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Is now the time to buy Bitcoin stocks as institutional adoption increases? – crypto.news

Wall-street investors may consider now an opportune time to buy Bitcoin stocks, as a bullish breakout could drive further growth.

As of Tuesday, the crypto market continues to show resilience and growth, leading to a positive sentiment for Bitcoin (BTC) stocks. This crypto surge is fueled by institutional adoption and upcoming legislative developments. Bitcoin made significant gains on Monday afternoon, reaching over $71,000 in late trading, leaving behind the stagnant price action of the past few days. This marks the first time Bitcoin has surpassed the $70,000 mark since early April.

Other cryptos also had strong intraday gains. Ethereum (ETH) shot up 11.5% to $3,4300, and Solana (SOL) was up 8.2%. Ethereum has since shot up to over $3,700.

The rally boosted cryptocurrency-related stocks on Monday, with Marathon Digital (MARA) rising by 15%, Bit Digital (BTBT) by 22%, and Coinbase (COIN) by 8.5% at the close of Mondays session. Bitcoin mining stocks like Marathon Digital (MARA), Riot Platforms (RIOT), CleanSpark (CLSK), and Cipher Mining (CIFR) will be in the spotlight as BTC demand and price rises.

The introduction of spot Bitcoin ETFs in January has accelerated the institutional adoption of crypto. According to recent 13-F filings, 563 professional investment firms reported owning $3.5 billion of Bitcoin ETFs.

Notable names in that filing include hedge funds like Citadel, Millennium, and Point72. Morgan Stanley, a traditional asset manager, disclosed a $270 million investment in GBTC. Additionally, the State of Wisconsin Investment Board (SWIB) was the first U.S. pension fund to invest in Bitcoin ETFs, setting a precedent for other state pensions.

The 13-F filings also revealed an influx of capital into spot Bitcoin ETFs, totaling $948.3 million in net inflows last week. This surge reversed nearly $500 million of net outflows from these products over the prior eight weeks, bringing year-to-date net flows back above $12 billion. This renewed investor interest underscores the growing acceptance of BTC-related financial products in traditional investment portfolios.

Given this influx of adoption and a growing number of BTC ETF investments, the sentiment for crypto remains bullish. Bitcoin mining stocks have faced pressure post-halving, but a bullish breakout in Bitcoins price could signify a positive turn mining companies are looking to boost investments in mining machines and rely on Bitcoins price rise to sustain growth. Companies like Cipher Mining, Marathon Digital, and CleanSpark have reported strong quarters, indicating the potential for further rallying if Bitcoin stays above $70,000.

H.C. Wainwright & Co gave notable stocks like Marathon Digital (MARA), CleanSpark (CLSK), Core Scientific (CORZ), and Riot Platforms (RIOT) all buy ratings, reflecting a bullish sentiment on Bitcoin stocks.

H.C. Wainwright & Co stated in a research note that Bitcoins volatility and sensitivity to CPI data proves to us that it still very much remains a risk asset, and that investors should expect significant volatility around future CPI releases, and note that inflation still remains well above the Feds 2% target, coming in at +3.4% y/y in April.

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Bitcoin price today: jumps to $71k on spot Ether ETF speculation – Investing.com

Investing.com-- price jumped sharply on Tuesday, tracking a rally in Ether after a media report flagged some progress towards the approval of spot-Ether exchange-traded funds for U.S. markets.

The worlds largest cryptocurrency rose 6.6% in the past 24 hours to $71,349 by 08:47 ET (12:47 GMT).

But world no.2 token Ether was the star performer on Tuesday, surging 22.5% to a 1- month high of $3,776.1.

A report from Coindesk showed that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission asked applicants for spot Ether ETFs to update some key filings, ahead of a key deadline for the approval of the funds later this Thursday.

While the report said that there was still no guarantee that the regulator will approve the ETFs, it did mark some progress towards an eventual approval.

Bloomberg analysts Eric Balchunas and James Seyffart updated their expectations for a spot Ether ETF approval to a 75% probability from 25%, citing the Coindesk report and stating that the SEC could be doing a 180 on a potential approval.

The SEC was seen largely averse towards a spot Ether ETF, especially as recent reports said the regulator was also pursuing action against the Foundation over Ethers potential nature as a security.

But a spot ETF approval could trigger a similar rally in Ether as it did for Bitcoin earlier in 2024, where the token surged to a record high on increased capital inflows as institutional investors piled into the ETFs.

Data from digital assets manager CoinShares showed on Monday that crypto investment products saw a second straight week of capital inflows, as some soft readings on U.S. inflation ramped up bets that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates this year.

Total capital inflows were at $932 million in the week to May 20, with Bitcoin continuing to dominate capital flows. Still, overall trading volumes remained well below peaks seen in the aftermath of the spot-Bitcoin ETF approvals in February and March.

Altcoins drifted higher, tracking gains in Ether. rose 1.2%, while added 6%.

Meme tokens and SHIB climbed 10.5% and 8%, respectively.

House Democrats Maxine Waters (NYSE:) (D-Calif.) and David Scott (D-Ga.) have voiced to their colleagues their strong opposition to the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act, also referred to as the crypto bill.

However, despite this stance, the pair is not actively urging members to vote against the bill, as reported by Politico.

Waters and Scott argue that the bill undermines established legal precedents and creates uncertainty in the traditional securities market.

They claim the bills safe harbor provision, allowing entities to file an "intent to register" if they meet certain requirements, effectively shields these entities from existing securities laws until the SEC and CFTC finalize new regulations.

This, they argue, "weakens investor protections and opens the door to fraud and market manipulation," the email said.

The letter also states that if the bill becomes law, it would prevent shareholders from suing publicly traded companies, override state regulations regarding digital assets, weaken fiduciary requirements, and undermine capital markets.

