Available for Vertex AI customers on the allowlist, Imagen 2 enables users to craft and deploy photorealistic images using intuitive tooling and fully-managed infrastructure. 

Developed with Google DeepMind technology, Imagen 2 offers improved image quality and a range of functionalities tailored for specific use cases.

Key features of Imagen 2 include:

• Diverse image generation: Imagen 2 excels in creating high-resolution images from natural language prompts that cater to various user requirements.

• Text rendering in multiple languages: Overcoming common challenges, Imagen 2 supports accurate text rendering in multiple languages.

• Logo generation: Businesses can leverage Imagen 2 to create a variety of creative and realistic logos—with the option to overlay them on products, clothing, business cards, and more.

• Captions and question-answering: Imagen 2’s advanced image understanding capabilities facilitate the creation of descriptive captions and provide detailed answers to questions about image elements.

• Multi-language support: Imagen 2 introduces support for six additional languages in preview, with plans for more in early 2024. This includes the ability to translate between prompt and output.

• Safety measures: Imagen 2 incorporates built-in safety precautions, aligning with Google’s Responsible AI principles. It features safety filters and integrates with a digital watermarking service to ensure responsible use.

Enterprise-ready capabilities

Imagen 2 on Vertex AI is designed to meet enterprise standards, offering reliability and governance akin to its predecessor. With new features such as high-quality image rendering, improved text rendering, logo generation, and safety measures, Imagen 2 aims to provide organisations with a comprehensive tool for creative image generation.

Leading companies like Snap, Shutterstock, and Canva have already embraced Imagen for creative purposes.

Chris Loy, Director of AI Services at Shutterstock, commented: “We exist to empower the world to tell their stories by bridging the gap between idea and execution.

“Variety is critical for the creative process, which is why we continue to integrate the latest and greatest technology into our image generator and editing features—as long as it is built on responsibly sourced data,”

Danny Wu, Head of AI at Canva, added: “We’re continuing to use generative AI to innovate the design process and augment imagination.

“With Imagen, our 170M+ monthly users can benefit from the image quality improvements to uplevel their content creation at scale.”

As Imagen 2 makes waves in the creative industry, organisations are encouraged to explore its potential. Google Cloud anticipates users will harness the new features to elevate their creative endeavours and build on the success achieved with Imagen.

(Photo by G on Unsplash)

See also: Microsoft unveils 2.7B parameter language model Phi-2

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with Digital Transformation Week.

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The post Google Cloud announces Imagen 2 text-to-image generator appeared first on AI News.

Phi-2 builds upon the success of its predecessors, Phi-1 and Phi-1.5, by matching or surpassing models up to 25 times larger—thanks to innovations in model scaling and training data curation.

The compact size of Phi-2 makes it an ideal playground for researchers, facilitating exploration in mechanistic interpretability, safety improvements, and fine-tuning experimentation across various tasks.

Phi-2’s achievements are underpinned by two key aspects:

• Training data quality: Microsoft emphasises the critical role of training data quality in model performance. Phi-2 leverages “textbook-quality” data, focusing on synthetic datasets designed to impart common sense reasoning and general knowledge. The training corpus is augmented with carefully selected web data, filtered based on educational value and content quality.

• Innovative scaling techniques: Microsoft adopts innovative techniques to scale up Phi-2 from its predecessor, Phi-1.5. Knowledge transfer from the 1.3 billion parameter model accelerates training convergence, leading to a clear boost in benchmark scores.

Performance evaluation

Phi-2 has undergone rigorous evaluation across various benchmarks, including Big Bench Hard, commonsense reasoning, language understanding, math, and coding.

With only 2.7 billion parameters, Phi-2 outperforms larger models – including Mistral and Llama-2 – and matches or outperforms Google’s recently-announced Gemini Nano 2:

Beyond benchmarks, Phi-2 showcases its capabilities in real-world scenarios. Tests involving prompts commonly used in the research community reveal Phi-2’s prowess in solving physics problems and correcting student mistakes, showcasing its versatility beyond standard evaluations:

Phi-2 is a Transformer-based model with a next-word prediction objective, trained on 1.4 trillion tokens from synthetic and web datasets. The training process – conducted on 96 A100 GPUs over 14 days – focuses on maintaining a high level of safety and claims to surpass open-source models in terms of toxicity and bias.

With the announcement of Phi-2, Microsoft continues to push the boundaries of what smaller base language models can achieve.

