Data & AI newsletter - Q1 2024 edition
Welcome to the latest edition of the Data & AI newsletter, where we bring you the latest developments and news from the world of artificial intelligence and data science.
Some of this month’s pickings include - OpenAI introduces Sora, a game-changing GenAI video model, while UC Berkeley opens the doors to a new era with the Large World Model (LWM). INSAIT launches Bulgaria's first open AI model for the Bulgarian language - BgGPT.
Plus, our managing partner Nick Nickolovski gave an insightful talk on 'AI-driven Next Best Action in the Customer Journey' at the SME Banking Club’s webinar.
Stay updated on AI's forefront with us. Explore further!
NEWS AND INSIGHTS
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
▶️ OpenAI announced Sora, a new GenAI video model for world simulation
Sora's demos are impressive. It's a generative AI text-to-video model developed by OpenAI researchers to simulate the physical world in motion. However, OpenAI is a commercial operation, not entirely open about its research. Check out Sora's blog post and technical report titled "Video Generation Models as World Simulators" for more information.
▶️ UC Berkeley open sources new Large World Model (LWM)
Learning from millions of tokens of video and language sequences poses significant challenges due to the limitations of memory, computational complexity, and the scarcity of datasets. To overcome these challenges, a team of distinguished researchers at UC Berkeley has recently made LWM (a video model trained on multimodal sequences with millions of tokens) open-source. By releasing this model to the public, the researchers have opened up the possibility of developing even more sophisticated video models that can deeply comprehend human knowledge and the complex multimodal world. You can find the paper, model code, and demos at World Model on Million-Length Video and Language with RingAttention.
▶️ Launching the first free and open Bulgarian LLM
INSAIT launched BgGPT-7B-Instruct-v0.1, the first free and open Bulgarian Large Language Model in the BgGPT series. BgGPT-7B-Instruct-v0.1 is now available for download at HuggingFace with the permissive and commercial-friendly Apache 2.0 licence. The model, which builds on Mistral-7B, already outperforms similarly sized models such as LLaMA2-7b and Mistral-7B on all Bulgarian language tasks. On many of these tasks, It also outperforms much larger models such as Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1 (about 6.5 times larger), which has been shown to have similar capabilities as GPT-3.5.
▶️ Apple Readies AI Tool to Rival Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot
Apple, racing to add more artificial intelligence capabilities, is nearing the completion of a critical new software tool for app developers that would step up competition with Microsoft. Read more on Bloomberg’s material.
▶️ Nvidia passes Alphabet in market cap and is now the third most valuable U.S. company
“Nvidia shares are up over 221% over the past 12 months on robust demand for its AI server chips that can cost more than $20,000 each. Companies like Google and Amazon need thousands of them for their cloud services. Before the recent AI boom, Nvidia was best known for consumer graphics processors it sold to PC makers to build gaming computers, a less lucrative market.”
INTERESTING AI STARTUPS AROUND
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
🔍 Colossyan: Outstanding $22M investment boosts AI-driven video production
Colossyan, a Hungarian-founded and UK-based startup focusing on AI-driven video production, has recently closed its Series A funding, raising an impressive $22 million round – an outstanding amount for the region. This round, led by the UK-based Lakestar, along with continued support from existing investors such as LAUNCHub Ventures, Day One, Emerge, Oktagon, and various angel investors, marks an important step in the company’s development. Read more at TheRecursive’s article.
LEARNING RESOURCES
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
💡 Webinar: AI-driven Next Best Action in the Customer Journey
Recording available
Our managing partner, Nick Nickolovski, was a featured speaker at the SME Banking Club's webinar on February 27th. Nick led a captivating discussion on the evolving landscape of AI-driven decision-making in banking, titled "AI-driven Next Best Action in the Customer Journey." In this webinar, he delved into the practical implications of Artificial Intelligence on personalised interactions within the financial industry.
💡 Online Conference: AI in production
Recordings available
The MLOps community organised an online conference where practitioners discuss topics such as cost optimisation, latency requirements, trust in output, and debugging techniques. Dive deep into discussions on graphs and language, fine-tuning Llamas, reliable AI, the current state of production ML in 2024, and more. Hear directly from experts in the field on how they navigate these challenges.
💡 INSAIT Launchеs AI Excellence Fеllowship Program to Support Talеntеd Bulgarian High Schoolеrs
The Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technology – INSAIT, part of Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” announced the launch of EXPLORER, an Excellence Program in Technology and Research aimed at talented high school students, specialising in the area of computer science and AI.
Thanks for reading our monthly digest! Have you enjoyed this newsletter?
Share it with friends and colleagues who might benefit from it.