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Bitcoin price today: jumps to $71k on spot Ether ETF speculation - Investing.com

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Machine Learning Stocks to Buy That Are Millionaire-Makers: May – InvestorPlace

Source: Wright Studio / Shutterstock.com

The next phase of technology has been established: machine learning and AI will revolutionize the world for the better. Although it might seem like these stocks are trading in a bubble, investors need to keep a discerning and keen long-term vision for these disruptive, emerging technologies. Some way or another, AI will grow to become a secular movement that nearly every industry, not every company in the world, will incorporate to increase productivity and efficiency.

Of course, anxiousness about the AI bubble is not unwarranted. Preparing a well-diversified portfolio of the right stocks is crucial to avoid such major drawdowns. Just because a company mentions AI doesnt mean it instantly becomes a good investment. Weve already seen this with pullbacks in industries like EVs and fintech. So, if you want to gain machine learning exposure in your portfolio, consider these three machine learning stocks to buy and thank us in the coming five or ten years.

Source: Ascannio / Shutterstock.com

Palantir (NYSE:PLTR) went from a meme stock to a legitimate business, earning hundreds of millions each year in profits. The stock is trading right at the average analyst price target of $21.45 and has a street-high price target of $35.00. This high-end target represents a more than 60% upside from the current price.

This stock has been polarizing on Wall Street since its direct listing debut in September 2020. While the first few years were a roller coaster ride for investors, the stock is earning legitimate backing through its machine-learning integrated production deployment infrastructure. Additionally, the hype doesnt get any more legit than Stanley Druckenmiller, who disclosed that he bought nearly 770,000 shares in the recent quarter! For those who dont know him, Druckenmiller has long supported the ML revolution, with NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) being his most recent win during its massive rally over the past year.

The problem with Palantir has always been its valuation. Currently, shares trade at 21x sales and 65x forward earnings. Nonetheless, growth prospects are looking strong now, with revenue growing at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12% and a three-year CAGR of 21%. As multiples begin to compress, investors should consider Palantir to be a legitimate money-making contender in the ML space.

Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) is a Chinese technology company that recently amassed over 200 million users on its new Ernie AI chatbot. This year, the stock is down by about 4.0% as Chinese stocks have lagged the broader rally in US equities. Nonetheless, Wall Street has maintained an average analyst price target of $153.36, about 40% higher than the current price.

Baidu recently made headlines after reporting it was interested in partnering with Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) to use its robotaxis in China. As China looks to get its hands on some for immediate rollout, investors should keep their eyes peeled for the unveiling of the CyberCabs in America this August. Not only will this potentially be one of the strongest new channels for revenue growth for both these companies, but Baidus race to get first movers advantage could solidify it as a leader in the Chinese automobile space.

As with many Chinese ADR stocks, the multiples for BIDU are low. For example, its P/E ratio of 9.79x is sitting 25% lower than its sectors median! On top of such a discounted valuation, Baidu has maintained a strong 10-year revenue CAGR of 14%. Baidu looks like a bargain for investors who can tolerate the risk that comes with Chinese stocks.

Micron Technologies (NASDAQ:MU) is an American chip maker with a major surge in demand due to AI and machine learning technology. Analysts are bullish on MU, with 28 of 31 recommendations coming in May as a Buy or Strong Buy rating. The average analyst price target is $145.52, nearly 15% higher than the current price.

This chip maker has already hit new all-time highs this month and is seeing revitalized product demand. This growth potential has largely been attributed to Micron being one of three companies in the world that make DRAM memory chips. These chips allow for storing massive amounts of data, which will help accelerate the training of AI and machine learning technologies. These DRAM chips account for 71% of Microns revenue as of Q2 2024, which bodes well for the stocks upward momentum.

Usually, when a stock trades at all-time highs, its valuations also stretch. Thats not exactly true for Micron, as shares are trading at just 7.5x sales and 17x forward earnings. As revenue growth accelerates, Micron sticks out as one of the more under-the-radar ways to gain exposure to AI and potentially join the million-dollar club.

On the date of publication, Ian Hartana and Vayun Chugh did not hold (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer, subject to the InvestorPlace.comPublishing Guidelines.

Chandler Capital is the work of Ian Hartana and Vayun Chugh. Ian Hartana and Vayun Chugh are both self-taught investors whose work has been featured in Seeking Alpha. Their research primarily revolves around GARP stocks with a long-term investment perspective encompassing diverse sectors such as technology, energy, and healthcare.

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Slack is training its machine learning on your chat behavior unless you opt out via email – TechRadar

Slack has been using customer data to power its machine learning functions, including search result relevance and ranking, leading to the company being criticized over confusing policy updates that led many to believe that their data was being used to train its AI models.

According to the company's policy, those wishing to opt out must do so through their organizations Slack admin, who must email the company to put a stop to data use.

Slack has confirmed in correspondence to TechRadar Pro that the information it uses to power its ML not its AI is de-identified and does not access message content.

An extract from the companys privacy principles page reads:

To develop non-generative AI/ML models for features such as emoji and channel recommendations, our systems analyze Customer Data (e.g. messages, content, and files) submitted to Slack as well as Other Information (including usage information) as defined in our Privacy Policy and in your customer agreement.

Another passage reads: To opt out, please have your org, workspace owners or primary owner contact our Customer Experience team at feedback@slack.com

The company does not provide a timeframe for processing such requests.

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In response to uproar among the community, the company posted a separate blog post to address concerns arising, adding: We do not build or train these models in such a way that they could learn, memorize, or be able to reproduce any customer data of any kind.

Slack confirmed that user data is not shared with third-party LLM providers for training purposes.

The company added in its correspondence to TechRadar Pro that its "intelligent features (not Slack AI) analyze metadata like user behavior data surrounding messages, content and files but they don't access message content."

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Machine Learning Researcher Links OpenAI to Drug-Fueled Sex Parties – Futurism

A machine learning researcher is claiming to have knowledge of kinky drug-fueled orgies in Silicon Valley's storied hacker houses and appears to be linking those parties, and the culture surrounding them, to OpenAI.

"The thing about being active in the hacker house scene is you are accidentally signing up for a career as a shadow politician in the Silicon Valley startup scene," begins the lengthy X-formerly-Twitter post by Sonia Joseph, a former Princeton ML researcher who's now affiliated with the deep learning institute Mila Quebec.

