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X launches Stories on X delivering news summarized by Grok AI | TechCrunch

May 4, 2024 1:47 AM0


X, formerly Twitter, is now using Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok to power a feature that summarizes the personalized trending stories in the app’s Explore section. According to an announcement and screenshots posted by the X Engineering team on Friday, X’s Premium subscribers will be able to read a summary of posts on X associated with each trending story featured on the “For You” tab in Explore.

The For You page showcases the news and stories being shared across X’s platform that are popular within your network, along with other suggested items. It’s among the first stops for X users who want to catch up with what’s being said on the platform, without having to spend long amounts of time scrolling their timeline.

For instance, a TechCrunch reader’s For You page today may feature stories about Apple’s coming iPad event, Microsoft’s security overhaul, and burnout among AI engineers. As you tap into each story to view the associated X posts, a summary of the story will now appear at the top of the page, offering an overview of the subject matter.

In the case of the AI burnout story, for example, the Grok-powered summary begins: “AI engineers are facing burnout and rushed rollouts due to the competitive race in the tech industry, as companies prioritize investor satisfaction over solving actual problems.” After briefly touching on the problem of the AI “rat race,” the story concludes by saying that “critics argue that proper safeguards and thoughtful innovation should not be afterthoughts in the pursuit of AI investments …”

Humorously, a message appears below that summary, warning: “Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs.”

The idea of summarizing trends is not a new one, but it is new in terms of how the summaries are being handled. Under its prior leadership, Twitter began adding headlines and descriptions to its trends in 2020, though not with the help of an AI bot. Instead, Twitter itself would annotate some of its daily trends with extra information and pin a representative tweet to provide further context. However, Twitter’s rollout was haphazard, with some trends getting written up and others not.

With Grok’s Stories, as the summaries are called, all the top news on the For You page is summarized.

Access to xAI’s chatbot Grok is meant to be a selling point to push users to buy premium subscriptions. With the Premium and top-tier Premium+ plans, users can access Grok by tapping on the bottom middle button of the app. A snarky and “rebellious” AI, Grok’s differentiator from other AI chatbots like ChatGPT is its exclusive and real-time access to X data.

A post published to X on Friday by tech journalist Alex Kantrowitz lays out Elon Musk’s further plan for AI-powered news on X, based on an email conversation with the X owner.

Kantrowitz says that conversations on X will make up the core of Grok’s summaries. Grok won’t look at the article text, in other words, even if that’s what people are discussing on the platform. That could be a problem in terms of painting a true picture of the news being shared, as what people are chattering about on X may be their reactions or opinions, not the news itself. Kantrowitz calls the move “controversial” but admits there’s opportunity there.

Journalists are already having to contend with AI news summaries in other areas as well, including from startups. Arc’s new web browser includes an AI summary feature and former Twitter engineers are building an AI news summary service called Particle, for example. How this will play out in terms of traffic to the news sites themselves remains to be seen. Kantrowitz believes that users may be interested in going “deeper into the source material once their curiosity is piqued,” he writes. But it’s also likely that at least some news sites will go out of business as page views drop due to AI summaries, leaving fewer sources for AI bots like Grok to summarize in the long run.

For that reason, some news publishers are doing deals with AI providers like OpenAI’s recently announced partnership with the FT. Axel Springer, the AP, Le Monde and others have also announced similar moves. In X’s case, it’s able to get at the news by way of the conversation around it — and without having to partner to access the news content itself. That’s both clever as well as worrisome, the latter from a misinformation standpoint.

Grok’s Stories are rolling out to Premium X subscribers now. Access to Premium starts at $8 per month, if paying on the web and not through the app stores.




Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

EXCLUSIVE: NASA is expanding its Wallops Island facility to support three times as many launches

May 3, 2024 10:11 PM0


NASA is kicking off a formal environmental assessment of its facilities on Wallops Island, Virginia, to increase the number of authorized rocket launches at the site by almost 200%, according to slides and recordings of an April 29 internal meeting viewed by TechCrunch.

The proposed changes could help ease congestion at the country’s other spaceports, which have felt the strain of a rapid increase in launch capacity due primarily to SpaceX. That strain is projected to only worsen as companies including Rocket Lab, Relativity, Blue Origin and others aim to bring new rockets online in the next few years.

