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Facebook to invest in audio with short-form Soundbites feature, podcast support and a Clubhouse clone

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Facebook today officially reported a suite of new audio products — a sign that it’s taking the threat from Clubhouse and other audio platforms all the more genuinely. The organization is accomplishing something other than building its own take on Clubhouse, notwithstanding, it’s likewise announcing tools that permit podcast creators to share long-form audio, a new Spotify integration for music and a brand-new short-form experience called Soundbites.

The Clubhouse clone was presumably the most-examined of the new products in front of the present declaration, given the expanded interest in the audio networking market.

Like Clubhouse, the Facebook experience will likewise involve live audio rooms, where clients can participate in effective conversations.

“I think the areas where I’m most excited about it on Facebook are basically in the large number of communities and groups that exist. I think that you already have these communities that are organized around interests, and allowing people to come together and have rooms where they can talk is — I think it’d be a very useful thing,” said Zuckerberg, in a friendly interview with Platformer, timed alongside the official announcement. “When we launched video rooms earlier last year, groups and communities were one of the bigger areas where that took off. So, I think around audio, just given how much more accessible it is, that’ll be a pretty exciting area as well.”

The Live Audio Rooms will be accessible across both Facebook and Messenger, Facebook says in an authority blog entry.

The organization will first test Live Audio Rooms in Quite a while, arriving at Groups’ 1.8 billion month to month clients. They’ll likewise be made accessible to public figures and experts. Early adopters of the component will include American football quarterback Russell Wilson, Grammy-assigned electronic music craftsman TOKiMONSTA, craftsman and chief Elle Moxley and five-time Olympic medalist and business person Nastia Liukin, Facebook says.

Live Audio Rooms will be accessible to everyone on Facebook this summer. Likewise this mid year, Live Audio Rooms will be made accessible on Messenger, for an experience that permits companions to hang out, as well.

In addition to products that rehash audio functionality available in tech products from different organizations, Zuckerberg likewise uncovered that the organization was working on an audio-only version of its TikTok competitor Instagram Reels that permits clients to rapidly travel through algorithmically arranged short brief snippets, a venture being called Soundbites. In its blog entry, Facebook nitty gritty that they will test Soundbites throughout the following not many months with a little gathering of makers prior to making it widely available.

“The idea here is it’s short-form audio clips, whether it’s people sharing things that they find funny… or kind of pithy things that people want to share that cover a bunch of different genres and topics,” Zuckerberg said.

For podcast creators, Zuckerberg said the organization will work out instruments for the individuals who finish web recordings and makers Facebook Pages, yet don’t presently have an approach to get to podcast content through the social network. He noticed that there are presently 170 million Facebook clients who are associated with a Page for a digital broadcast, which is the reason it needs to guarantee they have an approach to get to this audio content more easily.

For these clients, they’ll have the option to find the audio and start playing it, even behind the background. Or then again they could decide to launch a second app to continue to play it, Zuckerberg said. We comprehend that the experience will really permit clients to straightforwardly open Spotify, on the off chance that they would like to tune in to the music or audio there, all things considered.

The feature will likewise assist users with new podcast discovery dependent on your inclinations, and clients will actually want to remark on digital broadcasts and prescribe them to companions.

Identified with these audio efforts, Zuckerberg referenced Facebook’s partnership with Spotify, which is currently being extended with something it has inside alluded to as “Project Boombox” — a combination that would permit individuals to share content from their favorite artists, playlists and other types of audio in their feed. That substance would then show up in a little, in-line player for others to snap and play.

We comprehend from sources acquainted with the Spotify integration that this player will uphold both music and webcasts. It has effectively been tried in non-U.S. markets, including Mexico and Thailand. It’s required to show up in about seven days.

“Facebook’s interest in audio is further validation of the category and reinforces what we’ve known all along — the power and potential for audio is limitless,” a spokesperson for Spotify told TechCrunch. “Our ambition has always been to make Spotify ubiquitous across platforms and devices — bringing music and podcasts to more people — and our new integration with Facebook is another step in these efforts. We look forward to a continued partnership with Facebook, fueling audio discovery around the world,” they added.

Zuckerberg additionally referred to the need to serve the growing creator economy with its new products.

With Live Audio Rooms, fans will actually want to support creators through Stars, Facebook’s existing in-app tipping feature, or give to causes. Facebook says it will later offer other monetization tools like access to Live Audio Rooms on memberships. There’s additionally an Audio Creator Fund being made accessible to commence the dispatch of Soundbites.

The executive likewise talked about Facebook’s plans for a pamphlet item, all under the umbrella of serving the maker local area with a suite of tools — something Twitter is currently doing, as well, with its plans for Super Follow.

“I think a product where a journalist or a creator can basically create a subscription for people who want to follow them, that spans both a newsletter and a podcast, is going to be a really powerful thing,” said Zuckerberg. “So that’s a big part of what we’re going to enable with some of the monetization tools around podcasts. That dovetails with the work that we’re planning to do…our work on our newsletters and giving tools for for independent journalists. I think enabling both of those things to come together on extremely favorable terms to journalists and creators, will be a pretty powerful thing,” he noted.

The item launches, which Vox scooped on Sunday, demonstrate how genuinely Facebook considers the disruption to its dominance that could be attributed to the developing number of where fans connect with creators. The danger for Facebook today isn’t only another application like Clubhouse or Substack’s pamphlets or even Patreon, however the way that the creator economy, by and large, isn’t being centralized and owned by Facebook itself.

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OpenAI Releases new Features to Encourage Businesses to Develop Artificial Intelligence (AI) Solutions

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A significant portion of OpenAI’s business is focused on assisting enterprise customers in developing AI products, despite the company’s consumer-facing products, such as ChatGPT and DALL-E, receiving the majority of attention. They are now receiving new tools for those customers.

Corporate clients that power their AI tools with OpenAI’s application programming interface (API) will receive improved security features, the company announced in a blog post, including the option to use single sign-on and multi-factor authentication by default. In order to lessen the chance of any data leaks onto the public internet, OpenAI has also implemented 256-bit AES encryption during data transfers.

Additionally, OpenAI has introduced a new Projects feature that makes it easier for businesses to manage who has access to various AI tools. Companies should find it easier to stick to their budgets with the new cost-saving features, according to OpenAI. One such feature is the ability to use a Batch API to reduce spending by up to 50%.

Although the OpenAI announcement this week isn’t as exciting as a new GPT-4 version or text-to-video generation capabilities, it’s still significant. With OpenAI’s toolset, businesses all over the world are developing a wide range of AI tools for both internal and external use. If certain essential security and cost-savings improvements aren’t made, those businesses might look elsewhere or, worse yet, decide against pursuing AI projects altogether.

Security improvements may be especially important to companies and employees, as well as the eventual customers using their AI tools. If AI can deliver stronger security features, both company and user data is safer.

OpenAI stated that its new features not only address security and cost-savings, but also some of the requests made by its customers. Ingesting 10,000 files into AI tools is now possible for businesses, compared to just 20 files earlier. Additionally, according to the company, OpenAI’s platform should be less expensive to run and easier to use thanks to new file management features and the ability to control usage on the go.

Now accessible are all of OpenAI’s new API features. The company intends to continue enhancing its platform with cost-saving and security features in the future.

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Apple Launches Eight Small AI Language Models for On-Device Use

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Within the field of artificial intelligence, “small language models” have gained significant traction lately due to their ability to operate locally on a device rather than requiring cloud-based data center-grade computers. On Wednesday, Apple unveiled OpenELM, a collection of minuscule AI language models that are available as open source and small enough to run on a smartphone. For now, they’re primarily proof-of-concept research models, but they might serve as the foundation for Apple’s on-device AI products in the future.

Apple’s new AI models, collectively named OpenELM for “Open-source Efficient Language Models,” are currently available on the Hugging Face under an Apple Sample Code License. Since there are some restrictions in the license, it may not fit the commonly accepted definition of “open source,” but the source code for OpenELM is available.

A similar goal is pursued by Microsoft’s Phi-3 models, which we discussed on Tuesday. These models are small, locally executable AI models that can comprehend and process language to a reasonable degree. Although Apple’s OpenELM models range in size from 270 million to 3 billion parameters across eight different models, Phi-3-mini has 3.8 billion parameters.

By contrast, OpenAI’s GPT-3 from 2020 shipped with 175 billion parameters, and Meta’s largest model to date, the Llama 3 family, has 70 billion parameters (a 400 billion version is on the way). Although parameter count is a useful indicator of the complexity and capability of AI models, recent work has concentrated on making smaller AI language models just as capable as larger ones were a few years ago.

Eight OpenELM models are available in two flavors: four that are “pretrained,” or essentially a next-token version of the model in its raw form, and four that are “instructional-tuned,” or optimized for instruction following, which is more suitable for creating chatbots and AI assistants:

The maximum context window in OpenELM is 2048 tokens. The models were trained using datasets that are publicly available, including RefinedWeb, a subset of RedPajama, a version of PILE that has had duplications removed, and a subset of Dolma v1.6, which contains, according to Apple, roughly 1.8 trillion tokens of data. AI language models process data using tokens, which are broken representations of the data.

According to Apple, part of its OpenELM approach is a “layer-wise scaling strategy” that distributes parameters among layers more effectively, supposedly saving computational resources and enhancing the model’s performance even with fewer tokens used for training. This approach has allowed OpenELM to achieve 2.36 percent accuracy gain over Allen AI’s OLMo 1B (another small language model) with half as many pre-training tokens needed, according to Apple’s published white paper.

In addition, Apple made the code for CoreNet, the library it used to train OpenELM, publicly available. Notably, this code includes reproducible training recipes that make it possible to duplicate the weights, or neural network files—something that has not been seen in a major tech company before. Transparency, according to Apple, is a major objective for the organization: “The reproducibility and transparency of large language models are crucial for advancing open research, ensuring the trustworthiness of results, and enabling investigations into data and model biases, as well as potential risks.”

By releasing the source code, model weights, and training materials, Apple says it aims to “empower and enrich the open research community.” However, it also cautions that since the models were trained on publicly sourced datasets, “there exists the possibility of these models producing outputs that are biased, or objectionable in response to user prompts.”

Though the company may hire Google or OpenAI to handle more complex, off-device AI processing to give Siri a much-needed boost, Apple has not yet integrated this new wave of AI language model capabilities into its consumer devices. It is anticipated that the upcoming iOS 18 update—which is expected to be revealed in June at WWDC—will include new AI features that use on-device processing to ensure user privacy.

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Dingtalk, an Alibaba Company, Updates its AI Assistant and Launches a Marketplace

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The company announced this week that users of Dingtalk, the workplace communication platform from Alibaba Group, can now turn to AI agents from outside providers for assistance with a variety of tasks.

Over 200 AI-powered agents with a focus on enterprise-facing features, industry-specific services, and productivity tools are available in DingTalk’s newly launched marketplace.

The platform also improved DingTalk AI Assistant, its in-house created AI agent, so it can now take in data from more sources, such as photos and videos.

“We think AI agents have the potential to be the mainstay of applications in the future. Ye Jun, President of DingTalk, stated, “Our goal is for DingTalk’s AI Agent Store to become a preeminent center for the development and interchange of AI agents.”

AI agents, a type of software, are being used by businesses all over the world to increase productivity.

In a survey conducted by Accenture last year, the overwhelming majority of C-suite executives (96%) said they thought AI agent ecosystems would offer their companies a big opportunity over the next three years.

DingTalk is keeping up, with over 700 million users as of last year.

In April 2023, the platform made its first use of generative AI technology when it collaborated with Alibaba Cloud’s large language model Qwen to introduce DingTalk AI Assistant.

In less than a year, Dingtalk’s AI capabilities have been used by over 2.2 million corporations, including about 1.7 million monthly active enterprises.

Artificial Intelligence

With the ability to create and share AI agents on the platform, the most recent development of DingTalk positions it as a formidable ally for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies as well as individual developers.

Similar to conventional chatbots, these computer programs react to natural language commands, but they offer far more features. They are capable of carrying out both inside and outside of the DingTalk platform, from planning trips to producing insights from business analyses.

Ye stated, “We anticipate the rise of a thriving commercial marketplace and a flourishing ecosystem centered around AI agents.”

The more than 200 agents on DingTalk’s marketplace have cross-application integration and industry-specific knowledge.

AI agents created by third parties are required to apply for approval before they can be listed on DingTalk in order to guarantee a high standard of service.

Advantage of Multimodality

DingTalk has improved its AI Assistant even more by making it multimodal, or able to process data in multiple formats.

Up to 500 pages of text can be processed at once by Dingtalk AI Assistant, and users can request summaries to expedite work and learning.

Dingtalk AI agent is also capable of understanding images and extracting data from photos, pictures, videos, and other media thanks to Qwen-VL, Alibaba Cloud’s large vision language model.

DingTalk AI Assistant’s comprehension of visual cues enables it to produce subtitles, interpret images, transcribe videos, and even look up more information in response to a graphic prompt.

For example, someone who happened to take a photo of one of the temples dotted around the shore of Hangzhou’s West Lake could upload it. A quick synopsis of the site’s past would be provided to the user.

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