What follows is a vague and anecdotal diatribe about the "dark side" of startup culture made particularly explosive by Joseph's reference to so-called "consensual non-consent" sex parties that she says took place within the artificial general intelligence (AGI) enthusiast community in the valley.

The jumping off point, as far as we can tell, stems from a thread announcing that OpenAI superalignment chief Jan Leike was leaving the company as it dissolved his team that was meant to prevent advanced AI from going rogue.

At the end of his X thread, Leike encouraged remaining employees to "feel the AGI," a phrase that was also ascribed to newly-exited OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever during seemingly cultish rituals revealed in an Atlantic expos last year but nothing in that piece, nor the superalignment chief's tweets, suggests anything having to do with sex, drugs, or kink.

Still, Joseph addressed her second viral memo-length tweet "to the journalists contacting me about the AGI consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties." And in the post, said she'd witnessed "some troubling things" in Silicon Valley's "community house scene" when she was in her early 20s and new to the tech industry.

"It is not my place to speak as to why Jan Leike and the superalignment team resigned. I have no idea why and cannot make any claims," wrote the researcher, who is not affiliated with OpenAI. "However, I do believe my cultural observations of the SF AI scene are more broadly relevant to the AI industry."

"I don't think events like the consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties and heavy LSD use of some elite AI researchers have been good for women," Joseph continued. "They create a climate that can be very bad for female AI researchers... I believe they are somewhat emblematic of broader problems: a coercive climate that normalizes recklessness and crossing boundaries, which we are seeing playing out more broadly in the industry today. Move fast and break things, applied to people."

While she said she doesn't think there's anything generally wrong with "sex parties and heavy LSD use," she also charged that the culture surrounding these alleged parties "leads to some of the most coercive and fucked up social dynamics that I have ever seen."

"I have seen people repeatedly get shut down for pointing out these problems," Joseph wrote. "Once, when trying to point out these problems, I had three OpenAI and Anthropic researchers debate whether I was mentally ill on a Google document. I have no history of mental illness; and this incident stuck with me as an example of blindspots/groupthink."

"Its likely these problems are not really on OpenAI but symptomatic of a much deeper rot in the Valley," she added. "I wish I could say more, but probably shouldnt."

Overall, it's hard to make heads or tails of these claims.We've reached out to Joseph and OpenAI for more info.

"I'm not under an NDA. I never worked for OpenAI," Joseph wrote. "I just observed the surrounding AI culture through the community house scene in SF, as a fly-on-the-wall, hearing insider information and backroom deals, befriending dozens of women and allies and well-meaning parties, and watching many them get burned."

More on OpenAI: Sam Altman Clearly Freaked Out by Reaction to News of OpenAI Silencing Former Employees

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US Pharma and Biotech Summit 2024: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Through the Eyes of the FDA Part II – Pharmaceutical Executive

PE: Do you see the FDA placing any restrictions on the use of AI and machine learning as times goes on? What may prompt such actions?

Fakhouri: Like I mentioned during the keynote interview, we get asked, does FDA regulate large language models? Are you going to ban generative AI use? My response is that we typically don't regulate linear regression. We look at the data and the information that any modeling technique is producing, and we want to make sure that the information is trustworthy. So, I wouldn't say that we would be banning or prohibiting a certain AI or machine learning type of algorithm, what we're actually interested in is how robust how accurate, how credible, the information from these models is.

PE: What do you think the future may hold for AI and machine learning in pharma R&D in both the short- and long-term?

Fakhouri: We're actually very excited about AI use, I think we're seeing that it's increasing efficiencies in different parts of the drug development process. If you think about things such as discovery or protein folding, which again, is outside of what we normally look at, it could potentially cut the development time by years. This is all very exciting, because it could translate into faster, safe and effective drugs coming into the market. It can also fill in certain gaps for rare diseases, for example, where we can see a lot of potential use for AI to accelerate the development of drugs. In this type of situation, that's what I would say would be the long term. With the short term, I think what we're all doing, whether it's industry, whether it's the regulator's academia, is we're going through this adoption curve. You need to train your staff, you need to bring in the right expertise, and you need to develop the right tools to solve the right problems. That's going to take some time and that's why I think the short term uses of AI are going to be mostly low hanging type of fruits where you're increasing operational efficiency, but then that will translate into the development of safe and effective drugs faster.

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US Pharma and Biotech Summit 2024: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Through the Eyes of the FDA Part II - Pharmaceutical Executive

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Create a multimodal assistant with advanced RAG and Amazon Bedrock | Amazon Web Services – AWS Blog

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) models have emerged as a promising approach to enhance the capabilities of language models by incorporating external knowledge from large text corpora. However, despite their impressive performance in various natural language processing tasks, RAG models still face several limitations that need to be addressed.

Naive RAG models face limitations such as missing content, reasoning mismatch, and challenges in handling multimodal data. Although they can retrieve relevant information, they may struggle to generate complete and coherent responses when required information is absent, leading to incomplete or inaccurate outputs. Additionally, even with relevant information retrieved, the models may have difficulty correctly interpreting and reasoning over the content, resulting in inconsistencies or logical errors. Furthermore, effectively understanding and reasoning over multimodal data remains a significant challenge for these primarily text-based models.

In this post, we present a new approach named multimodal RAG (mmRAG) to tackle those existing limitations in greater detail. The solution intends to address these limitations for practical generative artificial intelligence (AI) assistant use cases. Additionally, we examine potential solutions to enhance the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and visual language models (VLMs) with advanced LangChain capabilities, enabling them to generate more comprehensive, coherent, and accurate outputs while effectively handling multimodal data. The solution uses Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies, providing a broad set of capabilities to build generative AI applications with security, privacy, and responsible AI.

The mmRAG solution is based on a straightforward concept: to extract different data types separately, you generate text summarization using a VLM from different data types, embed text summaries along with raw data accordingly to a vector database, and store raw unstructured data in a document store. The query will prompt the LLM to retrieve relevant vectors from both the vector database and document store and generate meaningful and accurate answers.