Wallops expansion has likely been on the minds of NASA officials for some time. After Rocket Lab conducted its first Electron launch from there in 2022, agency officials told the media that interest from private companies looking to launch from the site was “high.” And while these plans would eventually be made public as part of the EA process, this is the first time the scale of the proposed changes has been published.

The Wallops Island Southern Expansion Environmental Assessment (WISE EA), as the agency calls the undertaking, will study the potential consequences of a massive increase in annual launches from 18 to 52. The study will also consider other critical changes to the site, like water barge landings of rockets’ first stages and on-site storage of liquid methane, a novel rocket fuel. To fully understand the affects of these changes, NASA will be working with contractors who will conduct acoustic analyses, and look at air emissions impacts and impacts to marine and local wildlife.

The analysis will also consider the construction of up to four new launch pads and the installation of a suborbital launcher conducting up to 30 firings per year.

The increase in launches and new fuel mixes allowed are particularly notable. Today, of the 18 annual launches authorized at WFF, only six can involve liquid-fueled rockets, with the other 12 being solid-propellant rockets. The engines that power Electron, Rocket Lab’s launcher that flies out of Wallops, use a combination of liquid oxygen and RP-1, a highly-refined kerosene.

The new analysis would authorize 52 launches per year and allow a fuel mix that also includes methalox, a rocket fuel composed of liquid oxygen and liquid methane. Methalox has become the propellant system of choice for next-gen rockets including SpaceX’s Starship, Rocket Lab’s Neutron, Relativity Space’s Terran R and Blue Origin’s New Glenn.

A slide showing proposed changes. Image Credits:

One driver of the proposed expansion is the increased launch cadence from these companies. (While Relativity has not publicly disclosed any plans to launch from Wallops, the company, along with Rocket Lab, were listed as the two “participating agencies”.)

The Wallops site has become particularly important to Rocket Lab’s plans to bring Neutron to market by the end of this year. In 2022, the company announced it had selected WFF as the future home for Neutron’s first launch pad and production facility, effectively staking a claim in the future of the island. Rocket Lab’s recovery plans for Neutron also include the booster landing on downrange, on a barge at sea.

One of the slides in Miller’s presentation shows a launch forecast for WFF through 2032. It is unclear whether the data on the slide was provided by private companies or whether it’s from NASA’s internal estimates, and NASA did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment, but it charts around five annual Neutron flights per year through 2030. It also charts about five launches of Firefly and Northrop’s MLV by that date.

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Environmental assessments are essential: they ensure NASA and its commercial partners are following environmental regulations related to air emissions, acoustic impacts, and affects on local wildlife. They also provide a critical venue for input from stakeholders, including the public. Having an environmental assessment in place is vital for companies like Rocket Lab, as well as Firefly Space and Northrop Grumman, which are together developing a medium launch vehicle.

NASA completed a programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS) for the Wallops site in 2019, but as agency official Shari Miller said during the call, the anticipated growth of activity on the island “exceeds the numbers that were analyzed” for that document. Some proposed actions weren’t discussed at all in the 2019 document, like a water barge landing of a rocket. Miller said NASA is simultaneously undertaking what’s known as a “written re-evaluation” of the 2019 assessment to understand if additional environmental assessments is needed to allow for the storage of liquid methane and to authorize static fire tests of methalox engines at WFF. That would authorize those actions for two years, and importantly, act as a sort of temporary measure to facilitate Rocket Lab’s rollout of Neutron. The full WISE EA would extend for a full ten years.

Because of the scope of the various environmental assessments, the full EA process is projected to take around eighteen months, per one slide, with the final document published in December 2025.


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Robotic Automations

Snapchat launches new AR and ML tools for brands and advertisers | TechCrunch

May 2, 2024 5:32 AM0


At the 2024 IAB NewFronts event on Wednesday, Snapchat announced a series of new augmented reality (AR) and machine learning (ML) tools designed to help brands and advertisers reach users on the social network with interactive experiences.

The company said that it’s been investing in ML and automation to make it faster and easier for brands to create AR try-on assets. Over the past few years, Snapchat has worked with companies like Amazon and Tiffany & Co. to let users virtually try on different products in the app. The social network says it has now reduced the time it takes to create these AR try-on assets, which will allow brands to quickly turn more of their 2D product catalogs into try-on experiences.

