GSV's AI News & Updates (06/16/22)
AI's Serious Bias Issues, Synthesia's $90M Series C, The Beatles' AI Song Comeback, Accenture Invests $3B in AI, 4 Week Old Startup Raises $113M, What Should Students Learn About AI?
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 🚀
The Awkward Partnership Leading the AI Boom: the unconventional arrangement between Microsoft and OpenAI sometimes causes conflict.
Bard is getting better at logic and reasoning: Bard is improving at mathematical tasks, coding questions and string manipulation through a new technique called implicit code execution. Plus, it has a new export action to Google Sheets.
Salesforce Touts AI Strategy, Doubles Investment in Startups: They are rebranding their AI toolkit to “AI Cloud” and doubling their Generative AI fund announced in March to a whopping $500M.
Humans are biased. Generative AI is even worse: Bloomberg used Stable Diffusion to generate images for the keywords “inmate,” “drug dealer” and “terrorist.” AI models don’t just replicate stereotypes or disparities that exist in the real world — it amplifies them to alarming lengths. AI systems, like facial-recognition, are already being used by thousands of US police departments. Bias within those tools has led to wrongful arrests. Experts warn that the use of generative AI within policing could exacerbate the issue.
Market Map: Gen AI Companies with Foundational Models: whether for Consumers or Enterprise, Multi-Purpose or Niche, the gen AI ecosystem is taking shape in interesting ways.
Runway’s Gen-2 shows the limitations of today’s text-to-video tech
How AI is Changing (and Challenging) the Art World: AI is a new creative tool and it’s here to stay, the challenge of redefining the art and the artist, AI as a catalyst for content creation.
The Beatles to make one-song comeback via AI: The song has not yet been named but the BBC reported that it was likely to be a 1978 composition called Now and Then, one of several tracks on a cassette labeled “For Paul” that Lennon created before his death.
Education and the Future of Work 📚
Synthesia raises a $90M Series C: Synthesia uses AI-driven avatars to create synthetic videos for L&D, sales enablement, customer service, advertising and other use cases. The company has a year-over-year user growth rate of 456% and over 15 million videos generated on the platform to date.
Hey, Alexa, What Should Students Learn About A.I.?: While schools debate what to teach students about powerful new A.I. tools, tech giants, universities and nonprofits are intervening with free lessons. The lessons are proliferating even as schools are wrestling with a fundamental question: Should they teach students to program and use A.I. tools, providing training in tech skills employers seek? Or should students learn to anticipate and mitigate A.I. harms?
Accenture to invest $3B in AI and have 80,000 staff working on AI: it also launched a tool called the "AI Navigator for Enterprise", that it said would help guide businesses on how they can best use the technology.
University of Kansas Researchers Claim 99% Accuracy Detecting ChatGPT Fakes: Researchers say their algorithm can detect scientific writing by robots with surprising accuracy.
When Doctors Use a Chatbot to Improve Their Bedside Manner: Despite the drawbacks of turning to AI in medicine, some physicians find that ChatGPT improves their ability to communicate empathetically with patients.
Synthesis launches Synthesis Tutor: your child’s own superhuman math tutor.
Startups and Tools 🛠️
Cohere Announces $270M Series C to Bring Generative AI to Enterprises: Cohere’s AI platform is uniquely designed for enterprises, offering data-secure deployment options in companies’ existing cloud environments, customization, and customer support.
4-week-old AI startup, Mistral AI, raises record $113M without any product: Mistral AI is based out of Paris and co-founded by alums from Google’s DeepMind and Meta. They will focus on open source solutions and targeting enterprises and plan to release its first models for text-based generative AI in 2024.
Versed raises $1.7M in Pre-Seed Funding from Google’s Gradient Ventures: Versed empowers anyone to create their own role-playing video game. All you need to do is write. Versed generates immersive locations, diverse characters, turn-based combat, and branching narrative.
AI analyst by Rows: summarize any dataset, run deep dive analysis and answer questions in plain language.
Fini: turn your knowledge base into an AI chat. Fini gets you a tireless AI agent, ready to answer customer questions instantly, 24/7.
hila.ai: your new financial research assistant dig into earnings calls, query against financials, upload custom documents and glean insights from supported 10-Ks.
Receiptor.ai: extract receipts and invoices from emails with AI
Lancey: AI-driven product-led growth experimentation platform.
Tech 💻
OpenAI announces function calling and other API updates: function calling allows developers to describe programming functions to GPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4 and have the models create code to execute those functions.
The new upgrades to API include – a new function calling capability in the Chat Completions API, updated and more steerable versions of GPT-4 and GPT 3.5 turbo, new 16K context window of GPT-3.f turbo, 75% cost reduction in state-of-the-art embeddings model, 25% reduction on input tokens for GPT-3.5 turbo, deprecation timeline for the gpt-3.5-turbo-0301 and gpt-4-0314 models.
Meta open sources MusicGen, an AI-powered music generator: A simple and controllable music generation model. MusicGen can be prompted by both text and melody - “jazzy elevator music”, “lo-fi slow BPM electro chill with organic samples.”
MusicGen was trained on 20,000 hours of music, including 10,000 “high-quality” licensed music tracks and 390,000 instrument-only tracks from ShutterStock and Pond5, a large stock media library.
Different development paths of LLMs: in industry, open-source, and academia, each of these giant pools of talent are driven by different incentives and will create very different language models.
People Are Pirating GPT-4 By Scraping Exposed API Keys: People using the stolen API keys can then implement GPT-4 while racking up usage charges to the stolen OpenAI account.
Regulation and Policy ⚖️
Europe moves ahead on AI regulation, challenging tech giants’ power: European lawmakers voted to approve the EU AI Act, putting Brussels a step closer to shaping global AI standards. There are concerns that this will hurt AI companies and AI innovation in the EU.
Charting a Path to AI Accountability: Anthropic’s core AI policy proposals.
Listen/Watch
Other
Researchers discover that ChatGPT prefers repeating 25 jokes over and over: During a test run, 90 percent of 1,008 generations were the same 25 jokes.
Hundreds attend AI church service in Germany: a ChatGPT chatbot, personified by different avatars on a screen above the altar, led more than 300 people through 40 minutes of prayer, music, sermons and blessings in Germany.
This is great Claire, thank you so much