GSV's AI News & Updates (03/25/24)
LAUSD Ed, Neuralink, GPT-5 Rumors, Microsoft and Inflection, Cornerstone acquires Talespin, ATI Claire AI, NVIDIA AI Nurses, UN Global AI Resolution, Packback
AIR (AI Revolution) Show on April 13-15 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 now, tickets are free but capacity is limited.
General 🚀
Neuralink releases livestream showing first patient to play a game of chess using his mind: Noland Arbaugh, a 29-year-old individual who was paralyzed below the shoulders after a diving accident, used Neuralink's brain-chip technology to play chess on his laptop by moving a cursor with his mind. This groundbreaking demonstration showcased the potential of Neuralink's implant, which enables individuals with paralysis to interact with computers through direct brain signals. The chip, about the size of a one-pound coin, is implanted into the skull and uses microscopic wires to read neuron activity and transmit wireless signals.
GPT-5 Release Rumors: OpenAI may release a major new language model, potentially called GPT-5, sometime in mid-2024 (possibly as early as this summer). OpenAI has not officially confirmed the release timeline or even the existence of GPT-5.
CEO of Stability AI resigns: Stability AI is best known for its popular AI image generation tool Stable diffusion, achieving a $1B valuation in 2022. Emad Mostaque’s resignation comes after key departures - 3 of the original 5 authors who developed the core Stable Diffusion research - at the AI startup. There are rumors that Stability’s board may have pushed Mostaque out due to disagreements on whether to commercialize vs. keeping its latest SDXL-3 model open source.
Microsoft pays Inflection $650M in licensing deal while poaching top talents: Microsoft hired two of Inflection AI's co-founders, Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan, along with most of the startup's 70 employees. This move was not a traditional acquisition but more of an "acqui-hire" without a formal acquisition of the company itself, raising concerns about potential antitrust issues.
Microsoft is setting up a new division called Microsoft AI. Inflection will have a new business focus: Pi (its consumer chatbot) will continue to function, but most of Inflections’s revenue will come from licensing APIs.
Nvidia’s AI boom is only getting started. Just ask CEO Jensen Huang
Financial Times tests an AI chatbot trained on decades of its own articles: Ask FT differentiates itself by sourcing answers directly from decades of FT's own content, ensuring that the information is reliable and avoids the legal ambiguities associated with other sources
Character AI introduces Character Voices: allowing users to hear the synthetic personas they interact with, making conversations more engaging.
Education and the Future of Work 📚
Los Angeles Unified Bets Big on ‘Ed,’ an AI Tool for Students: Ed provides students with information about their grades, attendance, upcoming tests, and suggested resources to enhance their academic skills independently. Additionally, students can access social-emotional-learning resources, lunch menus, and bus schedules through the app. Ed is part of the district's efforts to address unfinished learning from the pandemic by using AI to create individualized academic plans for each student.
Packback: AI-Enabled Writing Platform Raises Funding From PSG Equity: Packback’s AI functions as a digital writing assistant, helping build students’ confidence by providing individualized feedback before submitting assignments.
Cornerstone Acquires Talespin: AI Meets Metaverse In Corporate Learning: AI is going to flip L&D on its head. For the first time in 20+ years we now have corporate learning platforms that can ingest content, generate instructional programs, and personalize experiences for every employee in the company.
ATI Nursing Education Launches Claire AI to Help Save Nurse Educators Time: the technology allows nurse faculty to use simple prompts to generate a wide variety of question ideas to build custom assessments for students from scratch in seconds. This will save significant time and improve the quality and security of questions, empowering educators to teach more effectively and spend more time with students to prepare them to be practice-ready nurses.
Nvidia is now powering AI nurses: Nvidia has collaborated with Hippocratic AI to introduce AI nurses designed to provide medical advice in real-time to patients during video calls at an affordable rate of $9/hour.
Teachers Are Using AI to Create New Worlds, Help Students with Homework, and Teach English: seven teachers across the world share their insights on AI tools for educators. A common theme emerged: just as the internet changed education, AI tools are here to stay, and it is prudent for teachers to adapt.
