GSV's AI News & Updates (01/28/23)
Google's Big AI Reveal, ChatGPT Pro, MusicLM, ChatGPT + Wolfram Alpha
We’ve moved to a newsletter format! You are receiving this weekly update on the intersection of AI and education as part of our GSV community – we hope this will be a helpful resource as we navigate this evolving and exciting intersection.
Please feel free to send over any relevant resources you may come across (claire@gsv.com) – we’d love to learn and hear from you!
General 🚀
ChatGPT Pro launches at $42/month: at $42/month, ChatGPT Pro needs 200,000 subscribers to hit $100 million ARR.
MusicLM: Google published a paper on a new Text-to-Music model. Describe the music and it will generate a track. You can also give it a genre, an instrument, a time period and an image, and it’ll spit out high-fidelity music. Advances in ML have primarily focused on natural language, images and video - this is an exciting development in the application of generative AI to audio! (Project page here, arXiv here)
Satya Nadella going all in on AI during MSFT earnings call:
“the age of AI is upon us…we have the most powerful AI supercomputing infrastructure in the cloud”
“GitHub is now home to 100M developers. And GitHub Copilot is the first at-scale AI product built for this era...more than 1M people have used Copilot to date.”
Google’s Big AI Reveal in May: products speculated for launch include AI image generators, “create your own AI tools” platforms, code completion tools powered by PaLM
The inside story of ChatGPT: How OpenAI founder Sam Altman built the world’s hottest technology with billions from Microsoft
Scale: the $290M/year Mechanical Turk of machine learning - indexed on labeling data for AI in the world of atoms, from autonomous vehicles to defense
Shutterstock rolls out Generative AI toolkit: while Getty Images sues, Shutterstock leans in
Actionable AI: how AI will become more actionable. AI will change how we work and what we spend time on; it does not mean AI will replace us
5 pieces of advice for those building in AI right now:
The pre-existing dynamics of whatever business you're integrating AI into are more important than any AI-specific advice.
AI technology isn’t anyone’s moat—but that doesn’t mean moats won't be built. Real power and durability comes from the same sources it always has: economies of scale, network effects, counter-positioning, switching costs, brand, etc.
Products using AI aren’t necessarily ‘wrappers’
Ignore the hype
AI-powered applications are mostly not about AI
The Human-AI Reflective Equilibrium: How do we communicate our values to a non-human AGI that lacks our biological history, cultural context, and physical hardware? What are our values anyways?
Startups and Tools 🛠️
ElevenLabs: raises $2M pre-seed. They produce realistic text-to-audio voice synthesis and can also extend existing recordings in audio-to-audio development. ElevenLabs seeks to become the first AI narrator providing the quality necessary for voicing news and audiobooks at scale.
Supernormal: raises $10M to automatically transcribe and summarize meetings - “delivering end-to-end workflow solutions based on foundational meeting data and develop next-generation tools that deliver actions and insights from conversations across the organization”
Atomic.ai: raises $35M in a Series A for AI-driven RNA drug discovery
Lingobo: use AI to learn 14 different languages
WithBroadcast: AI generated weekly recaps/updates
Hila.ai: AI-powered investment research investment. It can help you quickly query specific concepts and questions - ask about revenues, management’s priorities, analyst concerns, dips in stock prices - search through hundreds of companies’ financial information, stock information and earnings calls
VoicePen.ai: convert audio and video content (podcasts, webinars, or tutorials) into blog posts using AI
Education and the Future of Work 📚
ChatGPT can’t be credited as an author, says world’s largest academic publisher. But Springer Nature, which publishes thousands of scientific journals, says it has no problem with AI being used to help write research — as long as its use is properly disclosed.
How Medium is approaching AI-generated writing: transparency, disclosure, and publication-level guidelines
Prompt-Driven Design: a new form of UI
A Head-to-Head Comparison of AI Code Assistants: Github Copilot, Tabnine, Replit Ghostwriter, and Codeium compared across features and price, latency, and suggestion quality (disclaimer: written by team at Codeium but quite objective)
Tech 💻
Pentagon’s AI chief says data labeling is key to win race with China
An introduction to embeddings: the bread and butter of natural language models
Listen/Watch 💻
Is ChatGPT A Step Toward Human-Level AI? — with Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist at Meta and Professor of CS at NYU)
Fun/Other 🎉
SmoothTalker: generate pickup lines
WatchNowAI: let AI find your next movie or show
Memes
