Latest news with #JeffDean
CNET
11-07-2025
- Business
- CNET
How to Summarize Text Using Google's Gemini AI
One non-negotiable for all digital workers is a great hotspot. But streamlined productivity is a close second. Artificial intelligence tools are becoming better suited to the challenge and can be integrated into your workday in a useful way now. Gemini in Google Workspace is one of those. What is Gemini? Google welcomed Gemini, its AI-powered chatbot, to the digital world on Dec. 6, 2023. While the name doesn't coincide with its launch date (the tool went by a different name, Bard, originally), Gemini was named after the astrological symbol's dual-natured personality -- the ability to adapt quickly and connect to a wide range of people, all while seeing things from multiple perspectives. Gemini got its name "because we wanted to bring teams working on language modeling closer together," said Jeff Dean, Gemini's co-technical lead. I was able to access Gemini free for 14 days since I have a business domain through Google Workspace. I was given 30% off the monthly price for three months ($16.80) following my free trial. Then my monthly bill went up to $24. In those short two weeks, I had the opportunity to navigate its "Help me write" prompt to suggest texts based on what I inserted into the text screen. This can include drafts for a blog post, help writing song lyrics and rewriting original text to edit for tone or to be concise. What are AI summaries? If you've got a long to-do list, the last thing you've got time for is to read a super-long document. This is where AI summaries can help: AI tools can quickly scan everything from a document or a web page to a spreadsheet, and create concise notes on the main points. Think of it as a "too long, didn't read" summary made of any document you need to know the gist of. For now, we're focusing on summarizing Google Docs, but you can also use Gemini to summarize other files from Google Drive and emails from Gmail. How to use AI to summarize a Google Doc with AI Google Step 1: Open a document on Google Docs and highlight to select the text you would like Gemini to help you summarize. Step 2: Click Help me write to the right of the selected text, and choose what you'd like to implement from the drop-down menu -- in addition to Summarize, options include Tone, Bulletize, Elaborate, Shorten, Rephrase or Custom (write your own prompt). Step 3: Click Summarize and see what Gemini comes back with, making sure to double-check that it understood your document and what was important (and ensure the AI tool didn't hallucinate). Step 4: An interesting addition to Google Docs is the ability to provide feedback on the generated text. After creating your summary, you cannote whether Gemini has provided a good or bad suggestion, edit the prompt to update and regenerate text or create a new version of previously written text and click retry. You can also provide general feedback on this feature by navigating to Help > Help Docs improve. If necessary, you can also report a legal concern. To turn off the "Help me write" AI-powered prompt, you must exit Workspace Labs. If you exit, "you will permanently lose access to all Workspace Labs features, and you won't be able to rejoin Workspace Labs." You can learn more about how to exit Workplace Labs here. Who should use Gemini AI? Gemini AI lives on Pixel phones James Martin/CNET Gemini calls its AI writing tool "a useful and interesting resource" if you like finding patterns and connections. I agree. I decided to implement Google Workspace Gemini because of a desire to expedite and streamline writing processes. But I also decided to purchase a monthly Gemini membership because of how seamlessly it integrated with all the other Google products I regularly use. In my digital toolbox, this AI addition truly does help me navigate the most efficient pathway to writing emails and documents. Just make sure you apply the usual AI caveat of double-checking that the tool came back with accurate information before acting on anything, just in case it hallucinated or drew the wrong conclusions. You can check out the Gemini-powered summary of a human-written article at the bottom of this article to see how accurate this AI tool can be. Other AI tools for summarizing text There are many other choices if you need to summarize text and you're not a Google Docs or Gmail person. You can use other AI chatbots like Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity and DeepSeek. Just prompt the chatbot with a request to summarize something for you, then either copy and paste your document or attach a PDF file. There are also tools specifically made for summarizing text, like Summarizer and QuillBot.