Image Credits: Snapchat

Plus, brands can now create branded AR ads with generative AI technology to produce custom Lenses. Snapchat told TechCrunch that with this new capability, brands can provide a simple text or image prompt to generate a unique ML model that can add realistic face effects to a Lens. Lenses with these ML face effects can then be used as AR ads on Snapchat.

Snapchat also announced AR Extensions, which will allow advertisers to integrate AR Lenses and filters directly into all of the app’s ad formats, including Dynamic Product Ads, Snap Ads, Collection Ads, Commercials, and Spotlight Ads.

The company, which has been an early adopter of AR technology, says more than 300 million people engage with AR experiences on its app every day, on average.

The launch of the new tools for brands and advertisers comes a few days after Snap reported that its revenue for Q1 2024 increased 21% to $1.195 million, mainly due to improvements that it made to its advertising platform. The company also shared that the number of small and medium-sized advertisers on Snapchat increased 85% year-over-year.

Snapchat said on Wednesday that it’s focused on investing in its ad business and that it’s “encouraged” by the increased demand it’s seeing.

Image Credits: Snapchat

The company also announced that it’s launching a sports channel within Snapchat called the “Snap Sports Network.” The channel will cover unconventional sports, like dog surfing, extreme ironing, water bottle flipping, and more. It will include user-generated content, along with scripted content hosted by Snap Stars.

In addition, Snapchat is expanding its partnership with Live Nation with the launch of a new Snap Nation Public Profile that will feature exclusive behind-the-scenes content from concerts. Snapchat will also curate stories from Live Nation concerts and festivals featuring public posts from users.

Snap says total watch time on its TikTok competitor increased more than 125%


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Anthropic launches new iPhone app, premium plan for businesses | TechCrunch

May 2, 2024 3:54 AM0


Anthropic, one of the world’s best-funded generative AI startups with $7.6 billion in the bank, is launching a new paid plan aimed at enterprises, including those in highly regulated industries like healthcare, finance and legal, as well as a new iOS app.

Team, the enterprise plan, gives customers higher-priority access to Anthropic’s Claude 3 family of generative AI models plus additional admin and user management controls.

“Anthropic introduced the Team plan now in response to growing demand from enterprise customers who want to deploy Claude’s advanced AI capabilities across their organizations,” Scott White, product lead at Anthropic, told TechCrunch. “The Team plan is designed for businesses of all sizes and industries that want to give their employees access to Claude’s language understanding and generation capabilities in a controlled and trusted environment.”

The Team plan — which joins Anthropic’s individual premium plan, Pro — delivers “greater usage per user” compared to Pro, enabling users to “significantly increase” the number of chats that they can have with Claude. (We’ve asked Anthropic for figures.) Team customers get a 200,000-token (~150,000-word) context window as well as all the advantages of Pro, like early access to new features.

Image Credits: Anthropic

Context window, or context, refers to input data (e.g. text) that a model considers before generating output (e.g. more text). Models with small context windows tend to forget the content of even very recent conversations, while models with larger contexts avoid this pitfall — and, as an added benefit, better grasp the flow of data they take in.

Team also brings with it new toggles to control billing and user management. And in the coming weeks, it’ll gain collaboration features including citations to verify AI-generated claims (models including Anthropic’s tend to hallucinate), integrations with data repos like codebases and customer relationship management platforms (e.g. Salesforce) and — perhaps most intriguing to this writer — a canvas to work with team members on AI-generated docs and projects, Anthropic says.

In the nearer term, Team customers will be able to leverage tool use capabilities for Claude 3, which recently entered open beta. This allows users to equip Claude 3 with custom tools to perform a wider range of tasks, like getting a firm’s current stock price or the local weather report, similar to OpenAI’s GPTs.

“By enabling businesses to deeply integrate Claude into their collaborative workflows, the Team plan positions Anthropic to capture significant enterprise market share as more companies move from AI experimentation to full-scale deployment in pursuit of transformative business outcomes,” White said. “In 2023, customers rapidly experimented with AI, and now in 2024, the focus has shifted to identifying and scaling applications that deliver concrete business value.”

Anthropic talks a big game, but it still might take a substantial effort on its part to get businesses on board.