The following diagram illustrates the solution architecture.

The architecture diagram depicts the mmRAG architecture that integrates advanced reasoning and retrieval mechanisms. It combines text, table, and image (including chart) data into a unified vector representation, enabling cross-modal understanding and retrieval. The process begins with diverse data extractions from various sources such as URLs and PDF files by parsing and preprocessing text, table, and image data types separately, while table data is converted into raw text and image data into captions.

These parsed data streams are then fed into a multimodal embedding model, which encodes the various data types into uniform, high dimensional vectors. The resulting vectors, representing the semantic content regardless of original format, are indexed in a vector database for efficient approximate similarity searches. When a query is received, the reasoning and retrieval component performs similarity searches across this vector space to retrieve the most relevant information from the vast integrated knowledge base.

The retrieved multimodal representations are then used by the generation component to produce outputs such as text, images, or other modalities. The VLM component generates vector representations specifically for textual data, further enhancing the systems language understanding capabilities. Overall, this architecture facilitates advanced cross-modal reasoning, retrieval, and generation by unifying different data modalities into a common semantic space.

Developers can access mmRAG source codes on the GitHub repo.

You start by configuring Amazon Bedrock to integrate with various components from the LangChain Community library. This allows you to work with the core FMs. You use the BedrockEmbeddings class to create two different embedding models: one for text (embedding_bedrock_text) and one for images (embeddings_bedrock_image). These embeddings represent textual and visual data in a numerical format, which is essential for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks.

Additionally, you use the LangChain Bedrock and BedrockChat classes to create a VLM model instance (llm_bedrock_claude3_haiku) from Anthropic Claude 3 Haiku and a chat instance based on a different model, Sonnet (chat_bedrock_claude3_sonnet). These instances are used for advanced query reasoning, argumentation, and retrieval tasks. See the following code snippet:

In this section, we explore how to harness the power of Python to parse text, tables, and images from URLs and PDFs efficiently, using two powerful packages: Beautiful Soup and PyMuPDF. Beautiful Soup, a library designed for web scraping, makes it straightforward to sift through HTML and XML content, allowing you to extract the desired data from web pages. PyMuPDF offers an extensive set of functionalities for interacting with PDF files, enabling you to extract not just text but also tables and images with ease. See the following code:

The following code snippets demonstrate how to generate image captions using Anthropic Claude 3 by invoking the bedrock_get_img_description utility function. Additionally, they showcase how to embed image pixels along with image captioning using the Amazon Titan image embedding model amazon.titan_embeding_image_v1 by calling the get_text_embedding function.

You can harness the capabilities of the newly released Anthropic Claude 3 Sonnet and Haiku on Amazon Bedrock, combined with the Amazon Titan image embedding model and LangChain. This powerful combination allows you to generate comprehensive text captions for tables and images, seamlessly integrating them into your content. Additionally, you can store vectors, objects, raw image file names, and source documents in an Amazon OpenSearch Serverless vector store and object store. Use the following code snippets to create image captions by invoking the utility function bedrock_get_img_description. Embed image pixels along with image captions using the Amazon Titan image embedding model amazon.titan_embeding_image_v1 by calling the get_text_embedding functions.

You can consult the provided code examples for more information on how to embed multimodal and insert vector documents into the OpenSearch Serverless vector store. For more information about data access, refer to Data access control for Amazon OpenSearch Serverless.

Fusion in RAG presents an innovative search strategy designed to transcend the limitations of conventional search techniques, aligning more closely with the complex nature of human inquiries. This initiative elevates the search experience by integrating multi-faceted query generation and using Reciprocal Rank Fusion for an enhanced re-ranking of search outcomes. This approach offers a more nuanced and effective way to navigate the vast expanse of available information, catering to the intricate and varied demands of users searches.

The following diagram illustrates this workflow.

We use the Anthropic Claude 3 Sonnet and Haiku models, which possess the capability to process visual and language data, which enables them to handle the query decomposition (Haiku) and answer fusion (Sonnet) stages effectively. The following code snippet demonstrates how to create a retriever using OpenSearch Serverless:

The combination of decomposition and fusion intend to address the limitations of the chain-of-thought (CoT) method in language models. It involves breaking down complex problems into simpler, sequential sub-problems, where each sub-problem builds upon the solution of the previous one. This technique significantly enhances the problem-solving abilities of language models in areas such as symbolic manipulation, compositional generalization, and mathematical reasoning.

The RAG-decomposition approach, which uses the decomposition step (see the following code), underscores the potential of a technique called least-to-most prompting. This technique not only improves upon existing methods but also paves the way for more advanced, interactive learning frameworks for language models. The ultimate goal is to move towards a future where language models can learn from bidirectional conversations, enabling more effective reasoning and problem-solving capabilities.

The RAG process is further enhanced by integrating a reciprocal re-ranker, which uses sophisticated NLP techniques. This makes sure the retrieved results are relevant and also semantically aligned with the users intended query. This multimodal retrieval approach seamlessly operates across vector databases and object stores, marking a significant advancement in the quest for more efficient, accurate, and contextually aware search mechanisms.

The mmRAG architecture enables the system to understand and process multimodal queries, retrieve relevant information from various sources, and generate multimodal answers by combining textual, tabular, and visual information in a unified manner. The following diagram highlights the data flows from queries to answers by using an advanced RAG and a multimodal retrieval engine powered by a multimodal embedding model (amazon.titan-embed-image-v1), an object store (Amazon S3), and a vector database (OpenSearch Serverless). For tables, the system retrieves relevant table locations and metadata, and computes the cosine similarity between the multimodal embedding and the vectors representing the table and its summary. Similarly, for images, the system retrieves relevant image locations and metadata, and computes the cosine similarity between the multimodal embedding and the vectors representing the image and its caption.

The following screenshot illustrates the improved accuracy and comprehensive understanding of the users query with multimodality capability. The mmRAG approach is capable of grasping the intent behind the query, extracting relevant information from the provided chart, and estimating the overall costs, including the estimated output token size. Furthermore, it can perform mathematical calculations to determine the cost difference. The output includes the source chart and a link to its original location.

