Google has rolled out an open-source marketing mix model (MMM) called Meridian that aims to help in formulating cross-channel media strategies in the current environment of fragmented media consumption and privacy changes. As marketers contend with Google’s plan to sunset the use of third-party cookies by the end of this year, MMMs — classic tools of yesteryear — “are experiencing a renaissance,” says the search giant. MMMs are statistical analyses companies use to help measure the impact of cross-channel marketing sales. Google says it has “observed more customers turning to MMMs, especially performance and full-funnel marketers.” Continue reading Google Introduces Open-Source Marketing Measurement Tool

GitHub Copilot Enterprise is being released for general availability for $39 per month. Calling the tool GitHub’s “most advanced AI offering to date,” the company says it can be customized to an organization’s knowledge and codebase, placing “the institutional knowledge of your organization at your developers’ fingertips.” Infusing GitHub Copilot Enterprise throughout a company’s software development lifecycle lets team members “ask questions about public and private code, get up to speed quickly with new codebases and build greater consistencies across engineering teams” while ensuring everyone access to the same standard codebase. Continue reading GitHub Copilot Enterprise in General Release at $39 Monthly

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is launching a pilot program to create the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR), a shared U.S. AI research infrastructure. The move fulfills part of President Biden’s October executive order on the responsible development of artificial intelligence. Ten other federal agencies have joined the NSF in launching the program, while tech giants Microsoft, Nvidia and Google have already pledged their support, along with more than 20 other private organizations across the industry, academic and non-profit sectors. The idea is to create shared access to information and things like cloud computing resources. Continue reading Big Tech Onboard to Advance President Biden’s NSF AI Pilot

Intel formally launched its new Core Ultra CPUs and related products this week at its AI Everywhere event. The company shared new solutions ranging from the data center to the cloud edge and PC. Intel’s new mobile processors are part of its Meteor Lake lineup, all of which will now bear the Ultra imprimatur instead of the “I,” promising greater power efficiency and performance. At the New York City event, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said “AI innovation is poised to raise the digital economy’s impact up to as much as one-third of global gross domestic product.” Continue reading Intel Unveils AI-Driven Chips to Compete with Nvidia and AMD

Amazon’s new Thin Client is a new $195 device that allows enterprise users to connect to virtual desktop environments, such as Amazon WorkSpaces, using the Internet and a box as compact as the Fire TV Cube. In fact, the Thin Client leverages Fire TV Cube hardware, allowing Amazon to tap existing expertise from the e-retail giant’s streaming media player division. However, Thin Client “is not for spending time watching Thursday Night Football, or bingeing ‘Invincible,’” but aims to convenience workers while reducing technology costs and enhancing security for enterprise, the company says. Continue reading Amazon Thin Client Connects Employees to Virtual Desktops

Bill Gates has published his thinking about the future of computing, and fascinatingly, it’s the same as his prediction from decades ago: agents. No mere bots — and certainly not anthropomorphized paperclips — agents (to Gates) will abstract almost all HCI to a natural language conversation with systems that have our permission to take meaningful actions. Gates makes a highly specific prediction: within five years, the very idea of an app itself will seem as outdated as a rotary phone dial does next to an iPhone. A conversational UI will sit on top of a language model that has access to as much of our private data as we wish to give it. Continue reading Bill Gates Imagines Agents as the Human-Computer Interface

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

Dell Technologies is expanding its Generative AI Solutions portfolio to help enterprise customers add GenAI to their workflow. The expansion includes support for advanced infrastructure and collaborative data solutions that optimize and help secure intelligence gathering and utilization. Dell takes a “validated design” approach to optimization and acceleration, testing different hardware configurations designed to fit the needs of various use cases. Dell has partnered with Nvidia for validated GenAI design for model customization, and with Starburst on data lakehouse solutions that tap multi-cloud data for AI end-use. Continue reading Dell Partnering with Nvidia and Starburst for GenAI Solutions

Enterprise software firm SAP is launching its own AI assistant named “Joule,” which will be embedded throughout the company’s cloud portfolio, offering users contextualized insights across SAP apps and third-party sources on both desktop and mobile platforms. The German business solutions giant has an estimated 300 million global enterprise users using its software for applications related to managing human resources, finance, supply chain, procurement and customer experience, as well as the underlying SAP Business Technology Platform. Continue reading SAP Plans to Launch Its New AI Assistant ‘Joule’ in November

The White House has unveiled plans for a two-year competition with $18.5 million in prizes for artificial intelligence coders who can come up with ways to identify and fix software vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure code, such as that which runs the Internet. Styled AIxCC, the AI Cyber Challenge is being led by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) with support from companies including Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, who have committed to lending expertise and technology. Up to seven small businesses will potentially receive $1 million each to participate. Continue reading White House Launches $20 Million AI Cybersecurity Challenge

Massachusetts-based editing software and services company Avid Technology has entered into an agreement with an affiliate of private equity firm STG for an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $1.4 billion, including Avid’s net debt. Unanimously approved by Avid’s board of directors, the deal is expected to close during the fourth quarter of 2023. Upon completion, Avid will become a privately-held company and its stock will no longer be traded on the Nasdaq exchange. The transaction, which will be financed through equity and debt financing, is subject to Avid stockholder and regulatory approvals. Continue reading Private Equity Firm STG Plans to Acquire Avid for $1.4 Billion

Spotify is rolling out its new Confidence software development product in private beta. Based on its learnings from more than 10 years of experience experimenting at scale, the company says Confidence aims to make it simple for teams to set up, run and analyze their own user tests so they can quickly perfect and productize ideas. “Whether it’s automatically coordinating simultaneous A/B tests or orchestrating the rollout of an AI recommendation system across mobile, desktop, and web, the platform we built scales experimentation best practices and capabilities,” Spotify explains, adding that it plans to make the technology available soon to all companies. Continue reading Spotify’s Confidence Development Platform Is in Private Beta

There’s a new kind of cloud on the block, Wing Cloud, which features an open-source code called Winglang that drives cross-platform development across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Kubernetes, among others. Wing Cloud has emerged from stealth mode with $20 million in seed funding and offers “a new kind of abstract cloud” that “doesn’t involve data centers, machines or provisioning engines.” The software-based Wing Cloud visual layer is accessible through a general purpose computing model that operationally unifies infrastructure and application. Continue reading Wing Cloud Develops Unified Open-Source Coding Language

Google DeepMind has discovered a way to create AI algorithms that run faster than those coded by humans, which could lead to more cost-effective software development and computing that is more efficient and sustainable, according to the Alphabet company. The breakthrough, detailed in the journal Nature, is called AlphaDev. It uses a form of machine learning called reinforcement that allows computers to build on their successes, honing strategies independent of human programmers. In this case, faster algorithms were developed for computer-science functions like sorting and hashing. Continue reading Google DeepMind’s AlphaDev Can Create Faster Algorithms

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