According to a recent Gartner survey, 49% of companies said that it’s difficult to estimate and demonstrate the value of AI projects, making them a tough sell internally. A separate poll from McKinsey found that 66% of executives believe that generative AI is years away from generating substantive business results.

Image Credits: Anthropic

Yet corporate spending on generative AI is forecasted to be enormous. IDC expects that it’ll reach $15.1 billion in 2027, growing nearly eightfold from its total in 2023.

That’s probably generative AI vendors, most notably OpenAI, are ramping up their enterprise-focused efforts.

OpenAI recently said that it had more than 600,000 users signed up for the enterprise tier of its generative AI platform ChatGPT, ChatGPT Enterprise. And it’s introduced a slew of tools aimed at satisfying corporate compliance and governance requirements, like a new user interface to compare model performance and quality.

Anthropic is competitively pricing its Team plan: $30 per user per month billed monthly, with a minimum of five seats. OpenAI doesn’t publish the price of ChatGPT Enterprise, but users on Reddit report being quoted anywhere from $30 per user per month for 120 users to $60 per user per month for 250 users. 

“Anthropic’s Team plan is competitive and affordable considering the value it offers organizations,” White said. “The per-user model is straightforward, allowing businesses to start small and expand gradually. This structure supports Anthropic’s growth and stability while enabling enterprises to strategically leverage AI.”

It undoubtedly helps that Anthropic’s launching Team from a position of strength.

Amazon in March completed its $4 billion investment in Anthropic (following a $2 billion Google investment), and the company is reportedly on track to generate more than $850 million in annualized revenue by the end of 2024 — a 70% increase from an earlier projection. Anthropic may see Team as its logical next path to expansion. But at least right now it seems Anthropic can afford to let Team grow organically as it attempts to convince holdout businesses its generative AI is better than the rest.

An Anthropic iOS app

Anthropic’s other piece of news Wednesday is that it’s launching an iOS app. Given that the company’s conspicuously been hiring iOS engineers over the past few months, this comes as no great surprise.

The iOS app provides access to Claude 3, including free access as well as upgraded Pro and Team access. It syncs with Anthropic’s client on the web, and it taps Claude 3’s vision capabilities to offer real-time analysis for uploaded and saved images. For example, users can upload a screenshot of charts from a presentation and ask Claude to summarize them.

Image Credits: Anthropic

“By offering the same functionality as the web version, including chat history syncing and photo upload capabilities, the iOS app aims to make Claude a convenient and integrated part of users’ daily lives, both for personal and professional use,” White said. “It complements the web interface and API offerings, providing another avenue for users to engage with the AI assistant. As we continue to develop and refine our technologies, we’ll continue to explore new ways to deliver value to users across various platforms and use cases, including mobile app development and functionality.”


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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Atlassian launches Rovo, its new AI teammate | TechCrunch

May 1, 2024 10:48 PM0


During its Team ’24 conference in Las Vegas, Atlassian today launched Rovo, its new AI assistant. Rovo can take data from first- and third-party tools and make it easily accessible through a new AI-powered search tool and other integrations into Atlassian’s products. The most interesting part, though, may be the new Rovo Agents, which can be used to automate workflows in tools like Jira and Confluence. One nifty aspect of these agents: anyone can build them using a natural language interface. No programming required.

“We like to think of Rovo as a large knowledge model for organizations. It’s a knowledge discovery product for every knowledge worker,” Sherif Mansour, Atlassian’s head of product for Atlassian Intelligence, told TechCrunch. “When you look at what a knowledge worker has to do, they sort of go through this process of: I need to find a piece of work. I need to learn and understand it. And then I take an action. Most people that have some sort of desk job go through that loop. I think what’s exciting about Rovo is that we’re finally at the genesis of generative AI landing that that helps accelerate what we can do in that area for teams.”

Atlassian Team `24 Las Vegas

The basis for Rovo is Atlassian’s ‘cloud teamwork graph,’ the same graph that also forms the foundation of Atlassian Intelligence, the company’s year-old effort of bringing an AI teammate to its products. That graph brings together data from Atlassian’s own products and a number of third-party SaaS tools. And in a way, it’s the proliferation of SaaS tools that necessitates applications like Rovo, because every tool tends to have its own data silo, making it harder for employees to find the information they need.