Amazon Bedrock offers a comprehensive set of generative AI models for enhancing content comprehension across various modalities. By using the latest advancements in VLMs, such as Anthropic Claude 3 Sonnet and Haiku, as well as the Amazon Titan image embedding model, Amazon Bedrock enables you to expand your document understanding beyond text to include tables, charts, and images. The integration of OpenSearch Serverless provides enterprise-grade vector storage and approximate k-NN search capabilities, enabling efficient retrieval of relevant information. With advanced LangChain decomposition and fusion techniques, you can use multi-step querying across different LLMs to improve accuracy and gain deeper insights. This powerful combination of cutting-edge technologies allows you to unlock the full potential of multimodal content comprehension, enabling you to make informed decisions and drive innovation across various data sources.

The reliance on visual language models and image embedding models for comprehensive and accurate image captions has its limitations. Although these models excel at understanding visual and textual data, the multi-step query decomposition, reciprocal ranking, and fusion processes involved can lead to increased inference latency. This makes such solutions less suitable for real-time applications or scenarios that demand instantaneous responses. However, these solutions can be highly beneficial in use cases where higher accuracy and less time-sensitive responses are required, allowing for more detailed and accurate analysis of complex visual and textual data.

In this post, we discussed how you can use multimodal RAG to address limitations in multimodal generative AI assistants. We invite you to explore mmRAG and take advantage of the advanced features of Amazon Bedrock. These powerful tools can assist your business in gaining deeper insights, making well-informed decisions, and fostering innovation driven by more accurate data. Ongoing research efforts are focused on developing an agenic and graph-based pipeline to streamline the processes of parsing, injection, and retrieval. These approaches hold the promise of enhancing the reliability and reusability of the mmRAG system.

Authors would like to expression sincere gratitude to Nausheen Sayed, Karen Twelves, Li Zhang, Sophia Shramko, Mani Khanuja, Santhosh Kuriakose, and Theresa Perkins for their comprehensive reviews.

Alfred Shenis a Senior AI/ML Specialist at AWS. He has been working in Silicon Valley, holding technical and managerial positions in diverse sectors including healthcare, finance, and high-tech. He is a dedicated applied AI/ML researcher, concentrating on CV, NLP, and multimodality. His work has been showcased in publications such as EMNLP, ICLR, and Public Health.

Changsha Ma is an generative AI Specialist at AWS. She is a technologist with a PhD in Computer Science, a masters degree in Education Psychology, and years of experience in data science and independent consulting in AI/ML. She is passionate about researching methodological approaches for machine and human intelligence. Outside of work, she loves hiking, cooking, hunting food, mentoring college students for entrepreneurship, and spending time with friends and families.

Julianna Delua is a Principal Specialist for AI/ML and generative AI. She serves the financial services industry customers including those in Capital Markets, Fintech and Payments. Julianna enjoys helping businesses turn new ideas into solutions and transform the organizations with AI-powered solutions.

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EU AI Act Clears Final Hurdle to Become Global Landmark – InformationWeek

The European Union (EU) on Tuesday passed the AI Act, a landmark legislative effort that marks the first comprehensive regulations to create guardrails for artificial intelligence.

EU members final approval means the act will enter into force next month. The law, first drafted in 2021, was put on a fast track in recent months as global leaders race to adopt safeguards to keep pace with the explosive growth in generative AI (GenAI) adoption.

This landmark law, the first of its kind in the world, addresses a global technological challenge that also creates opportunities for our societies and economies, Belgian Digitalization Minister Mathieu Michel said in a statement. With the AI Act, Europe emphasizes the importance of trust, transparency and accountability when dealing with new technologies while at the same time ensuring this fast-changing technology can flourish and boost European innovation.

But US companies will certainly take notice as the rules will apply to any company doing business in Europe. And the cost of running afoul of the rules could be substantial, even for multibillion-dollar US firms.

Rules for general purpose AI models will impact companies after 12 months while rules for AI systems embedded into products will strike in 36 months. Bans on AI in predictive policing, and untargeted scraping of facial images from video will come into play in six months. Fines will range from $8.2 million or 1.5% of global turnover to $37.9 million or 7% of turnover, depending on the violation.

Related:EU AI Act Passes: How CIOs Can Prepare

The EU AI Act clearing its final hurdle today marks a significant milestone in the regulatory landscape of AI globally, Manoj Saxena, InformationWeek Insight Circle member and founder of the Responsible AI Institute, tells us via email. Although it may not directly affect US-based AI developers like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Meta until 2025, its implications are profound.

US companies are already bracing for change, Saxena tells InformationWeek. We are already seeing an uptick in consultations as our member companies prepare for a future where compliance will not only be mandatory but will also serve as a competitive differentiator in the global marketplace.

Companies, he says, should not take the act lightly. This act is setting a precedent that will likely influence AI regulation and development not just in the world, but across the US."

US legislators on both sides of the aisle have signaled concern about the EUs growing influence on US tech interests. A Biden administration executive order sought to establish some US-based rules, but an administration change could see that order easily canceled.

Related:Cranium, Microsoft, KPMG Launch EU AI Hub

Were glad to see that the EU is taking on the regulation of frontier AI models, Daniel Colson, executive director of the AI Policy Institute, tells InformationWeek in an email. But the American people are clear that they dont want Europe to take the lead on AI regulation, and want us to craft our own policies.

He noted that a poll conducted by the AI Policy Institute showed that the majority of Americans, regardless of partisan leanings, want to see the US pave its own way for AI regulation.

Theres a lot of work to do to improve on the European model of this tiering system as regulation is passed in the US, he says. But fundamentally, its approach is sound and on the right track US regulation has the opportunity to focus even more on reducing the dangers of these most powerful models while broadly supporting responsible innovation.

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Study population

The study population consisted of patients diagnosed with Schistosoma japonicum in Yueyang, Hunan Province, China. This city has historically been a high schistosomiasis epidemic area. Because it was located near Dongting Lake in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, where the Intermediate host Oncomelania hupensis breeds in large numbers.

