Duolingo just introduced Video Call and Adventures at its Duocon 2024 conference to make language practice more interactive. Duolingo Max subscribers can hold real-time, adaptive conversations with Lily across English, Spanish, and French, while new mini-games let learners practice everyday tasks like ordering coffee in a low-pressure game environment.
NVIDIA just teamed up with the U.S. government and companies like OpenAI and Google on the Partnership for Global Inclusivity on AI. The effort aims to expand access to AI tools in developing nations, with NVIDIA pledging roughly $10 million in free training alongside GPU credits. Why it matters: Frontier AI has been heavily concentrated in wealthy regions, and this effort could help developers in emerging markets build local solutions.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai just announced a $120M Global AI Opportunity Fund at the UN Summit of the Future. The company plans to partner with local nonprofits to bring AI education and training to communities worldwide, aiming to stop an AI divide before it widens.
Microsoft just announced that its Copilot Wave 2 features are rolling out to educators and students. School accounts now get free access to GPT-4o with enterprise data protection—ensuring prompts aren't used to train models—along with collaborative Copilot Pages and custom agents. Why it matters: It gives institutions compliant, walled-off AI tools instead of leaving teachers to bring their own.
Arizona State University is aggressively expanding ChatGPT Edu across campus, activating over 200 projects from more than 400 faculty and student proposals. Applications range from simulated patient conversations for healthcare students to scholarly writing assistants, showcasing how universities are moving from banning AI to safely embracing enterprise-grade tools.
Grammarly just introduced Authorship, a feature that monitors the writing process in real time to distinguish between human typing, AI generation, and copy-pasted text. Instead of relying on flawed post-hoc detection algorithms, it creates a replayable audit trail to protect students from false accusations. A beta launches in Google Docs next month before expanding to Word and Pages.
NVIDIA just opened applications for its 24th Graduate Fellowship Program, offering Ph.D. researchers in AI, robotics, and computing up to $60,000 in funding alongside mentorship. Applicants must have completed at least their first year of doctoral studies and be available for an in-person internship in summer 2025. The deadline is Sept. 13, 2024.
The Qwen team just released Qwen2-Math, a specialized math model series spanning 1.5B, 7B, and 72B parameters. The top-tier 72B instruct model outperforms frontier giants like GPT-4o, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, and Llama-3.1-405B across major math benchmarks. Why it matters: open specialized models are closing the gap on complex reasoning without needing hundreds of billions of parameters.
OpenAI built a text watermarking tool capable of catching students who use ChatGPT for assignments, but is now hesitating to release it. The company warned the invisible watermark can be easily bypassed using translation tools or other AI models, and could unfairly stigmatize non-native English speakers. Why it matters: Detecting AI text remains an unsolved mess, and OpenAI is worried its fix might do more harm than good.
OpenAI just threw its weight behind three U.S. Senate bills, notably supporting the Future of AI Innovation Act to formally authorize the U.S. AI Safety Institute. The company is actively courting lawmakers ahead of upcoming regulatory scrutiny to secure a front-row seat at the policy table.
AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2 just solved four out of six problems from the 2024 International Mathematical Olympiad, achieving a silver-medal standard for the first time. The hybrid systems scored 28 out of 42 points, including cracking the contest's hardest problem. It marks a major milestone toward building AI systems capable of complex mathematical reasoning.
AI pioneer Andrej Karpathy just unveiled Eureka Labs, a startup building an "AI-native" school. The idea pairs human teacher-designed materials with personalized AI teaching assistants to guide students, starting with an undergraduate-level course called LLM101n that walks learners through training their own AI.
OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy took the stage at UC Berkeley, framing modern LLMs as a brand-new operating system akin to 1980s personal computing. He revealed that GPT-4 began as an unglamorous internal Reddit chatbot, urging young developers to embrace the 10,000-hour rule and let tiny hackathon side projects snowball into real breakthroughs.
Google just opened up Gemini to teen students using Google Workspace for Education accounts across more than 100 countries, completely free of charge. The teen experience comes with built-in guardrails, automatic fact-checking, and zero chat data used for model training, while teachers get new AI lesson-planning tools in Classroom. Schools finally get a secure, supervised way to introduce GenAI to minors.
OpenAI just launched ChatGPT Edu, a new offering built specifically for universities looking to responsibly deploy AI across campus. The package brings flagship-level reasoning, custom GPTs, and data analysis to students and researchers with enterprise security, while keeping university data completely private. Why it matters: It gives schools an affordable way to scale campus AI without privacy trade-offs.
Google just overhauled Android with a suite of new AI capabilities powered by Gemini and Circle to Search. Students can now circle math and physics problems for step-by-step explanations, while Gemini's new overlay can answer questions about YouTube videos. Even better, multimodal Gemini Nano will run on-device to spot phone scams in real time.
Google just introduced LearnLM, a new family of models fine-tuned from Gemini designed to turn AI from an answer generator into an active tutor. Grounded in learning science, it powers features like interactive "raise your hand" prompts on YouTube, step-by-step guidance in Gemini, and simplified Search overviews. Why it matters: generative AI is shifting from an easy cheating shortcut to structured pedagogy.
Google just announced a $3 billion investment to build and expand data centers across Virginia and Indiana to power its AI workload. Alongside the infrastructure boost, Google.org is launching a $75 million fund and the Google AI Essentials course to train one million Americans in basic AI skills for free.
Cisco, Google, Microsoft, and IBM just launched the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium to tackle AI-driven job disruption. Led by Cisco, the group plans to evaluate AI's impact on 56 tech roles and suggest actionable training programs. Why it matters: With tech layoffs continuing and companies openly planning to replace workers with automation, the industry is trying to prove it can reskill the workforce it's disrupting.
Fresh off his OpenAI exit, Andrej Karpathy just released a two-hour deep dive on building a GPT tokenizer from scratch. The tutorial breaks down why LLMs stumble on basic tasks like string reversal and arithmetic, while explaining why YAML often beats JSON for saving precious tokens.
