using its Watson suite, the company says. At its annual Think conference, the company unboxed IBM Watsonx, a next-generation platform that leverages the scale and scope of foundation models to provide custom solutions for data-driven clients. Described as an “enterprise studio for AI builders,” Watsonx is an end-to-end framework that combines the tools, infrastructure and consulting expertise corporations can use to onboard AI. Continue reading IBM Bows Watsonx Suite of Enterprise AI Products, Services

Stability AI has released StableLM, an open source language model that will compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4 to create apps like ChatGPT. The Alpha version of StableLM is available in 3 billion and 7 billion parameters, and the company promises 15 billion to 65 billion parameter models to come. “With the launch of the StableLM suite of models, Stability AI is continuing to make foundational AI technology accessible to all,” the London-based company said. The StableLM models can generate text and code to power various downstream applications with appropriate training. Continue reading Stability AI Debuts Open Source StableLM Foundation Model

Auto-GPT, an open source app that uses OpenAI’s text-generating models, is currently generating a great deal of social media attention. The program can act somewhat autonomously in that it creates its own feedback loop, asking itself a series of questions to help build a more nuanced and complete response to a text prompt. In short, something that would take a user multiple prompts to produce the desired information using ChatGPT could be accomplished using a single request of Auto-GPT, which could independently explore a subject before spitting back a comprehensive response. Continue reading Auto-GPT Generates Social Sizzle, Ushers in Era of AI Agents

Gen Z creators keen to monetize content are increasingly turning to Fanfix, which has amassed about 10 million users — among them 3,000 creators — since its August 2021 launch. Active creators are said to average about $70,000 per year, and the platform itself reportedly commanded an eight-figure purchase price by beauty accelerator SuperOrdinary in June 2022. Fanfix requires 10,000 followers to start an account, which means creators will have to cultivate a base elsewhere before applying to join. All content is paywalled, with account holders choosing their own rates, between $5 and $50 per month. Continue reading Gen Z Creators Find New Revenue Opportunities with Fanfix

As China’s tech giants begin releasing ChatGPT-style products, the powerful Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has issued a draft of what will become the country’s first set of restrictions for generative AI. Ground rules include limiting content created by AI to that which reflects the core values of socialism and does not subvert state power in text or image, according to the draft. Models should also be trained in a way that does not allow them to generate false information or exhibit bias as to race, ethnicity or gender. The news comes as three Chinese firms release generative AI platforms. Continue reading Chinese Government Drafts New Rules for Generative AI Tech

Clement Delangue, co-founder and CEO of New York-based Hugging Face, turned a casual invitation to meet with open-source AI stakeholders during a trip to San Francisco into what is being called the “Woodstock of AI.” In a matter of days, the event ballooned to more than 5,000 people hosted at the Exploratorium on March 31. “We just crossed 1,500 registrations for the Open-Source AI Meetup!” Delangue messaged the RSVP list days before the event. “What started with a tweet might lead to the biggest AI meetup in history.” The 8-year-old company is also making headlines for its new HuggingGPT system. Continue reading Hugging Face Rallies Open-Source AI Community at Meetup

Today’s leading AI chatbots need tremendous computing resources to train, then function, but that isn’t stopping startups from trying to get into the game, some with open-source alternatives. Clearly disadvantaged compared to market leaders like OpenAI, Meta, DeepMind and Anthropic — deep-pocketed, all — a band of independent researchers has coalesced under the name Together. Their aim: to become the first open-source challenger to the likes of ChatGPT. The industry seems undecided as to whether open-source AI is a good thing. Many are worried at the thought of a universally available AI toolkit, and what troublemakers might do with it. Continue reading Researchers Developing Open-Source Challenger to ChatGPT

OpenAI is now allowing third-party developers integrate ChatGPT into their apps, a solution the company says will be a more cost-effective alternative. The language model can be used for more than chat, says OpenAI, which also has a new speech-to-text model called Whisper. The company is also touting gpt-3.5-turbo, calling it the “best model for many non-chat use cases.” With a major investment from Microsoft, and the eyes of the industry on it, OpenAI seems to be feeling some pressure to add earnings to the success it has as a thought leader. Continue reading OpenAI Targets Affordable AI with ChatGPT and Whisper APIs