Time of India
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
'She is a creep': Ja'Marr Chase's awkward moment with unidentified woman sparks outrage and concern over the star player's safety
Ja'Marr Chase was confronted by an unknown woman.(Image via AP Photo/Jeff Dean) Cincinnati Bengals' star player, Ja'Marr Chase, has been in the news ever since he ignored an unidentified woman as she tried to get close to him outside a club in New York City. The video has quickly gone viral and has raised eyebrows among fans. While Ja'Marr Chase has not commented on the video yet, fans are calling out the woman. Ja'Marr Chase had an unidentified woman put her arms around him, sparking a major outrage among fans The video shows Ja'Marr Chase getting out of a club and walking towards his luxurious car when a woman tries to stop him by putting her arms around his neck. The Cincinnati Bengals' star player was seen walking unbothered as he focused on getting to his car. The unidentified woman was also seen making a face at Ja'Marr Chase as he ignored her and now, this has sparked major outrage among fans. A fan took to X and wrote, 'He doesn't owe her anything, and if the roles were reversed, they'd call him a creep. She's a creep', while another fan commented, 'Now don't tussle me in these comments but that's what she gets lol….idk what reaction she was expecting but clearly I bet she humble herself a lil bit next time….' A third fan posted, 'Not tryna go against the girls but truth is truth, they get these bbl's and think they're irresistible. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Bangladesh: Unsold Sofas at Bargain Prices (View Current Prices) Sofas | Search Ads Search Now Undo Pretty sexy when a man isn't dehydrated for any and everything. That means you have to be more than what meets the eye and that's a sexy grown up energy to move with.' Another fan wrote, 'He was actually polite. He just didn't act like she was his girlfriend. Because she isn't! Girl, you should know your place. You see them cameras and all those people, you know you provide a service to him and are not meeting his mama and friends regularly. She likely had a few.' Ja'Marr Chase is looking forward to a successful NFL season Ja'Marr Chase has mostly tried to stay away from commenting on any controversies and he has not commented on this incident yet. As for his NFL career, the Cincinnati Bengals' star player is gearing up to play for the upcoming season after signing a massive deal of a whopping $161 million. Also Read: "She is deeply wounded": Taylor Swift is "furious" at Blake Lively amid Justin Baldoni drama as she finds support in Travis Kelce For real-time updates, scores, and highlights, follow our live coverage of the India vs England Test match here . Game On Season 1 kicks off with Sakshi Malik's inspiring story. Watch Episode 1 here
TechCrunch
23-06-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Databricks, Perplexity co-founder pledges $100M on new fund for AI researchers
Andy Konwinski, computer scientist and co-founder of Databricks and Perpelexity, announced on Monday that his personal company, Laude, is forming a new AI research institute backed with a $100 million pledge of his own money. Laude Institute is less an AI research lab and more like a fund looking to make investments structured similar to grants. In addition to Konwinski, the institute's board includes UC Berkeley professor Dave Patterson (known for a string of award-winning research), Jeff Dean (known as Google's chief scientist), and Joelle Pineau (Meta's vice president of AI Research). Konwinski announced the institute's first and 'flagship' grant of $3 million a year for five years, and it will anchor the new AI Systems Lab at UC Berkeley. This is a new lab led by one of Berkeley's famed, Ion Stoica, current director of the Sky Computing Lab. Stoica is also a co-founder of startup Anyscale (an AI and python platform) and AI big data company Databricks, both from tech developed in Berkeley's lab system. The new AI Systems Lab is set to open in 2027 and, in addition to Stoica, will include a number of other well-known researchers. In his blog post announcing the institute, Konwinski described its mission as 'built by and for computer science researchers … We exist to catalyze work that doesn't just push the field forward but guides it towards more beneficial outcomes.' That's not necessarily a direct dig at OpenAI, which started out as an AI research facility and is now, arguably, consumed by its enormous commercial side. But other researchers have fallen prey to the lure of money as well. For instance, popular AI researcher Epoch faced controversy when it revealed that OpenAI supported the creation of one of its AI benchmarks that was then used to unveil its new o3 model. Epoch's founder also launched a startup with a controversial mission to replace all human workers everywhere with AI agents. Techcrunch event Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Boston, MA | REGISTER NOW Like other AI research organizations with commercial ambitions, Konwinski has structured his institute across boundaries: as a nonprofit with a public benefit corporation operating arm. He's dividing his research investments into two buckets that he calls 'Slingshots and Moonshots.' Slingshots are for early-stage research that can benefit from grants and hands-on help. Moonshots are, as the name implies, for 'long-horizon labs tackling species-level challenges like AI for scientific discovery, civic discourse, healthcare, and workforce reskilling.' His lab has, for instance, collaborated with 'terminal-bench,' a Stanford-led benchmark for how well AI agents handle tasks, used by Anthropic. One thing to note, Konwinski's company Laude isn't solely a grant-writing research institute. He also co-founded a for-profit venture fund launched in 2024. The fund's co-founder is former NEA VC Pete Sonsini. As TechCrunch previously reported, Laude led a $12 million investment in AI agent infrastructure startup Arcade. It has quietly backed other startups, too. A Laude spokesperson tells us that while Konwinski has pledged $100 million, he's also looking for, and open to, investment from other successful technologists. As to how Konwinski amassed a fortune enough to guarantee $100 million for this new endeavor: Databricks closed a $15.3 billion funding round in January that valued the company at $62 billion. Perplexity last month secured a $14 billion valuation, too. Does the world really need yet another AI 'good for humanity' research or with a murky nonprofit/commercial structure? No, and yes. AI research has become increasingly muddled. For instance, AI benchmarks designed to prove that a particular vendor's model works best have become plentiful these days. (Even Salesforce has its own LLM benchmark for CRMs.) An alliance that includes the likes of Konwinski, Dean, and Stoica supporting truly independent research that could one day turn into independent and human-helpful commerce could be an attractive alternative.