(Image Credit: Microsoft)

See also: AI & Big Data Expo: Demystifying AI and seeing past the hype

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with Digital Transformation Week.

Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

The post Microsoft unveils 2.7B parameter language model Phi-2 appeared first on AI News.

For a long time, there has been a lack of synchronisation between lip movements and voices in dubbed content. Experts believe this is one of the reasons why dubbing is relatively unpopular in English-speaking countries. In fact, lip movements make localised content more realistic and therefore more appealing to audiences.

There is a study by Yukari Hirata, a professor known for her work in linguistics, which says that watching lip movements (rather than gestures) helps to perceive difficult phonemic contrasts in the second language. Lip reading is also one of the ways we learn to speak in general.   

Today, with Rask’s new feature, it’s possible to take localised content to a new level, making dubbed videos more natural.

The AI automatically restructures the lower face based on references. It takes into account how the speaker looks and what they are saying to make the end result more realistic. 

How it works:

1. Upload a video with one or more people in the frame.
2. Translate the video into another language.
3. Press the ‘Lip Sync Check’ button and the algorithm will evaluate the video for lip sync compatibility.
4. If the video passes the check, press ‘Lip Sync’ and wait for the result.
5. Download the video.

According to Maria Chmir, founder and CEO of Rask AI, the new feature will help content creators expand their audience. The AI visually adjusts lip movements to make a character appear to speak the language as fluently as a native speaker. 

The technology is based on generative adversarial network (GAN) learning, which consists of a generator and a discriminator. Both the generator and the discriminator compete with each other to stay one step ahead of the other. The generator clearly generates content (lip movements), while the discriminator is responsible for quality control.     

The beta release is available to all Rask subscription customers.

(Editor’s note: This article is sponsored by Rask AI)

The post AI multi-speaker lip-sync has arrived appeared first on AI News.

Demis Hassabis, CEO and Co-Founder of Google DeepMind, introduced Gemini as a multimodal model that is capable of seamlessly understanding and combining various types of information, including text, code, audio, image, and video.

Gemini comes in three optimised versions: Ultra, Pro, and Nano. The Ultra model boasts state-of-the-art performance, surpassing human experts in language understanding and demonstrating unprecedented capabilities in tasks ranging from coding to multimodal benchmarks.

What sets Gemini apart is its native multimodality, eliminating the need for stitching together separate components for different modalities. This groundbreaking approach, fine-tuned through large-scale collaborative efforts across Google teams, positions Gemini as a flexible and efficient model capable of running on data centres to mobile devices.

One of Gemini’s standout features is its sophisticated multimodal reasoning, enabling it to extract insights from vast datasets with remarkable precision. The model’s prowess extends to understanding and generating high-quality code in popular programming languages.

However, as Google ventures into this new era of AI, responsibility and safety remain paramount. Gemini undergoes rigorous safety evaluations, including assessments for bias and toxicity. Google is actively collaborating with external experts to address potential blind spots and ensure the model’s ethical deployment.

Gemini 1.0 is now rolling out across various Google products – including the Bard chatbot – with plans for integration into Search, Ads, Chrome, and Duet AI. However, the Bard upgrade will not be released in Europe pending clearance from regulators.

Developers and enterprise customers can access Gemini Pro via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio or Google Cloud Vertex AI. Android developers will also be able to build with Gemini Nano via AICore, a new system capability available in Android 14.

(Image Credit: Google)

See also: AI & Big Data Expo: AI’s impact on decision-making in marketing

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with Cyber Security & Cloud Expo and Digital Transformation Week.

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The post Google’s next-gen AI model Gemini outperforms GPT-4 appeared first on AI News.

The collaboration brings together the strengths of both companies, integrating NVIDIA’s latest multi-node systems with next-generation GPUs, CPUs, and AI software, along with AWS technologies such as Nitro System advanced virtualisation, Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) interconnect, and UltraCluster scalability.