While smart home technologies have often made a strong showing at CES, adoption has been hampered by issues of interoperability. This year at CES saw the widespread reveal of Matter (originally known as Project CHIP), a new smart home standard designed to support interoperability. Matter was originally announced in 2019 as a partnership between Apple, Google and Amazon to create an open-source smart home standard. Today, if CES 2023 is any indication, the standard is becoming more prevalent across a wide variety of connected devices and different product sectors. Continue reading CES: Matter Smart Home Protocol Marks Major Trend in 2023

Cloud-based code hosting service GitHub wants to make open-source material more secure. The Microsoft service is expanding safety features with two new offerings in beta. Secret scanning alerts are now free for all public repositories while push-notifications for custom secret patterns are also being made available. Open-source code is now incorporated into a whopping 97 percent of applications, according to Synopsys, which says 90 percent of organizations rely on it to varying degrees. Yet the very access that contributes to its popularity also leaves it vulnerable to malicious actors, as emphasized by the SolarWinds, Log4j and other breaches. Continue reading GitHub Is Testing New Security Tools for Open-Source Code

Meta, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Dutch mapping company TomTom have joined forces with The Linux Foundation to give Google a run for its money in the maps space with the launch of the Overture Maps Foundation to build interoperable open map data. “Mapping the physical environment and every community in the world, even as they grow and change, is a massively complex challenge that no one organization can manage,” Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin said. Overture’s mission is to create an extensible mapping framework that will enable companies to contribute their own data, constantly refreshing as the physical world changes. Continue reading Meta, Microsoft, AWS Want to Map the Future with Overture

Spotify is estimated to have a one-third share of the global music-streaming market, and now the company is making a mark in B-to-B with Backstage, an open-source framework for building developer portals that is now in use by an estimated 200 companies, including American Airlines, Netflix, Roku, Epic Games, VMware and LinkedIn. Backstage centralizes management of engineering tools, resources and documentation — from CI/CD status and Kubernetes monitoring to API and library docs and more. While Spotify has made Backstage available free, it’s now introducing a package of five premium plugins via paid subscription. Continue reading Spotify Launches Premium Plugins for Backstage Framework

In a social media ecosystem roiling with change, Mastodon is a newcomer that’s picking up steam as change agents and disaffected Twitter users seek alternative outlets. With 4.5 million accounts and growing, the microblogging platform is the brainchild of 29-year-old German software engineer Eugen Rochko, whose “free, open-source decentralized platform” has become the elephant in the room for Elon Musk, who on Monday tweeted three derogatory comments about the service. Musk later deleted the posts, but not before generating waves of publicity for his upstart competitor. Continue reading Twitter Users Are Testing Decentralized Social Site Mastodon

Bluesky, a decentralized platform conceived by Jack Dorsey while he was CEO of Twitter, has generated more than 30,000 waitlist signups as it prepares for a private beta launch of Bluesky Social. Bluesky’s main innovation is the Authenticated Transport (AT) Protocol, described as a networking technology “to power the next generation of social applications.” AT Protocol is an open standard designed to allow different social apps the ability to interoperate, giving users more control by letting them independently adjust algorithm settings or move profiles without losing data. Continue reading Incubated at Twitter by Jack Dorsey, Bluesky Launching Beta

A Kindle that lets you annotate text, a “no-contact” sleep tracker and a refresh on the Fire TV Cube were among the new products Amazon showcased at its annual fall hardware event this week. Updates for Echo smart speakers, an expanded Ring camera inventory and updates to its Eero Wi-Fi extender line were also in the spotlight. Home devices that enable “a silent infrastructure of ambient intelligence to do just about anything” was the through line, according to Wired, with news ranging from pet detection for Astro the robot to a feature called Alexa Shop the Look. Continue reading Amazon Promotes Device Updates at Its Fall Hardware Event