Fast Company
23-06-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
This Perplexity cofounder wants to help AI breakthroughs graduate from university labs
A team of prominent AI researchers, led by Databricks and Perplexity cofounder Andy Konwinski, has launched Laude Institute, a new nonprofit that helps university-based researchers turn their breakthroughs into open-source projects, startups, or large-scale products with real-world impact. Laude brings together top academic and industry leaders to guide promising AI research out of the lab and into the world. Its mission: help more AI ideas cross the gap from paper to product. The effort builds on a growing belief within the AI and open-source communities that the field's biggest advances should be developed in public, not behind corporate walls. Many promising breakthroughs happen inside university labs, but often end up as research papers with no clear path to deployment. At the same time, as AI's development costs and potential rewards have skyrocketed, the need to support ambitious academic work outside of the big tech ecosystem has become more urgent. Konwinski, who was named one of Bloomberg 's ' New Billionaires of the AI Boom, ' has assembled a high-profile board for Laude. Among its members are Google's head of AI Jeff Dean, board chairman and Turing Award winner Dave Patterson, and Joëlle Pineau, a professor at McGill University and the Quebec AI Institute (Mila), and former Global VP of AI Research at Meta (FAIR). Laude's core goal is to replicate and enhance the university lab model used by departments like UC Berkeley's, known for foundational AI research. As a PhD student at Berkeley, Konwinski helped develop Apache Spark and later cofounded Databricks to commercialize it. That experience shaped his vision for Laude. 'I could do another company,' he says, 'but I'm honestly more interested in helping find other Databricks' and Perplexities and Linux and the internet and the personal computer.' Laude will focus on projects in four key areas: reinventing healthcare delivery (for example, by developing an AI-powered insulin pump), accelerating scientific breakthroughs (such as visualizing black holes or discovering new materials), revitalizing civic discourse (helping voters find common ground on controversial issues), and helping workers reskill for the AI age. These are domains where AI could have significant positive impact, but where the technology's potential is still largely untapped, Konwinski explains. Laude, a nonprofit with a public benefit corporation operating arm, will award grants to ambitious 'moonshot' projects that may take three to five years to complete. Selected projects will receive $250,000 seed grants, with the most promising progressing to multiyear research labs led by faculty affiliated with universities. 'Funding ambitious, high-impact work for long periods can give academic labs the autonomy to really identify and tackle significant societal challenges,' Dean says. 'This longer-term view can enable not just writing research papers but also creation of full-fledged working systems, open-source software to catalyze broader communities, or other forms of impact.' In addition, Laude will support 'slingshot' projects, providing fast, low-friction grants and embedded support for individual researchers aiming to launch startups or open-source projects. This could mean tens of thousands of dollars worth of compute time, funding for PhD or Postdoc support, or embedding engineers, designers, and communicators to help bring a product to completion. 'We talk about the right resource for the right researcher at the right time in order to maximize how many more open-source breakouts and how many more companies we can build,' says Konwinski, who has pledged $100 million of his own money to fund the first round of grants. Laude's primary value will not just be resources like talent and compute power, but guidance from people who have successfully brought technologies from lab to market. 'The academic model, when done well, can be excellent, but it doesn't necessarily have this ability to accelerate research at key points,' Pineau says. 'You need to bring in more resources, build artifacts that go beyond papers, and get them in front of users.' A network of advisers, including top professors and industry leaders, will help shape research projects by offering insights on product launches, multidisciplinary viewpoints, and best practices for open-source distribution. Among the advisers are Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, Jake Abernethy of Georgia Tech and Google DeepMind, Ludwig Schmidt of Stanford and Anthropic, Kurtis Heimerl of the University of Washington, Berkeley RISElab director Ion Stoica, and researcher-professors from Caltech, University of Wisconsin, and University of Illinois Urbana. For some researchers, Laude may provide an appealing alternative to venture capital. 'There are some projects where it's probably too risky for venture capitalists to take on,' Pineau says, while noting that not all VCs are the same. 