Key highlights of the expanded collaboration include:

1. Introduction of NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips on AWS:
   • AWS becomes the first cloud provider to offer NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips with new multi-node NVLink technology.
   • The NVIDIA GH200 NVL32 multi-node platform enables joint customers to scale to thousands of GH200 Superchips, providing supercomputer-class performance.
2. Hosting NVIDIA DGX Cloud on AWS:
   • Collaboration to host NVIDIA DGX Cloud, an AI-training-as-a-service, on AWS, featuring GH200 NVL32 for accelerated training of generative AI and large language models.
3. Project Ceiba supercomputer:
   • Collaboration on Project Ceiba, aiming to design the world’s fastest GPU-powered AI supercomputer with 16,384 NVIDIA GH200 Superchips and processing capability of 65 exaflops.
4. Introduction of new Amazon EC2 instances:
   • AWS introduces three new Amazon EC2 instances, including P5e instances powered by NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs for large-scale generative AI and HPC workloads.
5. Software innovations:
   • NVIDIA introduces software on AWS, such as NeMo Retriever microservice for chatbots and summarisation tools, and BioNeMo to speed up drug discovery for pharmaceutical companies.

This collaboration signifies a joint commitment to advancing the field of generative AI, offering customers access to cutting-edge technologies and resources.

Internally, Amazon robotics and fulfilment teams already employ NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform to optimise warehouses in virtual environments first before real-world deployment.

The integration of NVIDIA and AWS technologies will accelerate the development, training, and inference of large language models and generative AI applications across various industries.

(Photo by ANIRUDH on Unsplash)

See also: Inflection-2 beats Google’s PaLM 2 across common benchmarks

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with Cyber Security & Cloud Expo and Digital Transformation Week.

Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

The post AWS and NVIDIA expand partnership to advance generative AI appeared first on AI News.

Inflection-2 was trained on over 5,000 NVIDIA GPUs to reach 1.025 quadrillion floating point operations (FLOPs), putting it in the same league as PaLM 2 Large. However, early benchmarks show Inflection-2 outperforming Google’s model on tests of reasoning ability, factual knowledge, and stylistic prowess.

On a range of common academic AI benchmarks, Inflection-2 achieved higher scores than PaLM 2 on most. This included outscoring the search giant’s flagship on the diverse Multi-task Middle-school Language Understanding (MMLU) tests, as well as TriviaQA, HellaSwag, and the Grade School Math (GSM8k) benchmarks:

The startup’s new model will soon power its personal assistant app Pi to enable more natural conversations and useful features.

Inflection said its transition from NVIDIA A100 to H100 GPUs for inference – combined with optimisation work – will increase serving speed and reduce costs despite Inflection-2 being much larger than its predecessor.  

An Inflection spokesperson said this latest model brings them “a big milestone closer” towards fulfilling the mission of providing AI assistants for all. They added the team is “already looking forward” to training even larger models on their 22,000 GPU supercluster.

Safety is said to be a top priority for the researchers, with Inflection being one of the first signatories to the White House’s July 2023 voluntary AI commitments. The company said its safety team continues working to ensure models are rigorously evaluated and rely on best practices for alignment.

With impressive benchmarks and plans to scale further, Inflection’s latest effort poses a serious challenge to tech giants like Google and Microsoft who have so far dominated the field of large language models. The race is on to deliver the next generation of AI.

(Photo by Johann Walter Bantz on Unsplash)

See also: Anthropic upsizes Claude 2.1 to 200K tokens, nearly doubling GPT-4

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with Digital Transformation Week.

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The post Inflection-2 beats Google’s PaLM 2 across common benchmarks appeared first on AI News.

The release comes on the heels of an expanded partnership with Google that provides Anthropic access to advanced processing hardware, enabling the substantial expansion of Claude’s context-handling capabilities.

With the ability to process lengthy documents like full codebases or novels, Claude 2.1 is positioned to unlock new potential across applications from contract analysis to literary study. 

The 200K token window represents more than just an incremental improvement—early tests indicate Claude 2.1 can accurately grasp information from prompts over 50 percent longer than GPT-4 before the performance begins to degrade.

Anthropic also touted a 50 percent reduction in hallucination rates for Claude 2.1 over version 2.0. Increased accuracy could put the model in closer competition with GPT-4 in responding precisely to complex factual queries.

Additional new features include an API tool for advanced workflow integration and “system prompts” that allow users to define Claude’s tone, goals, and rules at the outset for more personalised, contextually relevant interactions. For instance, a financial analyst could direct Claude to adopt industry terminology when summarising reports.

However, the full 200K token capacity remains exclusive to paying Claude Pro subscribers for now. Free users will continue to be limited to Claude 2.0’s 100K tokens.

As the AI landscape shifts, Claude 2.1’s enhanced precision and adaptability promise to be a game changer—presenting new options for businesses exploring how to strategically leverage AI capabilities.

