GSV's AI News & Updates (03/04/24)
Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Mistral Large, Duolingo Earnings, Glean raises $200M, Inkitt raises $37M, Physics Wallah's AI Suite, HMH Acquires Writable, India Reverses AI Stance
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General 🚀
Elon Musk sued Sam Altman and OpenAI, accusing them of violating OpenAI’s founding agreement, which prioritized AI development for “the benefit of humanity” rather than the pursuit of profit.
In response, OpenAI circulated an internal memo that rejects the 3 big claims made by Elon:
that GPT-4 represents AGI
that OpenAI has abandoned its mission of benefitting humanity
that it is acting as a subsidiary of Microsoft.
Mistral AI releases new model and chatbot, and a partnership with Microsoft: the company is launching its own alternative to ChatGPT with a new service called Le Chat - the chat assistant is currently available in beta. Founded by alums from DeepMind and Meta, Mistral AI raised a $113M seed round and a $415M funding round last December. Mistral AI also announced a partnership with Microsoft.
Sergey Brin (Google co-founder) talks about AGI, Gemini and other Google AI Initiatives
Education and the Future of Work 📚
Duolingo Surges as AI Content and New Courses Attract Users: Duolingo’s stock surged more than 16% on Thursday, forecasting a 2024 revenue in a range of $717.5M to $729.5M. They saw a lot of demand at higher prices for their generative AI MAX offering.
Glean raises $200M+ at $2.2B valuation to accelerate the deployment of generative AI in the enterprise: founded by former Google search engineers in 2019, Glean offers enterprises search and knowledge management solutions by connecting companies' applications and databases.
AI self-publishing startup Inkitt raises $37M Series C: its business has already attracted 33M users and dozens of bestsellers. The longer-term vision is to expand its content library and build multimedia empire around it. Less a competitor to the likes of Wattpad and more “the Disney of the 21st century”
Physics Wallah Rolls Out AI Education Suite, Garners 1.5M Users: the company’s AI educational suite’s offerings include AI Guru (24/7 personal AI tutor), Sahayak (facilitates personalized learning for students + customized content recommendations), and NCERT Pitara (leverages GenAI to generate questions from NCERT textbooks) among others.
HMH Acquires Writable, Launches AI and Emerging Technology Incubator HMH Labs: Writable’s OpenAI-powered integrations have enabled teachers to incorporate AI-suggested feedback and scores into their instruction since last fall
Klarna’s AI Assistant is doing the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents: the AI assistant has had 2.3M conversations (two-thirds of Klarna’s customer service chats), on par with human agents in customer satisfaction score, more accurate in errand resolution (a 25% drop in repeat inquiries) and resolves errands in less than 2 min (vs 11 min previously).
Can AI And ChatGPT Reshape Academia: Arizona State University Believes So: Universities are embracing AI to support student success, address ethical issues, and promote continuous learning, with initiatives like Arizona State University's collaboration with OpenAI highlighting the push towards integrating AI in education and operational efficiency.
Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang: AI will take over coding, making learning optional: Huang predicts a shift from traditional coding to using AI for software development. Huang is shaking things up, proclaiming that the era of prioritizing coding skills is over. Now, he suggests, we should focus on fields like agriculture and education.
Stack Overflow and Google Cloud Announce Strategic Partnership to Bring Generative AI to Millions of Developers: Google Cloud will integrate Gemini for Google Cloud with Stack Overflow, helping to surface important knowledge base information and coding assistance capabilities to developers.
Will AI Use in Schools Increase Next Year? 56 Percent of Educators Say Yes
The Program-Level AI Conversations We Should Be Having in Higher Ed: now is the time to progress to program-level conversations around curriculum and learning outcomes.
Why AI Struggles with Basic Math (and How That’s Changing): a guide to some of the emerging solutions and models that are attempting to make LLMs better in math.
Nevada uses AI to predict the likelihood a student will or won’t graduate: the algorithm makes its predictions based on an assessment of 150 million student years’ worth of data on students’ academic performance, attendance, behavior, demographics, and family characteristics
Startups and Tools 🛠️
AI Robotics Company Figure Raises $675M at $2.6B Valuation and Signs Collaboration Agreement with OpenAI: Figure is an AI Robotics company developing autonomous general purpose humanoid robots. Their Humanoids are designed for initial deployment into the workforce to address labor shortages, jobs that are undesirable or unsafe, and to support supply chain on a global scale.
Myko AI Raises $2.7M from Khosla Ventures to Bring Conversational AI to Sales and Revenue Teams: company’s conversational AI instantly answers questions and builds reports from a user’s existing data sources.
Introducing Microsoft Copilot for Finance: a new Copilot experience for Microsoft 365 that unlocks AI-assisted competencies for financial professionals, from streamlining audits to automating payment plans to accelerating financial reporting.
As Nvidia hits $2T, asset manager Apollo calls AI a ‘bubble’ worse than even the dotcom era
Blobr: AI assistant making sense of your business data stored in all your siloed SaaS. Reveal insights, understand variations and customer patterns without technical effort.
GuestLab: podcaster’s AI tools to get research done in minutes - well-crafted intros, interesting topics, and insightful questions from your guest’s online presence.
Chesski: your personal AI chess tutor that coaches you in plain English.
Saner.ai: scale and utilize your knowledge easily - instantly capture, find and develop ideas.
Tech 💻
Snapchat used AI agents to build a sound-aware model that captions your videos: they used "teachers" to describe 3.8M videos for their Panda-70M dataset.
Google Deepmind showcases Genie: a new model that can learn actions taken in a video game by only watching videos. This new model can then create 2D games from a single image.
Adobe previews new cutting-edge generative AI tools for crafting and editing custom audio
Regulation and Policy ⚖️
India reverses AI stance, requires government approval for model launches: India's Deputy IT Minister says AI advisory, which requires firms to comply with 'immediate effect,' is 'signaling that this is the future of regulation'
China court says AI broke copyright law in apparent world first: the latest ruling may also accelerate the debate over AI’s potential to infringe on protected material, as courts around the world take on the complex legal question.
Digital Media Outlets Sue OpenAI for Copyright Infringement: Raw Story, AlterNet and The Intercept sued for copyright infringement over the way the ChatGPT creator trains its technology.
SEC Investigating Whether OpenAI Investors Were Misled: the regulator is examining internal communications of CEO Sam Altman, after board last year temporarily ousted him for alleged lack of candor.
Welcome to the Era of BadGPTs: the dark web is home to a growing array of artificial-intelligence chatbots similar to ChatGPT, but designed to help hackers. Businesses are on high alert for a glut of AI-generated email fraud and deepfakes.
Meta wants Llama 3 to handle contentious questions as Google grapples with Gemini backlash: the guardrails in Llama 2 appear too “safe” in the eyes of Meta’s senior leadership and prevent the LLM from answering a broad range of questions deemed controversial.
Other
“AI will cure cancer” misunderstands both AI and medicine: the enthusiasm about AI in medicine is failing to grapple with realities of the system.
Apple cancels secretive electric car project in shift to focus on AI
Resources
The GSV BIG 10: weekly coverage corner for the top 10 stories, insights, and major plays in learning and skilling.
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