Schistosoma japonicum infection was diagnosed according to the definition of Zhou et al.26. Including the following diagnostic criteria: life history in schistosomiasis-endemic areas, contact with infected water, specific schistosoma serology testing, color ultrasound, excreta (feces, urine) microscopic examination. Schistosomiasis infection was considered when schistosome ova were visualized in stool, urine or when the Schistosoma serology was positive.

Liver fibrosis was determined by ultrasound according to the World Health Organization diagnostic criteria for Schistosoma japonicum infection27,28. An experienced ultrasound expert divided the patients into two groups according to the ultrasound results: fibrosis group (with mesh-like changes and uneven hepatic echotexture); no-fibrosis group (without mesh-like changes, smooth and uniform hepatic echotexture). The diagnosis was double-checked by another experienced schistosomiasis specialist.

A retrospective medical record review was conducted from June 2019 to June 2022 at Xiangyue Hospital, Yueyang City, Hunan Province of China. All patients underwent blood tests and ultrasound evaluation at admission. All variables were extracted from the hospitals electronic medical record system. The data include: patient demographic characteristics, blood routine indicators and other variables. KNN filling method is used to fill in the missing data. The principle is to identify k samples that are spatially similar or close in the data set through distance measurement, and then use these k samples to estimate the value of the missing data point. The percentage of missing data points is presented in Supplementary Table 5. The LassoCV method was used to screen out key variables. Data entry was performed by a full-time research physician or medical student. This study was conducted and approved by the Ethics Committee of the third Xiangya Hospital of Central South University (No: 21149) and has been carried out in accordance with the Code of Ethics of the World Medical Association (Declaration of Helsinki) for experiments. All methods were performed in accordance with the relevant guidelines and regulations. The need of informed consent was waived by the Ethics Committee of the third Xiangya Hospital of Central South University due to retrospective nature of the study. The privacy of all participants is fully protected.

Patients were divided into hepatic fibrosis and non-hepatic fibrosis groups according to their color Doppler ultrasound results. Patients with hepatitis B virus (hepatitis B surface antigen seropositive), hepatitis C virus (HCV antibody seropositive), human immunodeficiency virus (HIV antibody seropositive), alcoholic and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (ultrasound scanning and alcohol consumption above 30g daily), decompensated liver disease or liver cancer (ultrasound and liver function tests), and organ transplantation (self-reported) were excluded. The key variables are selected by LassoCV method for subsequent modeling.

First, the classification task was completed using 6 machine learning algorithms, including: XGB Classifier, Logistic Regression, LightGBM Classifier, Random Forest Classifier, Support Vector Classification, K Neighbors Classifier. Fivefold cross-validation method was used for validation. Each model was evaluated using AUC, clinical decision curve plot, accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, and F1 score. The ROC diagram and the forest diagram show the ROC results of each model for the prediction of hepatic fibrosis.

After selecting the best algorithm through multi-algorithm model comparison, the best algorithm was used to model again. Different from multi-model comparison, when using the best-performing algorithm for modeling, we randomly select 15% of the total samples as the test set, and the remaining samples are used as the training set for fivefold cross-validation.

The SHAP package in python can interpret the output of machine learning models, considering all features as contributors. For each prediction sample, the model will generate a prediction value, and its biggest advantage is that it can reflect the influence of the characteristics in each sample and show the positive and negative effects. This study used the SHAP package to interpret the model. SHAP value plots were used to show the contribution of each variable in the model. Model variable importance plots were used to show the importance ranking of each variable. Force diagrams were used to illustrate how each variable affects the predicted outcome for each sample with two examples.

The python used in this study is version 3.7. The statsmodels 0.11.1 package in Python was used to count whether each variable was different between two groups of people. The analysis method was selected according to the distribution of samples, homogeneity of variance, and sample size. Chi-square test was used for categorical variables. Students t-test or MannWhitney U-test was used for quantitative variables.

In this study, LassoCV was used to screen key variables, and factors with a coefficient of 0 were automatically eliminated (sklearn 0.22.1 package in Python). Lasso obtains a more refined model by constructing a penalty function, so that it compresses some regression coefficients, that is, forces the sum of the absolute values of the coefficients to be less than a certain fixed value; at the same time, sets some regression coefficients to zero. Therefore, the advantage of subset shrinkage is preserved, and it is a biased estimate for dealing with data with multicollinearity. In the multi-model and best-model modeling process, the xgboost 1.2.1 package of Python is used for XGBoost algorithm modeling, the lightgbm 3.2.1 package of Python is used for LightGBM algorithm modeling, and the sklearn 0.22.1 package of Python was used to build other models. The shap 0.39.0 package in python was used to demonstrate the interpretability of the model.

Ethics approval was obtained from the Ethics Committee of the third Xiangya Hospital of Central South University.

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Efficient and cost-effective multi-tenant LoRA serving with Amazon SageMaker | Amazon Web Services – AWS Blog

In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI), the rise of generative AI models has ushered in a new era of personalized and intelligent experiences. Organizations are increasingly using the power of these language models to drive innovation and enhance their services, from natural language processing to content generation and beyond.

Using generative AI models in the enterprise environment, however, requires taming their intrinsic power and enhancing their skills to address specific customer needs. In cases where an out-of-the-box model is missing knowledge of domain- or organization-specific terminologies, a custom fine-tuned model, also called a domain-specific large language model (LLM), might be an option for performing standard tasks in that domain or micro-domain. BloombergGPT is an example of LLM that was trained from scratch to have a better understanding of highly specialized vocabulary found in the financial domain. In the same sense, domain specificity can be addressed through fine-tuning at a smaller scale. Customers are fine-tuning generative AI models based on domains including finance, sales, marketing, travel, IT, HR, finance, procurement, healthcare and life sciences, customer service, and many more. Additionally, independent software vendors (ISVs) are building secure, managed, multi-tenant, end-to-end generative AI platforms with models that are customized and personalized based on their customers datasets and domains. For example, Forethought introduced SupportGPT, a generative AI platform for customer support.