With its substantial context expansion and rigorous accuracy improvements, Anthropic’s latest offering signals its determination to compete head-to-head with leading models like GPT-4.

(Image Credit: Anthropic)

See also: Paul O’Sullivan, Salesforce: Transforming work in the GenAI era

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with Digital Transformation Week.

Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

The post Anthropic upsizes Claude 2.1 to 200K tokens, nearly doubling GPT-4 appeared first on AI News.

Paul O’Sullivan, Senior Vice President of Solution Engineering (UKI) at Salesforce, sheds light on the complexities of this transformative landscape, urging businesses to tread cautiously while embracing the potential of artificial intelligence.

Unprecedented opportunities

Generative AI has stormed the scene with remarkable speed. ChatGPT, for example, amassed 100 million users in a mere two months.

“If you put that into context, it took 10 years to reach 100 million users on Netflix,” says O’Sullivan.

This rapid adoption signals a seismic shift, promising substantial economic growth. O’Sullivan estimates that generative AI has the potential to contribute a staggering £3.5 trillion ($4.4 trillion) to the global economy.

“Again, if you put that into context, that’s about as much tax as the entire US takes in,” adds O’Sullivan.

One of its key advantages lies in driving automation, with the prospect of automating up to 40 percent of the average workday—leading to significant productivity gains for businesses.

The AI trust gap

However, amid the excitement, there looms a significant challenge: the AI trust gap. 

O’Sullivan acknowledges that despite being a top priority for C-suite executives, over half of customers remain sceptical about the safety and security of AI applications.

Addressing this gap will require a multi-faceted approach including grappling with issues related to data quality and ensuring that AI systems are built on reliable, unbiased, and representative datasets. 

“Companies have struggled with data quality and data hygiene. So that’s a key area of focus,” explains O’Sullivan.

Safeguarding data privacy is also paramount, with stringent measures needed to prevent the misuse of sensitive customer information.

“Both customers and businesses are worried about data privacy—we can’t let large language models store and learn from sensitive customer data,” says O’Sullivan. “Over half of customers and their customers don’t believe AI is safe and secure today.”

Ethical considerations

AI also prompts ethical considerations. Concerns about hallucinations – where AI systems generate inaccurate or misleading information – must be addressed meticulously.

Businesses must confront biases and toxicities embedded in AI algorithms, ensuring fairness and inclusivity. Striking a balance between innovation and ethical responsibility is pivotal to gaining customer trust.

“A trustworthy AI should consistently meet expectations, adhere to commitments, and create a sense of dependability within the organisation,” explains O’Sullivan. “It’s crucial to address the limitations and the potential risks. We’ve got to be open here and lead with integrity.”

As businesses embrace AI, upskilling the workforce will also be imperative.

O’Sullivan advocates for a proactive approach, encouraging employees to master the art of prompt writing. Crafting effective prompts is vital, enabling faster and more accurate interactions with AI systems and enhancing productivity across various tasks.

Moreover, understanding AI lingo is essential to foster open conversations and enable informed decision-making within organisations.

A collaborative future

Crucially, O’Sullivan emphasises a collaborative future where AI serves as a co-pilot rather than a replacement for human expertise.

“AI, for now, lacks cognitive capability like empathy, reasoning, emotional intelligence, and ethics—and these are absolutely critical business skills that humans need to bring to the table,” says O’Sullivan.

This collaboration fosters a sense of trust, as humans act as a check and balance to ensure the responsible use of AI technology.

By addressing the AI trust gap, upskilling the workforce, and fostering a harmonious collaboration between humans and AI, businesses can harness the full potential of generative AI while building trust and confidence among customers.

You can watch our full interview with Paul O’Sullivan below:

Paul O’Sullivan and the Salesforce team will be sharing their invaluable insights at this year’s AI & Big Data Expo Global. O’Sullivan will feature on a day one panel titled ‘Converging Technologies – We Work Better Together’.

The post Paul O’Sullivan, Salesforce: Transforming work in the GenAI era appeared first on AI News.

Altman, who was recently ousted by OpenAI’s board for reasons that have had no shortage of speculation, has found a new home at Microsoft. The announcement came after unsuccessful negotiations with OpenAI’s board to reinstate Altman.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella – who has long expressed confidence in Altman’s vision and leadership – revealed that Altman and Brockman will lead Microsoft’s newly established advanced AI research team.