Image Credits: Atlassian

Rovo, Mansour said, revolves around three pillars of teamwork: helping teams find and connect with their work, helping those teams learn, and then helping them take action.

In a way, enterprise search is the low-hanging fruit here, since Atlassian is already aggregating all of this data. But it’s also a tool that should prove immediately useful for its users and keep them from having to constantly switch contexts to find information. Some of the third-party tools that are supported out of the box include Google Drive, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, GitHub, Slack, and Figma.

Enterprises, which often have lots of custom tools, can also build their own connectors. Atlassian itself, for example, built a connector that brings in its internal developer documentation. Simply making that documentation available in Rovo, Mansour said, saved developers an hour or two every week — a higher time savings than what those same developers report from using an AI code generation tool.

As Mansour stressed, the biggest technical challenge — aside from building the AI infrastructure to power Rovo — is building all of these connectors and ensuring that they respect the access permission set by a company’s IT and security teams. “When you search, you get a different set of results to my search. We make sure that it’s tailored to you and respects your permissions — and only [shows] what you have access to.”

Image Credits: Atlassian

It wouldn’t be 2024 if Rovo didn’t also come as a chat service. Since it also has access to all of this data, it’s a relatively easy task to use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to feed a large language model with it and have the model provide customized answers.

Even when using RAG, large language models are still susceptible to hallucinations (though RAG greatly reduces the chances of the model going off script). To ensure that users can trust the results, Rovo always cites its sources, and most of the time (with slideshows and Figma designs, for example), there is even an interactive preview.

One interesting feature Atlassian also built into Rovo is its ability to detect and explain company jargon. There is even a Chrome extension for this that will automatically underline and explain a certain company-specific term as you read a Google Doc, for example. This feature is powered by Rovo’s semantic search engine.

Virtual Teammates

It’s one thing to find information. It’s another to take action on it. That’s where Rovo Agents comes in. In a way, this is an extension of what the company did with Atlassian Intelligence. Indeed, the company describes Rovo Agents as “virtual teammates,” too.

“Rovo Agents will transform teamwork with their ability to synthesize large volumes of enterprise data, break down complex tasks, learn as they take action, and partner with their human teammates to make critical and complex decisions,” Mansour writes in today’s announcement. “Agents aren’t just some souped-up version of chatbots. They bring specialized knowledge and skills to a wide variety of workflows and processes.”

Image Credits: Atlassian

That means they can generate, review and edit content for for marketing use, product specs or Jira issues. Users can also build agents that answer specific questions or recommend best practices. But more importantly, they can automate tasks based on when a Jira issue progresses, for example, or help users clean up their Jira backlogs or organize Confluence pages — all with humans in the loop.

“We have a strong belief that the future of teamwork is teammates working alongside virtual teammates — agents,” Mansour said. “There’ll be many of them and you’ll be interacting with them in your day-to-day workflows.”


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Robotic Automations

LinkedIn launches gaming: 3 logic puzzles aimed at extending time spent on its networking platform | TechCrunch

May 1, 2024 8:11 PM0


Back in March, TechCrunch broke the news that LinkedIn was quietly testing the waters for games on its platform — word and logic puzzles similar to Wordle. Now, in an effort to attract more users and increase engagement, the platform is launching three of those games officially.

Queens, Crossclimb and Pinpoint — respectively testing your abilities in logic, trivia and word association — will be available globally starting today, both via a direct link to the games and by way of LinkedIn News, the division that developed them.

Similar to Wordle, each of these games can be played just once a day. For now, you can invite your first-degree connections to play a game together, and your status — whether or not you’ve played a game, and how well you fared — can be shared with those connections if you opt in.

Those social levers, as well as the number of games, are still up for discussion, so things might change over time. For now, LinkedIn plans to continue developing the games itself, independent of its owner, Microsoft, and its substantial gaming operation.

LinkedIn says that it sees the games as a more casual way to knit existing LinkedIn connections closer together.

“It is hard for people to stay in touch with each other, and games provide a way to build these network ties,” said Dan Roth, the VP and editor in chief of LinkedIn News, in an interview.

There is more to it than that, though. The fact that these were conceived of and built by the LinkedIn News team is significant. LinkedIn’s games borrow heavily from the portfolios that newspapers like The New York Times have built with their own word and logic games over the years, starting with crosswords and more recently expanding into a wider range of puzzles. Most of these were built in-house, but some were acquired (NYT acquired the viral hit Wordle in 2022).

