GSV's AI News & Updates (05/24/24)
GPT-4o, Google I/O, LearnLM, Scarlett Johansson "Sky" Voice, Copilot+ PC, OpenAI Content Partnerships, Microsoft and Khan Academy, DeepL, Praktika, NSF AI Education Act of 2024
General 🚀
OpenAI Spring Update: OpenAI announced a new flagship generative AI model, GPT-4o. Here’s a guide to the GPT-4o 'Omni' Model.
ChatGPT’s mobile app revenue saw its biggest spike yet following GPT-4o launch
OpenAI is also adding new data analysis features in ChatGPT: with the new GPT-4o model, ChatGPT will feature direct file uploads from Google Drive and OneDrive, interactive tables and charts, and downloadable custom charts. Additionally, GPT-4o supports over 50 languages and automates code generation for tasks like dataset merging and cleaning.
Google I/O 2024: Google’s annual developer conference with 100+ announcements and exciting new features across the Google ecosystem. If you haven’t had a chance to watch or digest the entire presentation, here’s a guide to Google I/O 2024.
Google Search’s New AI Overviews Will Soon Have Ads: Google is finding ways to incorporate sponsored advertising placements into its new AI-powered search features and summaries, while still maintaining regular search ad slots.
EdTech Insiders: The Evolution of Google for Education with Shantanu Sinha
Scarlett Johansson accused OpenAI of using her voice without consent for their AI chatbot ChatGPT's "Sky" voice persona: Johansson was "shocked" and "angered" by the resemblance, stating Altman had insinuated the similarity was intentional by tweeting "her" - a reference to the film. She has hired legal counsel and demanded an explanation from OpenAI, leading them to pause using the "Sky" voice. Johansson’s statement here.
OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show: a different actress was hired to provide the voice for ChatGPT’s “Sky,” according to documents and recordings shared with the Washington Post.
Microsoft introduces Copilot+ PCs: Microsoft announced a bold new direction for its laptops, based primarily on enabling bleeding-edge AI features that require a Neural Processing Unit (NPU).
OpenAI Partnerships:
OpenAI and News Corp (WSJ, MarketWatch, New York Post) have signed a landmark multi-year global partnership deal: the deal is valued at over $250M over 5 years. OpenAI’s previous deals with Axel Springer and Financial Times are estimated to be worth up to $10M/year.
OpenAI and Reddit partner: OpenAI will integrate Reddit conversations into its AI systems like ChatGPT, enhancing response accuracy and contextual relevance. Reddit will use OpenAI's AI models to develop new features for users and moderators, and OpenAI will become an advertising partner to help deliver more targeted ads.
Paid AI Assistants:
Meta is Working on a Paid Version of its AI Assistant: they're working on a premium version of their Meta AI assistant, probably with a monthly fee like the others.
Amazon Alexa’s big AI upgrade could require a new subscription: the upgraded Alexa, powered by LLMs, will have improved abilities to understand contextual phrases, handle multiple requests within a single command, and provide more intelligent responses. Amazon aims to position the AI-enhanced Alexa as a competitor to recent generative AI assistants like those from Google and OpenAI.
Education and the Future of Work 📚
Microsoft and Khan Academy partner on AI tools:
Microsoft is enabling Khan Academy to provide free access to Khanmigo for Teachers, an AI assistant, to all US educators. This tool helps teachers prepare lessons, analyze student performance, plan assignments, and facilitate their own learning.
They are collaborating to explore opportunities to improve AI-powered math tutoring with Phi-3, Microsoft’s new open-source small language model.
More Khan Academy content will be integrated into Microsoft Copilot and Teams for Education.
DeepL announces $300M investment at $2B valuation fueled by global demand for AI language solutions: the new funding round is led by Index Ventures, doubling the company's valuation from the previous $1B valuation it achieved in January 2023. The company is now in 60+ global markets and works with 100,000+ businesses, governments, and other organizations.
Praktika raises $35.5M to use AI avatars to make learning languages feel more natural: Praktika is reported to have 1.2M active monthly users across 100 countries and says it generated revenue of almost $20M in the last 12 months. “Praktika’s users interact with AI avatars who then “tailor” lessons for you and can speak with several accents, such as American, British, Asian, and Indian.”
SuperKalam Raises $2M To Enhance Its AI-Led Educational Platform: the startup said it will utilize the funding to enhance its AI-powered UPSC test prep platform, acquire more users, and improve its personalized learning products.