'They tend to be a little bit shortsighted and want to see returns within a certain time frame, whereas a moonshot can tolerate higher risks.' There are also practical considerations. Some researchers prefer to keep one foot in academia, while VCs often want them to go full-time in the commercial space. Berkeley roots The inspiration for Laude dates back to Konwinski's days as a PhD student at Berkeley from 2007 to 2012. Patterson, then a professor in the computer science department, was instrumental in developing Berkeley's lab system. There, professors lead labs that attract PhD students and postdocs to pursue emerging fields like reinforcement learning. 'We developed this model of research labs with an opinionated style that were multidisciplinary,' Patterson says. Experts from across the university were brought in to offer fresh perspectives on the work. Labs were structured with five-year sunset clauses to encourage high-impact results. About a year ago, after founding Databricks and Perplexity, Konwinski returned to the department with the goal of using his new wealth to give more young researchers the experience he had. At Berkeley, PhD students sometimes write 'vision papers' on controversial topics. As a student, Konwinski wrote one on the value of cloud computing for research. Upon returning, he wanted to take on an even more ambitious subject: how to accelerate and improve the real-world impact of AI research. The result was ' Shaping AI,' a paper coauthored by Konwinski, Patterson, Pineau, and others, with input from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind researcher and 2024 Nobel Prize winner John Jumper, Eric Schmidt, and former President Barack Obama. The idea for Laude took shape through writing the paper. 'We recognized that a way to help shape AI's impact was to set up prizes and research labs, similar to what we did at Berkeley,' Patterson says. 'The new idea was inducement prizes like the X-Prize, and also new labs in North America to tackle big problems and improve AI's outcomes for public good.' How Laude fits in Laude is not exactly an incubator or an accelerator. It represents something new, with a clear 'AI for good' mission and a conscientious approach to where and how the research is done. That starts with transparency. 'One of the requirements of this funding is to keep everything in the open,' Patterson says. 'There are not many requirements for grant recipients, but one is everything must be open source.' Konwinski is also focused on how researchers handle both the benefits and risks of the technology they create. Returning to Berkeley, he was troubled by the polarized tone of the AI debate. 'The AI discourse has ended up a bit polarized,' he says. 'It's the accelerationists and doomers. You either pump the brakes or you're pedal-to-the-metal. That loses nuance.' Konwinski believes in a rational middle ground. 'It would be just as much of a tragedy to ignore the upsides, especially medium and near-term upsides, as it would be to ignore the catastrophic potential.' Laude will encourage researchers to participate in public discussions about their work, partly to ensure they appreciate the weight of the decisions they are making. Too often, he says, executives like Sam Altman or Sundar Pichai lead the conversation about breakthrough technologies, not the Ilya Sutskevers and Jeff Deans who actually create them. Getting started On Thursday, June 19, Konwinski's voice was nearly gone after presiding over Laude's first Ship Your Research Summit the day before in San Francisco. The event brought together 70 handpicked researchers from more than two dozen universities for a day of salon-style discussions. Speakers included Jeff Dean and Dave Patterson, along with an off-record session with the Databricks founding team. Laude plans to make the summit an annual event to strengthen its community and attract new talent in computer science. Konwinski is particularly passionate when talking about Laude's community-building role. He wants Laude to serve as an anchor for researchers with strong academic ties who believe in open source and are motivated to use AI to tackle tough problems and seize new opportunities. 'It means you put people in a room and you make them like part of something bigger than themselves,' he says. 'It's like, 'Wow, I'm with my people here who want to move humanity forward by turning research into breakthroughs.' That's special.' Shortly after the summit, Laude announced its first major investment: $3 million a year for five years, comparable to a National Science Foundation grant, to fund a new AI-focused lab at UC Berkeley. The lab, led by a team of Berkeley's top researchers including Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia, Joey Gonzalez, and Raluca Ada Papa, is set to open in 2027. The final deadline for Fast Company's Next Big Things in Tech Awards is Friday, June 20, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
Business Wire
12-06-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Parallel Bio Secures $21 Million in Series A to Advance Human-First Drug Discovery
