GSV's AI News & Updates (09/06/24)

OpenAI Funding, Gems and Imagen 3, Alexa Anthropic, Yale $150M AI Support, Llama 350M Downloads, Alakh AI, SSI Raises $1B, NVIDIA and Sakana, Agent Civilizations

Sep 06, 2024

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General 🚀

OpenAI in Talks for Funding Round Valuing It Above $100 Billion: Thrive Capital and Microsoft are among investors putting several billion dollars into ChatGPT maker. As OpenAI maintains its leadership in the AI market, it faces increasing competition and requires substantial capital to fund the development of advanced systems, including the next model following GPT-4.
- OpenAI says ChatGPT usage has doubled to 200M weekly active users since last year: 92% of Fortune 500 companies are using its products. The usage of its automated API has doubled since the release of GPT-4o mini in July.
- OpenAI Considers Higher Priced Subscriptions to its Chatbot AI: Early discussions suggest prices up to $2,000 per month for its future Strawberry and Orion products, though final pricing is likely to be lower.
With 10x growth since 2023, Llama is the leading engine of AI innovation: Llama models have reached nearly 350M downloads and over 20M downloads in the last month. The Llama ecosystem includes over 60,000 derivative models.
- Accenture is using Llama 3.1 to improve ESG reporting productivity by 70% and quality by 20-30%, while expanding multilingual capabilities for global use. AT&T fine-tuned Llama to enhance customer care, improving search responses by 33%, while DoorDash leverages it to streamline software engineering tasks.
Few have tried OpenAI’s Google killer. Here’s what they think: SearchGPT offers AI-powered answers with cited sources but faces challenges with local and shopping queries, occasionally presenting false information. While promising, the tool still has significant improvements to make before posing a serious threat to Google’s search dominance.
Google launches Gems and Imagen 3: Gems allows users to create customized AI experts for specific tasks like coding or career advice, while Imagen 3 enhances creative image generation with improved quality and safeguards.
Amazon turns to Anthropic's AI for Alexa revamp: Amazon's new "Remarkable" Alexa, set to launch in October, will rely primarily on Anthropic's Claude AI rather than Amazon’s in-house models, after early internal tests showed performance issues. The paid version, priced at $5 to $10 per month, will offer advanced AI features like ongoing conversations, shopping advice, and enhanced home automation.

Education and the Future of Work 📚

Skillvue secures $2.8M for AI-based skills assessment platform: Skillvue, founded in Milan in 2021, helps companies assess candidates' and employees' skills using AI-driven asynchronous interviews and scalable skills analysis, aiding in recruitment, talent development, and internal mobility.
Yale announces $150 million to support leadership in AI: The investment will enhance compute infrastructure, secure access to generative AI tools, and facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration, while also supporting targeted faculty hires and curriculum development to drive AI innovation and research across the university.
Town Hall: Back to School with AI: AI can help educators focus more on human interaction and critical thinking by automating tasks that consume time but don’t require human empathy or creativity.
PhysicsWallah’s ‘Alakh AI’ is Making Education Accessible to Millions in India: The suite comes with several products including AI Guru, Sahayak, and NCERT Pitara. “AI Guru is a 24/7 companion available to students, who can use it to ask about anything related to their academics, non-academic support, or more”.
Here’s how ed-tech companies are pitching AI to teachers: Hundreds of AI-driven tools are being built to save teachers time on grading, lesson planning, and other tasks. But not all educators are on board.
Generative AI Can Address Advising Challenges: A new report from Tyton Partners encourages institutional leaders and academic advisers to consider the role of generative artificial intelligence to support advising caseloads and course mapping.
Can AI Help a Student Get Into Stanford or Yale?: Two entrepreneurial Stanford students fed hundreds of essays—both high and low quality—into an AI model to train it on what top-tier colleges look for in admissions essays.
Mayo Clinic launching AI education program: Harper Family Foundation provided $10M to train staff and medical professionals to deploy AI technology ethically for patients.
What Are Successful AI Leaders Doing Differently?: A recent study of 310 U.S. companies found that AI leaders—those achieving the most success with AI-infused systems—invest more, implement AI faster, and benefit from strong CEO support compared to laggards. AI leaders reported a 20% cost reduction, 17% revenue increase, and 33% cycle-time reduction from their most successful AI systems
ChatGPT Usage Varies Widely by Job and Gender: Women are 20 percentage points less likely to use ChatGPT compared to men in the same occupation, and even among coworkers within the same workplace. Younger and less experienced workers are more likely to use ChatGPT.
Work, workforce, workers: reinvented in the age of generative AI: A new Accenture report finds that while 95% of workers see value in AI, many are concerned about job loss, and only 9% of organizations, termed "Reinventors," are effectively leading AI integration by reshaping roles and actively engaging employees in the transformation.
71% of leaders prefer hiring candidates with AI skills over those with the relevant industry experience:

Startups and Tools 🛠️

OpenAI co-founder Sutskever's new safety-focused AI startup SSI raises $1B: The funding values the company at $5B despite being only three months old and having just 10 employees. SSI focuses on developing advanced, safety-first AI systems, prioritizing research over product launch, and is backed by top venture firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital
Nvidia Joins $100 Million Funding for Year-Old Japan AI Startup: Instead of using massive datasets and billions in investment, Sakana AI focuses on developing algorithms that can automate language and image processing AI models by simulating natural selection.
Generative AI coding startup Magic lands $320M investment from Eric Schmidt, Atlassian and others
GitHub Copilot competitor Codeium raises $150M at a $1.25B valuation
AI company Midjourney teases hardware product in a new form factor: The AI image generation company is entering the hardware space, led by former Apple manager Ahmad Abbas, though details about the device and its release remain unclear.
Spotter Studio: helps YouTube Creators brainstorm, research, and plan videos that perform better.

Tech 💻

Anthropic launches Claude for Enteprise and a Quickstarts repo:
- Quickstarts Repo: a collection of projects designed to help developers quickly get started with building deployable applications using the Anthropic API.
- Claude for Enterprise: offers organizations a 500K context window, GitHub integration, and enterprise-grade security features like SSO and role-based permissions, enabling teams to securely collaborate with Claude using internal knowledge for better productivity while protecting sensitive data.
Anthropic CEO says future of AI is a hive-mind with a corporate structure: Amodei discussed how larger AI models, like Claude, would oversee smaller, more efficient models to complete specific tasks, allowing users to access precise AI capabilities via a unified interface, potentially making AI more cost-effective and task-oriented.
The AI industry is obsessed with Chatbot Arena, but it might not be the best benchmark: While it offers real-time insights into AI model performance through user-submitted prompts and votes, experts argue that the results may not fully reflect real-world use cases due to a narrow, self-selecting user base and the influence of commercial ties.

Safety and Regulation ⚖️

AI startups ramp up federal lobbying efforts: OpenAI, which spent $800,000 in the first half of 2024, is advocating for favorable federal AI regulations while preparing for potential antitrust investigations. The number of groups lobbying on AI issues has grown to over 550, reflecting the high stakes of AI policy amid increasing state-level legislation and diverging political stances on AI regulation.
Major Sites Are Saying No to Apple’s AI Scraping: Several major news outlets, including The New York Times and Vox Media, are blocking Apple's AI training tool, Applebot-Extended, reflecting a broader conflict over AI data usage and intellectual property as media companies seek to protect their content without paid partnerships.