And, games have proven to be somewhat of a secret weapon for driving engagement, especially at a time when news publishers are scrambling to figure out what the future of their businesses look like, and TikTok and Instagram appear to be cornering the market for younger users.

Puzzles published by news titles and magazines attract millions of users, who in turn become part of those titles’ wider audiences, and potentially can turn into readers of the rest of their content.

Similarly, LinkedIn, with more than 1 billion users, has been developing its news and content operation to expand engagement on its platform. Like newspapers, it also has a substantial advertising business as well as paywalls for those who want to use it a bit more. Games sweeten the deal for extending that engagement to beef up its advertising audience, and to potentially give more value to users.

A little about the three games:

Image Credits: LinkedIn.com (opens in a new window) under a license.

Queens is a riff on Sudoku, and you have to figure out how to arrange crowns in patterns that do not overlap with each other within a time limit. As you can see from the screenshot, you can share scores with individuals, but your company affiliation appears on a leaderboard.

I asked if this could become problematic or distracting, given the restrictions some organizations put on using social media at work. Laura Lorenzetti, executive editor for LinkedIn in North America, said the one-game-per-day limitation, and the fact that the games are short, should help with those issues.

“They are contained and they’re intended to be contained, because we don’t want people wasting their time,” she said. “That is not what we’re here for!”

Image Credits: LinkedIn.com (opens in a new window) under a license.

Crossclimb is described as a trivia game. The player is given clues for words, which in turn have to fit on a grid where the words change by one letter with each subsequent clue to eventually form a different word.

I found this one to be harder than it looks if you don’t guess the first word for a start. (Another player countered that it was her favorite.) As with Queens, you see a company leaderboard here, too.

Image Credits: LinkedIn.com (opens in a new window) under a license.

Lastly we have Pinpoint, which seemed so similar to Connections — the New York Times game — that I kept slipping up and calling it “Connections” during my interview. The game involves finding a connection between words that you’re given, although the words are not immediately revealed, and you are asked to try to find the connection in as few reveals as possible. I found this also quite difficult in my early attempts.

As we’ve noted previously, LinkedIn is far from being the first social network to bake gaming into the platform to increase how much time its users spend using it. But even the biggest and most expensive efforts have seen mixed results. Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, has been a major driver of social gaming over the years, but in 2022, it shut down its standalone gaming app amid a decline in usage. It’s putting significantly more focus these days on mixed reality experiences and its Meta Quest business.

LinkedIn — designed for professional networking and specifically for job hunting and recruitment — has long been trying to find ways to get people to engage on its platform in more natural and less transactional ways. Games are transactional by nature, but the transactions are based on gameplay: If LinkedIn can get users hooked on these, the hope is that they may stay for more.


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NIST launches a new platform to assess generative AI | TechCrunch

April 30, 2024 2:50 AM0


The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. Commerce Department agency that develops and tests tech for the U.S. government, corporations and the broader public, today announced the launch of NIST GenAI, a new program spearheaded by NIST to assess generative AI technologies, including text- and image-generating AI.

A platform designed to evaluate various forms of generative AI tech, NIST GenAI will release benchmarks, help create “content authenticity” detection (i.e. deepfake-checking) systems and encourage the development of software to spot the source of fake or misleading information, explains NIST on its newly-launched NIST GenAI site and in a press release.

“The NIST GenAI program will issue a series of challenge problems designed to evaluate and measure the capabilities and limitations of generative AI technologies,” the press release reads. “These evaluations will be used to identify strategies to promote information integrity and guide the safe and responsible use of digital content.”

NIST GenAI’s first project is a pilot study to build systems that can reliably tell the difference between human-created and AI-generated media, starting with text. (While many services purport to detect deepfakes, studies — and our own testing — have shown them to be unreliable, particularly when it comes to text.) NIST GenAI is inviting teams from academia, industry and research labs to submit either “generators” — AI systems to generate content — or “discriminators” — systems that try to identify AI-generated content.

