GSV's AI News & Updates (07/05/22)
AI Startup Funding and Acquisitions (Inflection, Runway, MosaicML, Casetext), Merlyn Mind's Education LLM, The Future of Search, AI Automation of Work, the EU AI Act
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 🚀
AI and the automation of work: ChatGPT and generative AI will change how we work, but how different is this to all the other waves of automation of the last 200 years? What does it mean for employment? Disruption? Coal consumption?
OpenAI’s insights from global conversations: OpenAI’s takeaways after Sam Altman traveled to 25 cities across 22 countries to speak with users, developers, policymakers, and the public.
Meta explains how AI influences what we see on Facebook and Instagram: a detailed look at how Meta personalizes our experiences on social media using AI to choose the content we see based on a history of our own choices.
An Interview with Marc Andreessen about AI and How You Change the World
Hugging Face: Open-Sourcing the Future of AI: today, Hugging Face is a go-to hub for machine learning. The sheer size of the Hugging Face community feeds the inertia of its strategic position.
The Future of Search is being Reinvented with Generative AI: we’re moving away from the 10 blue links (and sometimes 10 blue ads) into a new paradigm in information retrieval with LLMs.
Education and the Future of Work 📚
Loora, a generative AI app that uses an audio interface to help users learn English, raises $9.25M: Loora aims to improve people’s conversational English skills, no matter the topic, by way of on-the fly, voice-based interactions with the eponymous Loora iOS assistant.
Merlyn Mind Launches Education-Specific LLM: Merlyn Mind, a pioneer in AI-enabled classroom digital assistants, is introducing a suite of LLMs specifically designed for the education industry. The platform aims to provide a trustworthy generative AI experience for teachers and students by focusing on curriculum-aligned, hallucination-resistant and age-appropriate content.
OpenAI Plans ChatGPT ‘Personal Assistant for Work,’ Setting Up Microsoft Rivalry: with built-in knowledge about an individual and their workplace, such an assistant could carry out tasks such as drafting emails or documents in that person’s style and with up-to-date information about their business.
Typeface, generative AI startup focused on enterprise use cases, raises $100M at a $1B valuation: Typeface revolutionizes the way enterprises deliver content, empowering every facet of the organization to drive exceptional results with unprecedented speed. The tranche brings Typeface’s total raised to $165M.
Japan’s Ministry of Education publishes guidelines allowing limited use of AI in schools: the education ministry will select a number of junior high and high schools that will trial AI use and plans to revise the guidelines based on the results.
Generative AI for Programming Education: Benchmarking ChatGPT, GPT-4, and Human Tutors: their results show that GPT-4 drastically outperforms ChatGPT (based on GPT-3.5) and comes close to human tutors' performance for several scenarios.
I Let An AI Do My Email: a review of Superhuman AI. Does Superhuman transform us into the one-line email machine of our dreams? Fun fact: OpenAI uses GPT internally to summarize long email chains, and it’s one of the most useful productivity-related applications of the technology they’ve found.
Startups and Tools 🛠️
Big funding rounds and deals for AI companies:
Inflection AI, The Year-Old Startup Behind Chatbot Pi, Raises $1.3B: backed by Microsoft, Nvidia and billionaires Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt, the startup led by ex-DeepMind leader Mustafa Suleyman is valued at $4B— and claims to have the world’s best AI hardware setup.
AI Video Startup Runway Raises $141M From Google, Nvidia: Runway’s new funding is an extension of a $50M Series C financing round in December led by Felicis Ventures. With the new cash infusion, Runway has raised ~$237M. Runway’s technology could change how artists work and tell stories.
Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML: the deal combines Databricks’ AI-ready data-management technology with MosaicML’s language-model platform, enabling businesses to build low-cost language models themselves with proprietary data (instead of 3rd party language models trained on troves of public data).
Thomson Reuters buys Casetext, an AI legal tech startup, for $650M in cash: Casetext’s flagship product is CoCounsel, which taps AI to review documents, help with legal research memos, prepare depositions and analyze contracts.
Lumine AI: Midjourney for 3D assets.
AudioPen: web app for converting your voice into text notes.
MyReader: let an AI read books for you - just upload your books, ask questions and get answers along with relevant sections to read more.
Respeecher: AI voice library and voice cloning for content creators - create speech that's indistinguishable from the original speaker. Perfect for filmmakers, game developers, and other content creators.
Tech 💻
Google announces first Machine Unlearning Challenge: “machine unlearning” is an emergent subfield of machine learning that aims to remove the influence of a specific subset of training examples — the "forget set" — from a trained model.
Personality Traits in Large Language Models: if LLMs can meaningfully
simulate personality, can LLM-synthesized personality profiles be shaped and controlled?
LLM Tech and a Lot More: Version 13.3 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica: new LLM features include LLMSynthesize (generate text, translate languages, and answer questions), LLMPrompt (create prompts that can be used with LLMSynthesize), LLMChatbooks (notebooks that allow you to have a conversation with an LLM).
Regulation and Policy ⚖️
What the European AI Act Means for You, AI Developer: the EU AI Act is hitting the stage with the world's first-ever legislation on artificial intelligence. The Act rolls out a red carpet of dos and don'ts for AI practices, mandatory disclosures, and an emphasis on 'trustworthy AI development.'
European companies claim the EU’s AI Act could ‘jeopardize technological sovereignty’: 150+ executives from companies like Renault, Heineken, Airbus, and Siemens have signed an open letter urging the EU to rethink its plans to regulate AI.
ChatGPT maker OpenAI faces class action over how it used people’s data: a California law firm says the company’s use of scraped data from the web violates the rights of millions of internet users.
China’s AI firms might further lose chip access in new US ban: the latest move is part of the U.S.’s broader strategy to limit China’s progress in AI, particularly in the military sphere. However, these measures are also having an adverse impact on the commercial AI sector in China, where many firms operate with teams that span both the U.S. and China.
Fun/Other 🎉
Microsoft brings new AI-powered shopping tools to Bing and Edge: GPT-powered AI capabilities to automatically generate buying guides when you use a query like “college supplies.” It will automatically aggregate products in each category, list their specs so you can compare similar items and tell you where to buy them.
Introducing OpenAI London: OpenAI announces first international expansion.
