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Knowledge Copilots

Knowledge Copilots

Generational features essays on the business of AI and spotlights outstanding AI companies and products. This essay began as a personal side project building knowledge graphs but evolved into an extensive exploration of knowledge copilots, retrieval augmented generation, and user experience. The main takeaway is that for knowledge intensive tasks, use multiquery RAG and thoughtful UX.A knowledge copilot is a user’s thought partner, optimized for retrieving information from a knowledge base, reasoning through context, and synthesizing responses. It is much more than a wrapper around foundation models for generating copy or poems. For instance, a business analyst synthesizing the latest…
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Which technologies will enable a cleaner steel industry?

Which technologies will enable a cleaner steel industry?

Decarbonizing the steel industry is a crucial challenge to overcome if the world is going to meet its climate goals. Steel production contributes around 11% of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, making it one of the heaviest polluting industries and a heavy-emitting sector of focus for the First Movers Coalition, an initiative seeking to aggregate demand for near-zero emissions products and services across some of the world’s most polluting industries.The coalition’s mission is to drive investment and accelerate the scaling of the breakthrough technologies required to make these products by demonstrating a credible demand signal for highly decarbonized products.But how can…
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Ines Montani at QCon London: Economies of Scale Can’t Monopolise the AI Revolution

Ines Montani at QCon London: Economies of Scale Can’t Monopolise the AI Revolution

During her presentation at QCon London, Ines Montani, co-founder and CEO of explosion.ai (the maker of spaCy), stated that economies of scale are not enough to create monopolies in the AI space and that open-source techniques and models will allow everybody to keep up with the "Gen AI revolution". Montani opened her presentation by asking for a show of hands to identify the open-source users in the audience. The vast majority of the audience raised their hand, easily demonstrating that open-source is ubiquitous ("it would be easier to ask who doesn’t use open-source’"). She pointed out the multiple benefits of the…
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How to Generate and Use Synthetic Data for Finetuning

How to Generate and Use Synthetic Data for Finetuning

It is increasingly viable to use synthetic data for pretraining, instruction-tuning, and preference-tuning. Synthetic data refers to data generated via a model or simulated environment, instead of naturally occurring on the internet or annotated by humans. Relative to human annotation, it’s faster and cheaper to generate task-specific synthetic data. Furthermore, the quality and diversity of synthetic data often exceeds that of human annotators, leading to improved performance and generalization when models are finetuned on synthetic data. Finally, synthetic data sidesteps privacy and copyright concerns by avoiding reliance on user data or possibly copyrighted content. There are two main approaches to…
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Meta and Google want to make AI deals with Hollywood studios

Meta and Google want to make AI deals with Hollywood studios

Meta and Google are offering Hollywood studios millions of dollars with the hope of striking licensing deals that could improve their models for AI-generated video, according to a in Bloomberg. The companies have reportedly offered “tens of millions of dollars,” though it’s unclear what will come from the talks.According to the report, Netflix and Disney “aren’t willing to license their content” but have “expressed interest in other types of collaborations.” Warner Brothers Discovery has reportedly indicated “a willingness to license some of its programs.”A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment. Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The…
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Introducing Deephaven’s new calendar API | Deephaven

Introducing Deephaven’s new calendar API | Deephaven

Deephaven 0.32.0 introduced a number of new features, as well as improvements to old ones. Key features of the overhauled calendar API include:An updated Java calendar API that boosts performance in table operations.A streamlined Python API designed to minimize the chances of calling Python from query strings.Simple and intuitive naming conventions for ease of use.Support for user-defined calendars.Conversion between Deephaven and NumPy calendar formats.The new Python API is designed to be minimal, and facilitate the use of the Java API in query strings. The new calendar class provides the following methods:MethodDescriptionadd_calendarAdds a new business calendar to the set of available…
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4DS Plots ReRAM Roadmap – EE Times

//php echo do_shortcode('[responsivevoice_button voice="US English Male" buttontext="Listen to Post"]') ?> 4DS Memory Limited has broken its radio silence to lay out its go-forward plans for its Resistive RAM (ReRAM) technology. The company said its interface switching capabilities based on PCMO (Praseodymium, Calcium, Manganese, Oxygen) delivers significant advantages over other filamentary ReRAM technologies, making its high-bandwidth, high-endurance persistent memory suitable for AI, big data and neural net applications. In a briefing with EE Times, chief strategy officer Peter Himes said 4DS’ ReRAM requires no refresh within its persistence window and can be “refreshed” within the DRAM operating window, which makes it…
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CIRCTEC raises €150M for Europe’s largest tyre pyrolysis recycling facility

CIRCTEC raises €150M for Europe’s largest tyre pyrolysis recycling facility

UK recycling startup CIRCTEC has raised €150 million to construct Europe’s largest end-of-life tyre pyrolysis recycling facility in Delfzijl, the Netherlands. The funds include a €75 million equity investment led by Novo Holdings and A.P. Moller Holding and €22.5 million of grants awarded by the Government of the Netherlands. Discarded tyres pose significant environmental and health risks, accumulating in landfills, and polluting ecosystems with toxic substances.  CIRCTEC has developed a proprietary technology for decomposing old tyres through pyrolysis (a process that transforms waste into valuable circular materials through thermal decomposition in an oxygen-free environment), and for upgrading the products to…
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Gemini breaks new ground with a faster model, longer context, AI agents and more

Gemini breaks new ground with a faster model, longer context, AI agents and more

1.5 Flash excels at summarization, chat applications, image and video captioning, data extraction from long documents and tables, and more. This is because it’s been trained by 1.5 Pro through a process called “distillation,” where the most essential knowledge and skills from a larger model are transferred to a smaller, more efficient model.Read more about 1.5 Flash in our updated Gemini 1.5 technical report, on the Gemini technology page, and learn about 1.5 Flash’s availability and pricing.Significantly improving 1.5 ProOver the last few months, we’ve significantly improved 1.5 Pro, our best model for general performance across a wide range of…
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How to use Google Search entirely AI-free automatically – gHacks Tech News

How to use Google Search entirely AI-free automatically – gHacks Tech News

Google is integrating AI information into Google Search. Called AI Overviews, it is a feature that is rolling out to users from specific regions already. The feature adds an AI response to the very top of the search results. Below that, you find the regular web links. There are good reasons to skip AI output. From hallucinations, which means made-up information, to returning the wrong or even dangerous information. Add ads to that, which Google is now also rolling out in the United States, and you may not be super interested into these results at the time of writing. If…
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