I Have Bigger Fish to Fry: Why K12 Education is Not Thinking About AI
Can AI Aid the Early Education Workforce?: generative AI can be used to overcome language barriers or help educators support families.
How People Are Really Using GenAI: the authors identified 100 use cases categorized into six main themes: Technical Assistance & Troubleshooting (23%), Content Creation & Editing (22%), Personal & Professional Support (17%), Learning & Education (15%), Creativity & Recreation (13%), and Research, Analysis & Decision Making (10)
Want to Know if AI Will Take Your Job? I Tried Using It to Replace Myself: the ‘Cognitive Revolution’ will automate tasks done by hundreds of millions of workers. The best way to understand which of us will go first is direct experience with AI.
Startups and Tools 🛠️
Foundry comes out of stealth with $80M: Foundry aims to provide cloud computing services tailored for AI workloads in a market where compute capabilities are increasingly democratized. Foundry is now valued at $350 million and has reported more than eight figures in revenue.
The Browser Company raises $50M at a $550M valuation: the Browser Company aims to revolutionize personal computing by transforming the Arc browser into an "internet computer” - the “Chrome replacement we’ve all been waiting for”.
Benchmark to lead $60M investment in AI video startup HeyGen at $440M pre-money valuation
Pricing and Packaging Your B2B or Prosumer Generative AI Feature: B2B and prosumer genAI features fall into 3 buckets: as a core offering, as part of an upgrade tier, or as an add-on.
16 Changes to the Way Enterprises Are Building and Buying Generative AI: Though leaders still have some reservations about deploying generative AI, they’re also nearly tripling their budgets, expanding the number of use cases that are deployed on smaller open-source models, and transitioning more workloads from early experimentation into production. Open source is booming - 60% of AI leaders want to increase their usage of open-source in 2024, and 46% prefer open-source models to closed ones.
Dealwise: AI-powered M&A advisor for startups.
Fin+: your AI copilot for investment research.
Theydo: Journey AI converts customer research into journey maps packed with actionable insights.
Tech 💻
Sakana introduces Evolutionary Model Merge: Sakana leverages “evolutionary” algorithms to enhance the automatic discovery of optimal combinations of diverse open-source models to create new foundation models. The key contributions of this work include automated model composition, cross-domain merging capabilities, state-of-the-art performance in generating models like a Japanese LLM with Math reasoning capability, high efficiency, surprising generalizability, and culturally-aware VLM.
Evaluating Frontier Models for Dangerous Capabilities: a study introduces a program for evaluating AI systems like Gemini 1.0 in areas of persuasion, cybersecurity, self-proliferation, and self-reasoning.
Introducing RAG 2.0: unlike the previous generation of RAG, which stitches together frozen models, vector databases, and poor quality embeddings, contextual.ai has created their first set of Contextual Language Models (CLMs).
Regulation and Policy ⚖️
UN adopts first global artificial intelligence resolution: this landmark resolution aims to enhance privacy policies, protect personal data, monitor AI for potential risks, and uphold human rights.
BBC develops AI plans and talks to Big Tech over archives access: the Gen AI initiatives include 12 internal test pilots - utilizing AI technology to improve content creation, audience experiences, and operational efficiency.
Saudi Arabia Plans $40 Billion Push Into Artificial Intelligence: the Middle Eastern country is creating a gigantic fund to invest in AI technology, potentially becoming the largest player in the hot market.
Other
Google unveils TacticAI, an AI assistant for football tactics: Human experts from Liverpool FC found that TacticAI's recommendations were preferred over real tactical setups 90% of the time.
OpenAI is pitching Sora to Hollywood: OpenAI is scheduled to meet with a number of studios, talent agencies, and media executives in LAnext week to discuss partnerships.
iOS 18 may include Anthropic: rumors have said that Apple might partner with OpenAI or Google (or Baidu in China) for iOS chatbot functionality while using its own AI for on-device features.
Google’s AI system can now accurately predict floods: Google claims its AI tool ‘Flood Hub’ can now accurately predict floods seven days in advance. Flood Hub was used to provide forecasts for 80 countries, reaching over 460M people.
Tutorial: Integrating Zoom AI Companion and Google Workspace
Resources
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