Generators in the study must generate summaries provided a topic and a set of documents, while discriminators must detect if a given summary is AI-written or not. To ensure fairness, NIST GenAI will provide the data necessary to train generators and discriminators; systems trained on publicly available data won’t be accepted, including but not limited to open models like Meta’s Llama 3.

Registration for the pilot will begin May 1, with the results scheduled to be published in February 2025.

NIST GenAI’s launch — and deepfake-focused study — comes as deepfakes grow exponentially.

According to data from Clarity, a deepfake detection firm, 900% more deepfakes have been created this year compared to the same time frame last year. It’s causing alarm, understandably. A recent poll from YouGov found that 85% of Americans said they were concerned about the spread of misleading deepfakes online.

The launch of NIST GenAI is a part of NIST’s response to President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI, which laid out rules requiring greater transparency from AI companies about how their models work and established a raft of new standards, including for labeling content generated by AI.

It’s also the first AI-related announcement from NIST after the appointment of Paul Christiano, a former OpenAI researcher, to the agency’s AI Safety Institute.

Christiano was a controversial choice for his “doomerist” views; he once predicted that “there’s a 50% chance AI development could end in [humanity’s destruction]” Critics — including scientists within NIST, reportedly — fear Cristiano may encourage the AI Safety Institute to focus to “fantasy scenarios” rather than realistic, more immediate risks from AI.

NIST says that NIST GenAI will inform the AI Safety Institute’s work.


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BigPanda launches generative AI tool designed specifically for ITOps | TechCrunch

April 26, 2024 12:51 AM0


IT operations personnel have a lot going on, and when an incident occurs that brings down a key system, time is always going to be against them. Over the years, companies have looked for an edge in getting up faster with playbooks designed to find answers to common problems, and postmortems to keep them from repeating, but not every problem is easily solved, and there is so much data and so many possible points of failure.

It’s actually a perfect problem for generative AI to solve, and AIOps startup BigPanda announced a new generative AI tool today called Biggy to help solve some of these issues faster. Biggy is designed to look across a wide variety of IT-related data to learn how the company operates and compare it to the problem scenario and other similar scenarios and suggest a solution.

BigPanda has been using AI since the early days of the company and deliberately designed two separate systems: one for the data layer and another for the AI. This in a way prepared them for this shift to generative AI based on large language models. “The AI engine before Gen AI was building a lot of other types of AI, but it was feeding off of the same data engine that will be feeding what we’re doing with Biggy, and what we’re doing with generative and conversational AI,” BigPanda CEO Assaf Resnick told TechCrunch.

Like most generative AI tools, this one makes a prompt box available where users can ask questions and interact with the bot. In this case, the underlying models have been trained on data inside the customer company, as well as on publicly available data on a particular piece of hardware or software, and are tuned to deal with the kinds of problems IT deals with on a regular basis.

“The out-of-the box LLMs have been trained on a huge amount of data, and they’re really good actually as generalists in all of the operational fields we look at — infrastructure, network, application development, everything there. And they actually know all the hardware very well,” Jason Walker, chief innovation officer at BigPanda, said. “So if you ask it about a certain HP blade server with this error code, it’s pretty good at putting that together, and we use that for a lot of the event traffic.” Of course, it has to be more than that or a human engineer could simply look this up in Google Search.

It combines this knowledge with what it is able to cull internally across a range of data types. “BigPanda ingests the customer’s operational and contextual data from observability, change, CDMB (the file that stores configuration information) and topology along with historical data and human, institutional context — and normalizes the data into key-value pairs, or tags,” Walker said. That’s a lot of technical jargon, but basically it means it looks at system-level information, organizational data and human interactions to deliver a response to help engineers solve the problem.

When a user enters a prompt, it looks across all the data to generate an answer that will hopefully point the engineers in the right direction to fix the problem. They acknowledge that it’s not always perfect because no generative AI is, but they let the user know when there is a lower degree of certainty that the answer is correct.

“For areas where we think we don’t have as much certainty, then we tell them that this is our best information, but a human should take a look at this,” Resnick said. For other areas where there is more certainty, they may introduce automation, working with a tool like Red Hat Ansible to solve the issue without human interaction, he said.

The data ingestion part isn’t always going to be trivial for customers, and this is a first step toward providing an AI assistant that can help IT get at the root of problems and solve them faster. No AI is foolproof, but having an interactive AI tool should be an improvement over current, more time-consuming manual approaches to IT systems troubleshooting.