AI coding startup Replit cuts 20% of staff, shifts to enterprise sales: Replit has raised over $220M in funding and previously focused on providing a coding playground for learners. The company is shifting its strategy from catering to individual learners to pursuing enterprise sales with its AI coding assistant.
Microsoft Copilot will soon act as a team member in meetings and chats: Microsoft is expanding Copilot beyond a personal assistant to enable collaboration and automation for teams and businesses. Businesses can also build custom copilots that act as agents. It will be able to act as a:
Meeting facilitator: manage agendas, take notes, track time during meetings
Group collaborator: surface important information, track action items, address unresolved issues in chats
Project manager: create and assign tasks, track deadlines, notify team members when input is needed
Bipartisan bill aims to bolster AI education and workforce training in the U.S.: the bill aims to open doors to AI education for students at all levels, upskill the workforce, and maintain U.S. leadership in these critical technologies. It builds on previous legislation like the CHIPS and Science Act that invested in AI R&D.
A quarter of U.S. teachers say AI tools do more harm than good in K-12 education according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in fall 2023. Among teens who have heard of ChatGPT, 19% say they have used it to help them with schoolwork.
Generative AI is Best at Something Teachers Need Least: here's why customizing word problems isn’t generative AI’s killer app.
Professors Try ‘Restrained AI’ Approach to Help Teach Writing: can ChatGPT make human writing more efficient, or is writing an inherently time-consuming process best handled without AI tools?
Startups and Tools 🛠️
Reap: turn your long videos into viral shorts/reels faster.
UserCall: AI voice user interview agents.
Funding frenzy week - a few highlights:
Scale AI raises a $1B Series F at a $13.8B valuation: Scale AI provides data-labeling services to companies that want to train machine learning models.
H raises $220M Seed: the French AI startup has emerged out of stealth to build agentic models that can break down tasks into multiple steps, reason, plan and collaborate. H was founded earlier this year by former DeepMind Scientists and CEO Charles Kantor, former Stanford computational math researcher. The $220M round was led by Accel.
Suno raises a $125M Series B: to build a future where anyone can use AI to make music. According to sources, the funding round gives the two year old company an implied value of $500M.
Gamma raises a $12M Series A: Gamma is building an AI-powered platform for the future of content creation and idea presentation. Their Series A was led by Accel.
But other startups are starting to feel the squeeze:
Wearable AI Startup Humane Explores Potential Sale, Sources Say: the startup apparently thinks it’s worth between $750 million and $1 billion despite the deep software flaws and hardware issues of its first product. Humane has raised $230 million from investors.
Stability AI, Facing Cash Crunch, Discusses Sale: the startup behind the popular Stable Diffusion image generator has presented itself as an acquisition target in recent weeks and held early-stage conversations with multiple companies, though a deal is not imminent.
Hugging Face is sharing $10M worth of compute to help beat the big AI companies: ZeroGPU gives everyone the chance to create AI apps without the burden of GPU costs.
Tech 💻
Anthropic Announces Revolutionary AI Breakthrough: Mapping The Mind of Large Language Models: Anthropic has made a significant breakthrough in understanding the inner workings of large language models (LLMs) by identifying millions of features that represent various concepts within their AI model, Claude Sonnet. This research has profound implications for AI safety, as understanding and controlling the internal workings of AI models can help prevent undesirable outcomes like bias, deception, and misuse.
Predibase’s Open-source Model Fine-Tuning Leaderboard: most of the fine-tuned open-source models surpass GPT-4 with Llama-3, Phi-3 and Zephyr demonstrating the strongest performance.
GPT-5 Is Coming: Reading Between the Lines at Microsoft Build: news and notes from the AI-everything developer conference.
Regulation and Policy ⚖️
OpenAI shares safety reassurances as top leaders exit: Leike and OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, who'd both led the company's superalignment team — dedicated to foreseeing and preventing long-term disaster stemming from advanced AI — left OpenAI last week.
Charting a Bipartisan Course: The Senate’s Roadmap for AI Policy: the long-anticipated Roadmap for Artificial Intelligence Policy, based on nine forums with 150 AI experts, emphasizes strategic investments to maintain US leadership in AI while addressing potential risks and societal impacts.
Alphabet, Meta Offer Millions to Partner With Hollywood on AI: the proposed partnerships could allow Alphabet and Meta to enhance their AI video generation tools, like Alphabet's Veo and Meta's Make-A-Video, by leveraging the vast libraries of Hollywood content.
Other
Mike Krieger (co-founder and CTO of Instagram) joins Anthropic as Chief Product Officer
No Priors: with Y Combinator President and CEO Garry Tan
Resources
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