GSV's AI News & Updates (02/26/24)
Nvidia $2T Market Cap, Google Reddit $60M Deal, Powerschool's AI PowerBuddy, AI Tutors Struggle with Math, The AI Chip Race, Stable Diffusion 3, AI Replacing Jobs
AIR (AI Revolution) Show is the world’s leading event at the frontier of AI in EDU for educators, administrators, professionals, and AI explorers. There will be demos, exhibits, booths, workshops, hackathons, panels and more! REGISTER here now, tickets are free but capacity is limited.
General 🚀
Nvidia reaches $2T market cap: Nvidia becomes the 3rd US company to reach $2T market cap, after Apple and Microsoft. The company’s revenue has increased 126% YoY to a record $60.9B in 2023.
Nvidia Hardware Is Eating the World: an interview with the man of the hour - Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang.
Google issues explanations and apologizes for “embarrassing and wrong” images generated by Gemini: users caught Gemini generating historically inaccurate images last week. Google injected special instructions into Gemini in an effort to reduce bias within their training sets. Social media users criticized the company for going too far and “too woke” in its effort to showcase racial diversity. Google has now stopped letting users create images of people while it works to fix the historical inaccuracies.
Stability AI announces Stable Diffusion 3: their best text-to-model with new architecture, responsible training and various model sizes. It can now spell correct text and focus on multiple subjects when creating images.
I Spent a Week With Gemini Pro 1.5—It’s Fantastic: the groundbreaking advancements of Google's latest private beta language model that's setting new standards in AI capabilities. It promises a new era where personal data, from notes to highlights, can be leveraged more effectively, hinting at a future where the breadth of one's data enhances their creative and analytical capabilities.
Google partners with Reddit in AI content licensing deal: Social media platform Reddit has struck a deal with Google to make its content available for training the search engine giant's models. The contract with Alphabet-owned Google is worth about $60M per year. Reddit says it’s made $203M so far licensing its data
OpenAI is shaping its GPT store toward being “the next app store”. You can now rate GPTs.
Education and the Future of Work 📚
PowerSchool PowerBuddy Providing AI PowerUps To Schools And Students: PowerSchool is revolutionizing education by leveraging AI, notably through PowerBuddy, to provide personalized learning and data analysis, enhancing everything from daily classroom activities to college and career counseling.
Loora wants to leverage AI to teach English: Loora, whose namesake is the Arabic word for “language,” offers learners several AI-generated conversation subjects and scenarios to choose from, from sports, tech, business, fashion, books and TV shows to interviews and presentations.
Raising children on the eve of AI: “I feel a bit like we’re preparing children to be good blacksmiths or shoemakers in 1750 when the factory is coming. The families around us are still very much focused on the track of do well in school > get into a good college > have a career > have a nice life. It seems really likely that chain will change a lot sometime in my children’s lifetimes.”
We Tested an AI Tutor for Kids. It Struggled With Basic Math: Math is a well-known challenge for large language models, which use vast sums of data and a complex statistical model to craft text-based responses to prompts.
I analyzed 5M freelancing jobs to see what jobs are being replaced by AI: a very noticeable decrease in writing, customer service and translation jobs in Upwork since the release of ChatGPT. The most popular use case, by far for AI right now is in developing chatbots.
AI hiring tools may be filtering out the best job applicants: from body-language analysis to vocal assessments and CV scanners, these AI tools were initially heralded as the solution to bias in hiring. However, evidence suggests they may be perpetuating discrimination, inadvertently sidelining candidates based on flawed criteria rather than merit.
Students Concerned about Schools and AI: Students don’t appear to like or use AI more than parents and teachers. Recent graduates report feeling threatened and worried by the rise of AI.
You should be playing with GPTs at work: 20 examples of how people are using GPTs today to make their workplaces more productive - “the next big thing will start out looking like a toy.”
What Is Age-Appropriate Use of AI? 4 Developmental Stages to Know About
Startups and Tools 🛠️
"Responsible" AI image generation startup BRIA raises $24M Series A: BRIA’s platform is trained solely on licensed imagery and contains no public figures, trademarks, or privacy concerns, which safeguards a company from legal challenges.
China’s Moonshot AI raises $1B Series B: the startup is concentrating on developing large language models with a unique focus on processing long-form context and responses.
Inside the Funding Frenzy at Anthropic, One of A.I.’s Hottest Start-Ups: the company raised $7.3B over the last year. Its five funding deals stood out not just for their speed and size, but for their unusual structures.
Adobe’s AI Assistant: chat with your documents and generative one click documents.
Kraftful: copilot for product teams - instant lists of feature requests, popular features, and other product insights.
GoEnhance: video editing redefined by generative AI.
Decktopus: AI-powered presentation generator - AI that helps you with research, copywriting and image generation. A side-by-side AI presenter coach to help with your delivery.
Longshot: generative AI assistant for your content teams.
Tech 💻
How Sora Works (and What It Means): traditionally, text-to-video models like Runway are diffusion models, while text models like GPT-4 are transformers. Sora is a diffusion transformer: a mashup of the two. Instead of predicting the next piece of text in a sequence, Sora predicts the next “patch” in a sequence of patches. By using this architecture, OpenAI can throw much more data and compute at training Sora, and the results are stunning.
Masayoshi Son Seeks to Build a $100 Billion AI Chip Venture: dubbed Project Izanagi, after the Japanese god of creation, Son's vision extends beyond SoftBank's traditional startup investments, focusing on a synergy with Arm Holdings to forge an AI chip titan.
AI chip race: Groq CEO takes on Nvidia, claims most startups will use speedy LPUs by end of 2024: unlike Nvidia's GPUs, which are optimized for parallel processing, Groq's LPUs are designed for sequential data handling, making them ideal for natural language and code. This could potentially allow them to run applications like ChatGPT over 13x faster.
Regulation and Policy ⚖️
Google DeepMind forms a new org focused on AI safety: the teams are responsible for developing and incorporating concrete safeguards into Google’s Gemini models, current and in-development. A few of the organization’s near-term focuses will be preventing bad medical advice, ensuring child safety and “preventing the amplification of bias and other injustices.”
US Justice Dept names first AI officer as new technology challenges law enforcement: Jonathan Mayer, a professor at Princeton University who researches technology and law, will serve as chief science and technology adviser and chief AI officer.
Hundreds of AI luminaries sign letter calling for anti-deepfake legislation: while this is unlikely to spur real legislation (despite the House’s new task force), it does act as a bellwether for how experts lean on this controversial issue.
Other
Tyler Perry Puts $800M Studio Expansion on Hold After Seeing OpenAI’s Sora: “Jobs Are Going to Be Lost”: the actor, filmmaker and studio owner is raising the alarm about the impact of the tech, saying, "I feel like everybody in the industry is running a hundred miles an hour to try and catch up, to try and put in guardrails."
Scientists Claim AI Breakthrough to Generate Boundless Clean Fusion Energy: there's a huge potential to unleash AI to get better control and to figure out how to operate such devices in a more effective way.
Resources
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