GSV's AI News & Updates (10/06/23)
Canva's Magic Studio, Assistant + Bard, LinkedIn AI Tools, Celebrity Deepfakes, Rise of the Novice Coder, Gen AI Retention, Friends and Foes of Open-Source
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!
This week, we are announcing the inaugural ASU+GSV AIR SHOW: On April 13-15th we're launching ASU+GSV's inaugural AIR (AI Revolution) Show in San Diego, California. Done in conjunction with our 15th Annual ASU+GSV Summit, the AIR Show will be an immersive exposition providing a window to the transformative future of AI and learning. Tickets are complimentary for Mavericks.
General 🚀
Assistant with Bard: A step toward a more personal assistant: generative AI is creating new opportunities to build a more intuitive, intelligent, personalized digital assistant. One that extends beyond voice, understands and adapts to you and handles personal tasks in new ways. Google combines Bard’s generative and reasoning capabilities with Assistant’s personalized help.
Google Bard readies ‘Memory’ to adapt to important details about you: sometimes there are details that can be tedious to remind the AI about at the beginning of each conversation. (eg. if you’re on a gluten-free diet or have food allergies, you need to mention that to Bard every time you ask for recipe ideas).
Canva introduces Magic Studio, the power of AI, all in one place: created for the 99% of the world without complex design skills, Magic Studio reduces the need to toggle between multiple AI tools or learn lots of different software – all the best of AI is at your fingertips. The partnership allows you to access Runway’s Gen-2 text-to-video models, DALL-E, Imagine, and more.
Anthropic in Talks to Raise $2 Billion From Google and Others Just Days After Amazon Investment: the 2-year-old startup, which sells Claude, a chatbot that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, wants a valuation between $20 billion to $30 billion including the new investment.
Jasper, an Early Generative AI Winner, Cuts Internal Valuation as Growth Slows: the cut takes its valuation to $1.2B, down 20% from June when Jasper raised at $1.5B valuation. They are also cutting their 2023 annual recurring revenue projections by at least 30%.
10 Hypothetical Blockbuster AI Acquisitions: Databricks acquired MosaicML for $1.3B, Thomson Reuters acquired Casetext for $650M - which blockbuster acquisitions in the world of AI would be the most strategically compelling and make the most business sense?
The synthetic social network is coming: between ChatGPT’s surprisingly human voice and Meta’s AI characters, our feeds may be about to change forever.
The shape of the shadow of The Thing: we can start to see, dimly, what the near future of AI looks like.
One month retention rates for Generative AI apps
Education and the Future of Work 📚
LinkedIn goes big on new AI tools for learning, recruitment, marketing and sales, powered by OpenAI: LinkedIn Learning will be incorporating AI in the form of a “learning coach” that builds advice and content recommendations based on a user’s job title, goals, and skills. Marketing will get a new product called Accelerate that helps run campaigns without heavy lift. Their new Recruiter 2024 experience allows talent leaders to use natural language to put hiring goals in their own words for LinkedIn to find candidates for them.
Workday unveils new HR-focused generative AI features: Workday customers will soon be able to automatically compare signed contracts against contracts in Workday to surface discrepancies, create personalized knowledge management articles and generate statements of work for service procurement.
Coda introduces Coda 4.0, a connected AI work assistant: delivering end-to-end solutions, extending our ability to be your “single source of truth,” and unlocking the most connected AI work assistant that can truly understand each person, team, and company.
The rise of the novice coder: Can AI turn every employee into a developer?: for years now, companies have been yearning for employees to become “citizen developers” and take it upon themselves to build software and improve productivity. Automated code generation could help make that a reality.
Wanted: High Performers for the Last Job You’ll Ever Have: Train an AI to replace yourself. Salary paid and profits shared indefinitely.
JPMorgan’s Dimon Predicts 3.5-Day Work Week for Next Generation Thanks to AI
Startups and Tools 🛠️
Enterprise-focused AI startup Cohere launches demo chatbot Coral and Chat API: with this new capability, developers can integrate user inputs, data sources, and model generations to build powerful chat applications based off Cohere’s proprietary LLM, Command.
Unitary raises $15M in Series A funding round for AI-driven content moderation: the company uses contextual AI to automate content moderation and keep bad actors, e.g. NSFW or otherwise, at bay.
Sam Altman backs teens’ AI startup Induced AI, in a $2.3M Seed round: enables businesses to input their workflows in plain English, subsequently converting the instructions into pseudo-code in real time for numerous repetitive tasks typically managed by back offices.
Prophetic: creating what’s billed as the “world’s first wearable device for stabilizing and inducing lucid dreams.”
Rewind Pendant: a wearable that captures what you say and hear in the real world and transcribes, encrypts, and stores it entirely locally on your phone.
Anything World: let AI rig & animate your 3D models - animate your own assets and build your own worlds in minutes.
AI Emojis: AI generated emojis
Tech 💻
Perplexity launches pplx-api: one of the fastest ways to access Mistral 7B, Llama2 13B, Code Llama 34B, and Llama2 70B models.
OpenAI Residency: a 6-month program is a bridge for brilliant technical researchers from diverse fields to transition into AI. The program is ideal for researchers specializing in fields outside of deep learning like mathematics, physics, or neuroscience.
Regulation and Policy ⚖️
The A.I. Wars Have Three Factions, and They All Crave Power: the doomsayers, the reformers, and the warriors.
Meta, OpenAI Square Off Over Open Source AI: are cutting-edge AI models too powerful to hand to just anyone?
Other
Celebrities, including Mr. Beast and Tom Hanks, warn followers not to be duped by AI deepfakes: AI deepfakes are getting so good that a fraudulent MrBeast ad slipped past TikTok’s ad moderation technology. Social media services are not ready for cheap and ubiquitous deepfakes flooding their news feeds.
Domino’s and Microsoft are joining forces to create Generative AI pizza tech
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on how AI and art will coexist in the future
Resources
The GSV BIG 10: weekly coverage corner for the top 10 stories, insights, and major plays in learning and skilling.
Thank you!
So much good stuff here!