GSV's AI News & Updates (06/23/22)
Robots Learn Chores, Powerschool Partners with OpenAI, China's Nvidia Chip Demand, AI as Companions, AWS & Dropbox's AI Funds, ElevenLabs raises $19M Series A
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 🚀
Meta introduces Voicebox: a breakthrough in generative AI for speech, the first model that can generalize to speech-generation tasks it was not specifically trained to accomplish with state-of-the-art performance.
It’s able to create voice samples from scratch; take a sample and modify it; do so in 6 different languages, is 20x faster than prior models, and has significantly better performance. Example: crop a dog barking out of a video of someone speaking, and regenerate it with pure speech.
Robots learn to perform chores by watching YouTube: a team of researchers from Stanford University and Google AI created a system that can automatically extract instructions from YouTube videos and translate them into a format that robots can understand. The system was able to teach robots how to perform a variety of tasks, including folding laundry, making a bed, and cleaning a room.
China's ByteDance has gobbled up $1B of Nvidia GPUs for AI this year: Chinese companies are frantically pre-ordering GPUs before government sanctions fully kick in.
AWS launches $100M program to fund generative AI initiatives: the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center will focus on 6 key areas: healthcare, life sciences, media and entertainment, automotive and manufacturing, energy and utilities, and telecommunications.
Dropbox launches $50M AI-focused venture fund, intros AI features
New AI launches:
Google’s spreadsheet-generating AI feature is rolling out now: auto-builds custom templates based on a text prompt.
Dropbox introduces Dropbox Dash and Dropbox AI: Dropbox Dash is a universal search bar that can search across tools, content, and apps from 3rd party platforms. Dropbox AI for Files uses AI to summarize and answer questions about content saved in Dropbox.
Figma acquired AI design tool Diagram: AI will help users do more across every part of the product development process: automate tasks (wireframing and prototyping), generate ideas (color palettes and typography combinations), improve the overall quality of design (identifying potential problems and making suggestions for improvement).
It’s Not a Computer, It’s a Companion!: a16z believes we’re on the cusp of a significant societal shift: AI companions will soon become commonplace. Generative AI models will fundamentally change our relationship with computers, putting them beside us as coworkers, friends, family members, and even lovers.
As these companions become more sophisticated, they will raise a number of ethical and philosophical questions. How will we ensure that these companions are not used to manipulate or exploit us? How will we balance the benefits of these companions with the potential risks?
Why GPT-4 Function Calling is a big deal: GPT-4 can now access and use external resources, such as APIs, databases, and web services, giving GPT-4 a much wider range of capabilities.
Data Wars: Control The Data | Control The World: exploring the growing fight between tech companies over who gets to use their data, and how this might change the way we teach and train artificial intelligence models.
The New New Moats: Why Systems of Intelligence are still the next defensible business model. Jerry Chen argues that traditional moats, such as network effects and economies of scale, are becoming less effective as AI-powered competitors enter the market. Businesses that are able to build effective systems of intelligence will be able to create new moats and protect their market share.
Education and the Future of Work 📚
Powerschool announces collaboration with Microsoft OpenAI: Large-scale language models integrated within PowerSchool Performance Matters and PowerSchool LearningNav products will empower educators in delivering transformative personalized learning pathways.
Assigning AI: Seven Approaches for Students, with Prompts: AI-tutor, AI-coach, AI-mentor, AI-teammate, AI-tool, AI-simulator, and AI-student, each with distinct pedagogical benefits and risks. The aim is to help students learn with and about AI, with practical strategies designed to mitigate risks such as complacency about the AI’s output, errors, and biases.
Harvard’s CS50 Will Integrate Artificial Intelligence Into Course Instruction: AI will be used to help students find bugs in their code, give feedback on the design of student programs, explain unfamiliar lines of code or error messages, and answer individual questions.
The AI Workforce: an exploration of AI’s impact on the nature of work and companies and why ChatGPT has created a false sense of security.
Your next job interview could be with AI instead of a person: it may sound like a strange Turing test - wondering if the recruiter you're interacting with about a potential job position is a person or a bot. A recent survey found that 43% of companies will use AI to run hiring interviews by 2024.
92% of programmers are using AI tools, says GitHub developer survey
Startups and Tools 🛠️
ElevenLabs raises $19M Series A for their voice creation AI: launched in Beta in January 2023, ElevenLabs has now attracted over 1M registered users across creative, entertainment and publishing spaces.
Current: Current integrates with the tools your team uses to get work done, and gives you a unified feed to share and view updates. All work in Current is organized into specific work streams, and easily searchable.
Upword: GPT-powered research tools for individuals and teams - AI generated notes, work with AI to build a summary, extract key takeaways.
Avaturn: turn people into realistic and customizable 3D avatars for your metaverse, game, or app.
VoiceGenie: generative voice bot for interactive sales, support and everything in between.
Encord: the open source active learning toolkit for computer vision. Encord Active helps you find failure modes in your models, prioritize high-value data for labelling, and drive smart data curation to improve model performance.
Tech 💻
Inflection announces in-house LLM “Inflection-1”: which powers Pi.ai and will soon be available via their conversational API. They state that Inflection-1 is the best model in its compute class, outperforming GPT-3.5, LLaMA, Chinchilla, and PaLM-540B on a wide range of benchmarks.
Stability AI announces SDXL 0.9: the most advanced development in the Stable Diffusion text-to-image suite of models. SDXL 0.9 is trained on a dataset of over 100M images, has 1.3B parameters, and uses a new diffusion process uses a technique called "progressive growing". Will be released as an open-source model in mid-July.
Emerging Architectures for LLM Applications: the most common systems, tools, and design patterns used by AI startups and sophisticated tech companies.
The Getting Started with AI Stack for JavaScript: a16z releases the “AI stack” for JavaScript, components include: machine learning frameworks, pre-trained models, APIs, frontend libraries and more.
Regulation and Policy ⚖️
OpenAI Lobbied the E.U. to Water Down AI Regulation: The lobbying efforts of OpenAI have raised concerns about the influence of large AI companies on the development of AI regulation.
Artificial Intelligence: Advancing Innovation Towards the National Interest: The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee held a hearing on June 21, 2023 to discuss the future of artificial intelligence.
Hugging Face CEO tells US House open-source AI is ‘extremely aligned’ with American interests: Delangue argued that open-source AI can help to level the playing field for small businesses and startups, and help to build trust and transparency in the AI community.
Google Cloud Launches Anti-Money-Laundering Tool for Banks, Betting on the Power of AI: The company is looking to set itself apart from a crowded field of surveillance platforms by reducing the amount of human input in the process of screening for money-laundering risks.
Fun/Other 🎉
Pixar teamed up with Disney to use AI in their latest film Elemental: Pixar used AI to create realistic and dynamic flames - trained on a dataset of real fire footage and was able to learn the nuances of fire, such as how it flickers and dances.
Midjourney v5.2’s new “Zoom out” feature:
