Stability AI unveils 12B parameter Stable LM 2 model and updated 1.6B variant

Stability AI has introduced the latest additions to its Stable LM 2 language model series: a 12 billion parameter base model and an instruction-tuned variant. These models were trained on an impressive two trillion tokens across seven languages: English, Spanish, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Dutch.

The 12 billion parameter model aims to strike a balance between strong performance, efficiency, memory requirements, and speed. It follows the established framework of...

9 April 2024 | Artificial Intelligence

Microsoft AI opens London hub to access ‘enormous pool’ of talent

Microsoft is doubling down on its AI efforts in the UK with the opening of a major new AI hub in London. The Microsoft AI London outpost will focus on advancing state-of-the-art language models, supporting infrastructure, and tooling for foundation models.

The hub will be led by AI scientist and engineer Jordan Hoffmann, who previously distinguished himself as a pioneer at AI companies Inflection and DeepMind, which are also based in London.

"There is an enormous pool of...

8 April 2024 | Artificial Intelligence

ML Olympiad returns with over 20 challenges

The popular ML Olympiad is back for its third round with over 20 community-hosted machine learning competitions on Kaggle.

The ML Olympiad – organised by groups including ML GDE, TFUG, and other ML communities – aims to provide developers with hands-on opportunities to learn and practice machine learning skills by tackling real-world challenges.

Over the previous two rounds, an impressive 605 teams participated across 32 competitions, generating 105 discussions and...

8 April 2024 | Applications

UK and US sign pact to develop AI safety tests

The UK and US have signed a landmark agreement to collaborate on developing rigorous testing for advanced AI systems, representing a major step forward in ensuring their safe deployments.

The Memorandum of Understanding – signed Monday by UK Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan and US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo – establishes a partnership to align the scientific approaches of both countries in rapidly iterating robust evaluation methods for cutting-edge AI models,...

2 April 2024 | Artificial Intelligence

Databricks claims DBRX sets ‘a new standard’ for open-source LLMs

Databricks has announced the launch of DBRX, a powerful new open-source large language model that it claims sets a new bar for open models by outperforming established options like GPT-3.5 on industry benchmarks. 

The company says the 132 billion parameter DBRX model surpasses popular open-source LLMs like LLaMA 2 70B, Mixtral, and Grok-1 across language understanding, programming, and maths tasks. It even outperforms Anthropic's closed-source model Claude on certain...

28 March 2024 | Artificial Intelligence

Large language models could ‘revolutionise the finance sector within two years’

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to improve efficiency and safety in the finance sector by detecting fraud, generating financial insights and automating customer service, according to research by The Alan Turing Institute.

Because LLMs have an ability to analyse large amounts of data quickly and generate coherent text, there is growing understanding of the potential to improve services across a range of sectors including healthcare, law, education and in financial...

27 March 2024 | Artificial Intelligence

STFC Hartree Centre signs agreement with Lenovo for state-of-the-art supercomputer

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), a UK government agency that carries out research in science and engineering, has signed an agreement with Lenovo for the installation of a powerful new supercomputer for the STFC Hartree Centre.

Ten times more powerful than its predecessor, but using less electricity thanks to Lenovo’s direct water cooling, the new supercomputer will power AI research for UK industry

The new supercomputer is part of the Hartree...

26 March 2024 | Applications

Stanhope raises £2.3m for AI that teaches machines to ‘make human-like decisions’

A pile of Sterling notes.

Stanhope AI – a company applying decades of neuroscience research to teach machines how to make human-like decisions in the real world – has raised £2.3m in seed funding led by the UCL Technology Fund.

Creator Fund also participated, along with, MMC Ventures, Moonfire Ventures and Rockmount Capital and leading angel investors. 

Stanhope AI was founded as a spinout from University College London, supported by UCL Business, by three of the most eminent names in...

25 March 2024 | Applications

NVIDIA unveils Blackwell architecture to power next GenAI wave 

NVIDIA has announced its next-generation Blackwell GPU architecture, designed to usher in a new era of accelerated computing and enable organisations to build and run real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models.

The Blackwell platform promises up to 25 times lower cost and energy consumption compared to its predecessor: the Hopper architecture. Named after pioneering mathematician and statistician David Harold Blackwell, the new GPU architecture introduces...

19 March 2024 | Artificial Intelligence

Elon Musk’s xAI open-sources Grok

Elon Musk's startup xAI has made its large language model Grok available as open source software. The 314 billion parameter model can now be freely accessed, modified, and distributed by anyone under an Apache 2.0 license.

The release fulfils Musk's promise to open source Grok in an effort to accelerate AI development and adoption.

XAI announced the move in a blog post, stating: "We are releasing the base model weights and network architecture of Grok-1, our large...

18 March 2024 | Artificial Intelligence