BigPanda gets its horn after securing $190M in fresh capital


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Threads launches custom mute filters, teases controls for quote posts | TechCrunch

April 25, 2024 11:54 PM0


Threads and Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced today that Threads is launching a new feature that lets users filter out words and phrases from their feeds and mentions. The “Hidden Words” feature automatically mutes common words, phrases, and emojis that might be offensive to users. In addition to these preset filters, users can add their own custom words and phrases in the settings. Users can turn these settings off at any point in time.

Earlier this week, dating app Hinge launched its own “Hidden Words” feature (yes, with the same name) to block requests with comments that contain unwanted words.

Image Credits: Threads

Threads said that the feature will filter out content from both the “Following” and “For You” feeds, search results, profiles, and replies to posts.

Controls for quoting posts

The Meta-owned social network already allows users to control who could reply to their posts: anyone, profiles you follow, or mentioned people only. Threads also have the option to restrict who can mention you in their posts, replies, and bio: everyone, profiles you follow, or no one.

Now the company is planning to introduce similar controls for quote posts. Threads said that it will soon let you limit who could quote your posts. Additionally, users will be able to manually unquote their posts as well.

The company’s rationale behind these new controls for quote posts is that it wants to restrict unwanted interactions.

“Since quoting a post is one of the most visible ways to connect with someone on Threads, it was important for us to give people more agency over who can engage with them and help reduce unwanted interactions,” a company spokesperson said.

Separately, Theards is also testing a way to mute notifications for interactions with posts. While some of these features aren’t available just yet, the company is still shipping new features at a rapid pace as it has started testing a way for people to archive posts automatically.

Image Credits: Threads

During Meta’s earnings call on Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that Threads has over 150 million monthly active users.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Xaira, an AI drug discovery startup, launches with a massive $1B, says it's 'ready' to start developing drugs | TechCrunch

April 25, 2024 6:09 AM0


Advances in generative AI have taken the tech world by storm. Biotech investors are making a big bet that similar computational methods could revolutionize drug discovery.

On Tuesday, ARCH Venture Partners and Foresite Labs, an affiliate of Foresite Capital, announced that they incubated Xaira Therapeutics and funded the AI biotech with $1 billion. Other investors in the new company, which has been operating in stealth mode for about six months, include F-Prime, NEA, Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures and SV Angel.

Xaira’s CEO Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a former Stanford president and chief scientific officer at Genentech, says the company is ready to start developing drugs that were impossible to make without recent breakthroughs in AI. “We’ve done such a large capital raise because we believe the technology is at an inflection point where it can have a transformative effect on the field,” he said.

The advances in foundational models come from the University of Washington’s Institute of Protein Design, run by David Baker, one of Xaira’s co-founders. These models are similar to diffusion models that power image generators like OpenAI’s DALL-E and Midjourney. But rather than creating art, Baker’s models aim to design molecular structures that can be made in a three-dimensional, physical world. 

While Xaira’s investors are convinced that the company can revolutionize data design, they emphasized that generative AI applications in biology are still in the early innings.

Vik Bajaj, CEO of Foresite Labs and managing director of Foresite Capital, said that unlike in technology, where data that train AI models is created by consumers, biology and medicine are “data poor. You have to create the datasets that drive model development.”

Other biotech companies using generative AI to design drugs include Recursion, which went public in 2021, and Genesis Therapeutics, a startup that last year raised a $200 million Series B co-led by Andreessen Horowitz.

The company declined to say when it expects to have its first drug available for human trials. However, ARCH Venture Partners managing director Bob Nelsen underscored that Xaira and its investors are ready to play the long game.

“You need billions of dollars to be a real drug company and also think AI. Both of those are expensive disciplines,” he said.  

Xaira wants to position itself as a powerhouse of AI drug discovery. However, some view bringing on Tessier-Lavigne as CEO as an unexpected move. Tessier-Lavigne resigned last year from his position as Stanford president amid allegations that his laboratory at Genetech manipulated research data.

But investors are confident that he is the right person for the job.

“I have known Marc for many years and know him to be a person of integrity and scientific vision who will be an exceptional CEO,” Nelsen said in an email. “Stanford exonerated him of any wrongdoing or scientific misconduct.”  


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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