Nadella expressed excitement about the collaboration, stating, “We’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success.”

The move follows Altman’s abrupt departure from OpenAI. Former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear has been appointed as interim CEO at OpenAI.

Altman’s role at Microsoft is anticipated to build on the company’s strategy of allowing founders and innovators space to create independent identities, similar to Microsoft’s approach with GitHub, Mojang Studios, and LinkedIn.

Microsoft’s decision to bring Altman and Brockman on board coincides with the development of its custom AI chip. The Maia AI chip, designed to train large language models, aims to reduce dependence on Nvidia.

While Microsoft reassures its commitment to the OpenAI partnership, valued at approximately $10 billion, it emphasises ongoing innovation and support for customers and partners.

As Altman and Brockman embark on leading Microsoft’s advanced AI research team, the industry will be watching closely to see what the high-profile figures can do with Microsoft’s resources at their disposal. The industry will also be observing whether OpenAI can maintain its success under different leadership.

(Photo by Turag Photography on Unsplash)

See also: Amdocs, NVIDIA and Microsoft Azure build custom LLMs for telcos

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with Digital Transformation Week.

Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

The post Microsoft recruits former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Co-Founder Greg Brockman appeared first on AI News.

From addressing the spectrum of use cases to navigating digital transformation, Shakir shed light on the challenges, ethical considerations, and the promising future of this groundbreaking technology.

Wide spectrum of use cases

Shakir highlighted the wide array of GenAI applications, ranging from productivity enhancements and research support to high-stakes areas such as strategic data mining and knowledge bots. She emphasised the transformational power of AI in understanding customer data, moving beyond simple sentiment analysis to providing actionable insights, thus elevating customer engagement strategies.

“GenAI now can take your customer insights to another level. It doesn’t just tell you whether something’s a positive or negative sentiment like old AI would do, it now says it’s positive or negative. It’s negative because X, Y, Z, and here’s the root cause for X, Y, Z,” explains Shakir.

Powering digital transformation

Gate One adopts an adaptive strategy approach, abandoning traditional five-year strategies for more agile, adaptable frameworks.

“We have a framework – our 5P model – where it’s: identify your people, identify the problem statement that you’re trying to solve for, appoint some partnerships, think about what’s the right capability mix that you have, think about the pathway through which you’re going to deliver, be use case or risk-led, and then proof of concept,” says Shakir.

By solving specific challenges and aligning strategies with business objectives, Gate One aims to drive meaningful digital transformation for its clients.

Assessing client readiness

Shakir discussed Gate One’s diagnostic tools, which blend technology maturity and operating model innovation questions to assess a client’s readiness to adopt GenAI successfully.

“We have a proprietary tool that we’ve built, a diagnostic tool where we look at blending tech maturity capability type questions with operating model innovation questions,” explains Shakir.

By categorising clients as “vanguard” or “safe” players, Gate One tailors their approach to meet individual readiness levels—ensuring a seamless integration of GenAI into the client’s operations.

Key challenges and ethical considerations

Shakir acknowledged the challenges associated with GenAI, especially concerning the quality of model outputs. She stressed the importance of addressing biases, amplifications, and ethical concerns, calling for a more meaningful and sustainable implementation of AI.

“Poor quality data or poorly trained models can create biases, racism, sexism… those are the things that worry me about the technology,” says Shakir.

Gate One is actively working on refining models and data inputs to mitigate such problems.

The future of GenAI

Looking ahead, Shakir predicted a demand for more ethical AI practices from consumers and increased pressure on developers to create representative and unbiased models.

Shakir also envisioned a shift in work dynamics where AI liberates humans from mundane tasks to allow them to focus on solving significant global challenges, particularly in the realm of sustainability.

Later this month, Gate One will be attending and sponsoring this year’s AI & Big Data Expo Global. During the event, Gate One aims to share its ethos of meaningful AI and emphasise ethical and sustainable approaches.

Gate One will also be sharing with attendees GenAI’s impact on marketing and experience design, offering valuable insights into the changing landscape of customer interactions and brand experiences.

As businesses navigate the evolving landscape of GenAI, Gate One stands at the forefront, advocating for responsible, ethical, and sustainable practices and ensuring a brighter, more impactful future for businesses and society.

Umbar Shakir and the Gate One team will be sharing their invaluable insights at this year’s AI & Big Data Expo Global. Find out more about Umbar Shakir’s day one keynote presentation here.

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