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Parallel Bio, a biotech company pioneering human-first drug discovery, today announced it has raised $21 million Series A funding, led by AIX Ventures. The round attracted prominent leaders in AI and biotech, including new investors Amplo and Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce, and existing investors Metaplanet, Humba Ventures, Atypical Ventures, Undeterred Capital, and Jeff Dean. 'Parallel Bio is redefining drug development by turning the conventional model upside down—transforming today's 95% failure rate into a pathway for 95% success." Share The company also revealed that 8 pharmaceutical partners, including three Fortune 500 companies, are testing more than 50 drugs and immunotherapies using its organoid-based immune system platform—including Centivax, which completed the first preclinical testing on the platform for its universal flu vaccine candidate. 'With these milestones, we are closer to making human-first drug discovery the new industry standard,' said Robert DiFazio, CEO and co-founder at Parallel Bio. 'For too long, the reliance on lab mice to model human biology has come at a high cost: 95% of drugs fail in human trials even after succeeding in animal studies. We're turning that on its head by using organoids and AI to discover drugs in true-to-life human models from the start.' Parallel Bio will use the new capital to scale the AI and automation capabilities of its organoid-based immune system platform, expand its team of scientists and engineers, and support growing pharmaceutical partnerships. To date, Parallel Bio has raised a total of nearly $30 million, including this Series A and previous seed rounds. Parallel Bio's platform combines lymph-node organoids with AI and robotics to replicate the human immune system at scale across diverse populations. Organoids are 3D, self-assembling models of human biology. These miniature organs mimic an organ's structure and function and the body's response to disease or treatment, as if the organoids were individual patients. AIX Ventures partner Krish Ramadurai, who joined the company's board of directors as part of the round, commented: 'Parallel Bio is redefining drug development by turning the conventional model upside down—transforming today's 95% failure rate into a pathway for 95% success. Their groundbreaking human-first platform unlocks biological insights previously impossible to capture, accelerating the development of effective treatments that reach patients faster while generating de novo biological data to power the next generation of AI-driven therapeutics. We're thrilled to partner with the Parallel Bio team in setting a new gold standard for the future of medicine.' Since launching Clinical Trial in a Dish last year, Parallel Bio has seen growing demand from pharmaceutical companies. This first commercial application accurately predicts the safest and most effective drug candidates for human trials. 'Starting with human models enables new drugs to reach the market at a pace never possible before,' said Juliana Hilliard, Parallel Bio co-founder and chief scientific officer. 'We aim to slash $2 billion and 9 years from each drug candidate in development by predicting success at the earliest stages of discovery.' Centivax Validates Broad Immune Response in Organoid Trial Parallel Bio partnered with Centivax, a universal immunity biotechnology company, to generate human-first data to validate Centivax's first program: a universal flu vaccine called Centi-Flu that is now in manufacturing for human clinical trials, with the first patient expected to be dosed early next year. 'Parallel Bio enables us to derisk the single biggest source of failure in vaccine development: making sure the vaccines work in humans before the human trials have even begun,' said Jacob Glanville, president and CEO at Centivax. 'Even though we have validated our pan-influenza responses in mice, rats, pigs, and ferrets, ultimately we are making a universal vaccine for humans. Parallel Bio's platform is transformative by allowing us to directly validate our results in immune organoids derived from adult humans.' The organoid study revealed the power of the Centi-Flu technology: by effectively targeting common features of the virus shared by many different influenza strains, Centi-Flu even produces strong immune responses against strains not included in the vaccine. Human immune organoids were 'vaccinated' with Centi-Flu, leading to the production of B cells capable of reacting to a wide variety of flu strains. The immune organoids were derived from patients with prior flu exposure, proving that Centi-Flu could trigger broad humoral responses in flu-exposed individuals. The organoid model also showed activation of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells, which are important for fighting infections, suggesting that Centi-Flu helps stimulate both antibody production and T cell immunity. This combination is particularly valuable for protecting against severe flu, including hospitalization and death. About Parallel Bio Parallel Bio is pioneering human-first drug discovery by combining organoids and AI to create true-to-life models of human biology. The company developed the first platform that replicates the human immune system across diverse populations, predicting drug success and identifying disease targets with accuracy and speed far beyond the limits of traditional animal models. Pharmaceutical partners, including three Fortune 500 companies, are using its Clinical Trial in a Dish to test the safety and efficacy of immunotherapies. Based in Cambridge, Mass., Parallel Bio was founded in 2021 by two scientists behind the world's first scalable human immune organoid.
