GSV's AI News & Updates (09/22/23)
DALL-E 3, Gemini, Bard Extensions, Writer $100M Series B, Lepaya $38M Series C, Betterleap $13M Seed, Sizzle, Outschool Teacher AI Tools, Deepfake Influencers
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 🚀
Open AI
Releases DALL-E 3: DALL-E 3 understands significantly more nuance and detail than DALL-E 2. It is built natively on ChatGPT and can now render text (other popular image generators still struggle with).
Launches Red Teaming Network: a contracted group of experts to help inform the company’s AI model risk assessment and mitigation strategies. Members of the network will be called upon based on their expertise to help red team at various stages of the model and product development lifecycle.
Google Nears Release of Gemini AI to Challenge OpenAI: it is reported to have lesser hallucinations, better coding power, and other features such as chart analysis.
Google launches Bard Extensions: Bard will be able to connect to other Google apps like Docs, Gmail, Maps, YouTube and more. Bard can find and show relevant information across the Google tools (even when information you need is across multiple apps and services).
Bard can also now fact-check its own outputs and assess the accuracy of the information it generates.
Amazon brings generative AI to Alexa: the new model will power more conversational experiences (take into account body language as well as a person’s eye contact and gestures). It’ll interact with APIs to enable new smart home capabilities, inferring the meaning of descriptions like “spooky” lighting, and will give Alexa a bigger — and more opinionated — personality.
TikTok introduces a way to label AI-generated content: the company will also rename its AI filters and effects to include ‘AI’ in the name and require effects creators to do the same.
How Big Tech Is Ruining the Dream of AI: AI once promised to make us healthier and wealthier. Now, we’re faced with either gimmicky chatbots or total annihilation.
Why Japan is building its own version of ChatGPT: some Japanese researchers feel that AI systems trained on foreign languages cannot grasp the intricacies of Japanese language and culture.
Education and the Future of Work 📚
Writer raises a $100M Series B for its enterprise-focused generative AI platform: this brings Writer’s total raised capital to $126M and values the company between $500-$750M post-money. Writer asserts that its models are “smaller” than average and thus more “cost-effective”; transparent in the sense that customers can inspect the models’ code, features and data; and never trained on customer data.
Lepaya raises a $38M Series C to revolutionize the corporate learning market with an AI-powered capability development platform: Lepaya’s AI-coach will adjust the learning content to an individual learner’s context and career level.
Betterleap leverages AI to revolutionize recruitment, launches with impressive $13M in seed funding: Betterleap helps recruiters 10x their productivity - source, reach out to candidates and collaborate with recruiters all from oe platform.
Former Meta AI VP debuts Sizzle, an AI-powered learning app and chatbot: built by a team with backgrounds from Meta, Google, X (formerly Twitter) and Twitch, Sizzle already has over 20K downloads since launching in August.
Outschool launches an AI-powered tool to help teachers write progress reports: Outschool partnered with OpenAI to power the AI Teaching Assistant, designed to help teachers save time on writing progress reports as well as encourage better communication with the learner’s parent or caregiver. Outschool also announced that it’s venturing into one-on-one tutoring (competing with Varsity Tutors, Tutor.com and Preply).
Teachers Are Going All In on Generative AI: surveys suggest teachers use generative AI more than students, to create lesson plans or more interesting word problems. Educators say it can save valuable time but must be used carefully.
Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier: AI is really a big deal for the future of work. Consultants using AI finished 12.2% more tasks on average, completed tasks 25.1% more quickly, and produced 40% higher quality results than those without. On some tasks AI is immensely powerful, and on others it fails completely or subtly. And, unless you use AI a lot, you won’t know which is which.
One Day, AI Will Make Teaching Obsolete. As Educators, We Have a Different Role to Play
Startups and Tools 🛠️
Akkio: the AI Assistant for your data - forecast revenue, analyze live data, visualize survey sentiment, track ad spend, and predict customer lifetime value in one intuitive platform.
Eleven Labs’ Audiobook Workshop: generate, edit, and customize long-form spoken audio with precision, all within a streamlined workflow.
Capsule: AI-powered video editor for content and marketing teams.
Zeebra.ai: dub videos into 27 languages.
Tech 💻
Toyota Research Institute is developing a new method to teach robots overnight: TRI's progress signifies a move towards multi-purpose robotic systems that can learn and adapt to new tasks, and their research is exploring combinations of learning methods, including fleet learning, to create robots that can function efficiently in real-world settings.
6 Big Announcements At Intel Innovation 2023: From 288-Core CPU To AI Supercomputer: while Nvidia may still lead, Intel's major investments in AI-focused chips and infrastructure signal more choices for developers.
Chain-of-Verification Reduces Hallucination in Large Language Models
Regulation and Policy ⚖️
AI Regulation: there have been multiple call to regulate AI. It is too early to do so.
Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy: the basic idea is to require safety, security, and operational standards appropriate to a model’s potential for catastrophic risk, with higher ASL levels requiring increasingly strict demonstrations of safety.
Self-publishers must declare if content sold on Amazon’s site is AI-generated: new rules for Kindle Direct Publishing forum after complaints about AI-produced works being sold under human writers’ names.
What if AI treats humans the way we treat animals?: the dehumanizing philosophy of AI is built on a hatred of our animal nature.
38TB of data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers
Other
Deepfakes of Chinese influencers are livestreaming 24/7: with just a few minutes of sample video and $1,000, brands never have to stop selling their products. Now, all the human workers have to do is input basic information such as the name and price of the product being sold, proofread the generated script, and watch the digital influencer go live. A more advanced version of the technology can spot live comments and find matching answers in its database to answer in real time, so it looks as if the AI streamer is actively communicating with the audience.
How AI can help us understand how cells work—and help cure diseases: a virtual cell modeling system, powered by AI, will lead to breakthroughs in our understanding of diseases.
Resources
Celebrating 15 Years of ASU+GSV: Here Comes the Sun! Join us for the 15th anniversary of ASU+GSV to be part of the extraordinary group of educators, entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators reshaping the future through scaled innovations in education and workforce skills at the 2024 ASU+GSV Summit, April 14-17, in San Diego.
The GSV BIG 10: weekly coverage corner for the top 10 stories, insights, and major plays in learning and skilling.