As the demands for personalized and specialized AI solutions grow, businesses often find themselves grappling with the challenge of efficiently managing and serving a multitude of fine-tuned models across diverse use cases and customer segments. With the need to serve a wide range of AI-powered use cases, from resume parsing and job skill matching, domain-specific to email generation and natural language understanding, these businesses are often left with the daunting task of managing hundreds of fine-tuned models, each tailored to specific customer needs or use cases. The complexities of this challenge are compounded by the inherent scalability and cost-effectiveness concerns that come with deploying and maintaining such a diverse model ecosystem. Traditional approaches to model serving can quickly become unwieldy and resource intensive, leading to increased infrastructure costs, operational overhead, and potential performance bottlenecks.

Fine-tuning enormous language models is prohibitively expensive in terms of the hardware required and the storage and switching cost for hosting independent instances for different tasks. LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) is an efficient adaptation strategy that neither introduces inference latency nor reduces input sequence length while retaining high model quality. Importantly, it allows for quick task switching when deployed as a service by sharing the vast majority of the model parameters.

In this post, we explore a solution that addresses these challenges head-on using LoRA serving with Amazon SageMaker. By using the new performance optimizations of LoRA techniques in SageMaker large model inference (LMI) containers along with inference components, we demonstrate how organizations can efficiently manage and serve their growing portfolio of fine-tuned models, while optimizing costs and providing seamless performance for their customers.

The latest SageMaker LMI container offers unmerged-LoRA inference, sped up with our LMI-Dist inference engine and OpenAI style chat schema. To learn more about LMI, refer to LMI Starting Guide, LMI handlers Inference API Schema, and Chat Completions API Schema.

There are two kinds of LoRA that can be put onto various engines:

The new LMI container offers out-of-box integration and abstraction with SageMaker for hosting multiple unmerged LoRA adapters with higher performance (low latency and high throughput) using the vLLM backend LMI-Dist backend that uses vLLM, which in-turn uses S-LORA and Punica. The LMI container offers two backends for serving LoRA adapters: the LMI-Dist backend (recommended) and the vLLM Backend. Both backends are based on the open source vLLM library for serving LoRA adapters, but the LMI-Dist backend provides additional optimized continuous (rolling) batching implementation. You are not required to configure these libraries separately; the LMI container provides the higher-level abstraction through the vLLM and LMI-Dist backends. We recommend you start with the LMI-Dist backend because it has additional performance optimizations related to continuous (rolling) batching.

S-LoRA stores all adapters in the main memory and fetches the adapters used by the currently running queries to the GPU memory. To efficiently use the GPU memory and reduce fragmentation, S-LoRA proposes unified paging. Unified paging uses a unified memory pool to manage dynamic adapter weights with different ranks and KV cache tensors with varying sequence lengths. Additionally, S-LoRA employs a novel tensor parallelism strategy and highly optimized custom CUDA kernels for heterogeneous batching of LoRA computation. Collectively, these features enable S-LoRA to serve thousands of LoRA adapters on a single GPU or across multiple GPUs with a small overhead.

Punica is designed to efficiently serve multiple LoRA models on a shared GPU cluster. It achieves this by following three design guidelines:

Punica uses a new CUDA kernel design called Segmented Gather Matrix-Vector Multiplication (SGMV) to batch GPU operations for concurrent runs of multiple LoRA models, significantly improving GPU efficiency in terms of memory and computation. Punica also implements a scheduler that routes requests to active GPUs and migrates requests for consolidation, optimizing GPU resource allocation. Overall, Punica achieves high throughput and low latency in serving multi-tenant LoRA models on a shared GPU cluster. For more information, read the Punica whitepaper.

The following figure shows the multi LoRA adapter serving stack of the LMI container on SageMaker.

As shown in the preceding figure, the LMI container provides the higher-level abstraction through the vLLM and LMI-Dist backends to serve LoRA adapters at scale on SageMaker. As a result, youre not required to configure the underlying libraries (S-LORA, Punica, or vLLM) separately. However, there might be cases where you want to control some of the performance driving parameters depending on your use case and application performance requirements. The following are the common configuration options the LMI container provides to tune LoRA serving. For more details on configuration options specific to each backend, refer to vLLM Engine User Guide and LMI-Dist Engine User Guide.

Enterprises grappling with the complexities of managing generative AI models often encounter scenarios where a robust and flexible design pattern is crucial. One common use case involves a single base model with multiple LoRA adapters, each tailored to specific customer needs or use cases. This approach allows organizations to use a foundational language model while maintaining the agility to fine-tune and deploy customized versions for their diverse customer base.

An enterprise offering a resume parsing and job skill matching service may use a single high-performance base model, such as Mistral 7B. The Mistral 7B base model is particularly well-suited for job-related content generation tasks, such as creating personalized job descriptions and tailored email communications. Mistrals strong performance in natural language generation and its ability to capture industry-specific terminology and writing styles make it a valuable asset for such an enterprises customers in the HR and recruitment space. By fine-tuning Mistral 7B with LoRA adapters, enterprises can make sure the generated content aligns with the unique branding, tone, and requirements of each customer, delivering a highly personalized experience.

On the other hand, the same enterprise may use the Llama 3 base model for more general natural language processing tasks, such as resume parsing, skills extraction, and candidate matching. Llama 3s broad knowledge base and robust language understanding capabilities enable it to handle a wide range of documents and formats, making sure their services can effectively process and analyze candidate information, regardless of the source. By fine-tuning Llama 3 with LoRA adapters, such enterprises can tailor the models performance to specific customer requirements, such as regional dialects, industry-specific terminology, or unique data formats. By employing a multi-base model, multi-adapter design pattern, enterprises can take advantage of the unique strengths of each language model to deliver a comprehensive and highly personalized job profile to a candidate resume matching service. This approach allows enterprises to cater to the diverse needs of their customers, making sure each client receives tailored AI-powered solutions that enhance their recruitment and talent management processes.

Effectively implementing and managing these design patterns, where multiple base models are coupled with numerous LoRA adapters, is a key challenge that enterprises must address to unlock the full potential of their generative AI investments. A well-designed and scalable approach to model serving is crucial in delivering cost-effective, high-performance, and personalized experiences to customers.

The following sections outline the coding steps to deploy a base LLM, TheBloke/Llama-2-7B-Chat-fp16, with LoRA adapters on SageMaker. It involves preparing a compressed archive with the base model files and LoRA adapter files, uploading it to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), selecting and configuring the SageMaker LMI container to enable LoRA support, creating a SageMaker endpoint configuration and endpoint, defining an inference component for the model, and sending inference requests specifying different LoRA adapters like Spanish (es) and French (fr) in the request payload to use those fine-tuned language capabilities. For more information on deploying models using SageMaker inference components, see Amazon SageMaker adds new inference capabilities to help reduce foundation model deployment costs and latency.

To showcase multi-base models with their LoRA adapters, we add another base model, mistralai/Mistral-7B-v0.1, and its LoRA adapter to the same SageMaker endpoint, as shown in the following diagram.

You need to complete some prerequisites before you can run the notebook:

To prepare the LoRA adapters, create a adapters.tar.gz compressed archive containing the LoRA adapters directory. The adapters directory should contain subdirectories for each of the LoRA adapters, with each adapter subdirectory containing the adapter_model.bin file (the adapter weights) and the adapter_config.json file (the adapter configuration). We typically obtain these adapter files by using the PeftModel.save_pretrained() method from the Peft library. After you assemble the adapters directory with the adapter files, you compress it into a adapters.tar.gz archive and upload it to an S3 bucket for deployment or sharing. We include the LoRA adapters in the adapters directory as follows:

Download LoRA adapters, compress them, and upload the compressed file to Amazon S3:

SageMaker provides optimized containers for LMI that support different frameworks for model parallelism, allowing the deployment of LLMs across multiple GPUs. For this post, we employ the DeepSpeed container, which encompasses frameworks such as DeepSpeed and vLLM, among others. See the following code:

Create an endpoint configuration using the appropriate instance type. Set ContainerStartupHealthCheckTimeoutInSeconds to account for the time taken to download the LLM weights from Amazon S3 or the model hub, and the time taken to load the model on the GPUs:

Create a SageMaker endpoint based on the endpoint configuration defined in the previous step. You use this endpoint for hosting the inference component (model) inference and make invocations.

Now that you have created a SageMaker endpoint, lets create our model as an inference component. The SageMaker inference component enables you to deploy one or more foundation models (FMs) on the same SageMaker endpoint and control how many accelerators and how much memory is reserved for each FM. See the following code:

With the endpoint and inference model ready, you can now send requests to the endpoint using the LoRA adapters you fine-tuned for Spanish and French languages. The specific LoRA adapter is specified in the request payload under the "adapters" field. We use "es" for the Spanish language adapter and "fr" for the French language adapter, as shown in the following code:

Lets add another base model and its LoRA adapter to the same SageMaker endpoint for multi-base models with multiple fine-tuned LoRA adapters. The code is very similar to the previous code for creating the Llama base model and its LoRA adapter.

Configure the SageMaker LMI container to host the base model (mistralai/Mistral-7B-v0.1) and its LoRA adapter (mistral-lora-multi-adapter/adapters/fr):

Create a new SageMaker model and inference component for the base model (mistralai/Mistral-7B-v0.1) and its LoRA adapter (mistral-lora-multi-adapter/adapters/fr):

Invoke the same SageMaker endpoint for the newly created inference component for the base model (mistralai/Mistral-7B-v0.1) and its LoRA adapter (mistral-lora-multi-adapter/adapters/fr):

Delete the SageMaker inference components, models, endpoint configuration, and endpoint to avoid incurring unnecessary costs:

The ability to efficiently manage and serve a diverse portfolio of fine-tuned generative AI models is paramount if you want your organization to deliver personalized and intelligent experiences at scale in todays rapidly evolving AI landscape. With the inference capabilities of SageMaker LMI coupled with the performance optimizations of LoRA techniques, you can overcome the challenges of multi-tenant fine-tuned LLM serving. This solution enables you to consolidate AI workloads, batch operations across multiple models, and optimize resource utilization for cost-effective, high-performance delivery of tailored AI solutions to your customers. As demand for specialized AI experiences continues to grow, weve shown how the scalable infrastructure and cutting-edge model serving techniques of SageMaker position AWS as a powerful platform for unlocking generative AIs full potential. To start exploring the benefits of this solution for yourself, we encourage you to use the code example and resources weve provided in this post.

Michael Nguyen is a Senior Startup Solutions Architect at AWS, specializing in leveraging AI/ML to drive innovation and develop business solutions on AWS. Michael holds 12 AWS certifications and has a BS/MS in Electrical/Computer Engineering and an MBA from Penn State University, Binghamton University, and the University of Delaware.

Dhawal Patel is a Principal Machine Learning Architect at AWS. He has worked with organizations ranging from large enterprises to mid-sized startups on problems related to distributed computing, and Artificial Intelligence. He focuses on Deep learning including NLP and Computer Vision domains. He helps customers achieve high performance model inference on SageMaker.

Vivek Gangasani is a AI/ML Startup Solutions Architect for Generative AI startups at AWS. He helps emerging GenAI startups build innovative solutions using AWS services and accelerated compute. Currently, he is focused on developing strategies for fine-tuning and optimizing the inference performance of Large Language Models. In his free time, Vivek enjoys hiking, watching movies and trying different cuisines.

Qing Lan is a Software Development Engineer in AWS. He has been working on several challenging products in Amazon, including high performance ML inference solutions and high performance logging system. Qings team successfully launched the first Billion-parameter model in Amazon Advertising with very low latency required. Qing has in-depth knowledge on the infrastructure optimization and Deep Learning acceleration.

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Efficient and cost-effective multi-tenant LoRA serving with Amazon SageMaker | Amazon Web Services - AWS Blog

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