GSV's AI News & Updates (10/16/23)
2023 State of AI, Replit AI for All, Chip Shortages, Class Companion $4M Seed, PhysicsWallah's Alakh AI, Adobe Firefly, Google's Gen AI for Doctors
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!
Last week, we announced 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.
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General 🚀
State of AI Report 2023: a 160+ page report covering trends across research, industry adoption, politics and safety of AI. Nathan Beinach’s director cut (a snapshot of key themes and ideas) here.
Google’s AI Search experience can now generate images: you can type your query into the Google search bar and SGE can create a few images based on your prompt that you can pick from.
Replit announces AI for All: Replit is releasing its AI capabilities (features like code completion and assistance) to all its 23M+ users for free. Additionally, Replit has introduced a new model, known as replit-code-v1.5-3b, to drive the implementation of these features during this extensive release. This 3-billion parameter model has been fine-tuned for programming in 30 different languages.
Adobe announced several major updates to Firefly: using its new model Firefly Image 2, Adobe users can now enjoy enhanced control over artistic styles, generate vector graphics, and benefit from improved integration with other Adobe applications. Adobe also officially launched a sneak preview of Project Stardust, a next-generation AI-powered photo-editing engine.
Spotify Code Hints at Generative AI Playlists: Spotify is putting the finishing touches on a new ‘Supremium’ subscription tier that will include a generative AI tool for creating playlists. The $20/month subscription will offer 24-bit lossless audio, more playlist-mixing tools based on pace, mood, genre, and other factors, 20-30 hrs of access to Spotify’s new audiobook library, a Highlights feature detailed statistics on the user’s listening history, and something called Your Sound Capsule.
OpenAI’s Revenue Crossed $1.3 Billion Annualized Rate: Altman’s remark implies the company is generating more than $100M per month, up 30% from this summer.
Big Tech Struggles to Turn AI Hype Into Profits: Microsoft, Google and others experiment with how to produce, market and charge for new tools. Uncertainty persists regarding the most effective business models and how to profit from generative AI despite massive investments.
Meta Is Paying Creators Millions for AI Chatbots: Meta pays stars like Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady, MrBeast and Charli D’Amelio to use their likenesses for fictional AI characters.
Gen AI boom has massively strained the GPU supply chain: Microsoft is facing a shortage of the server hardware needed to run AI so severe that it might lead to service disruptions, the company warned in a summer earnings report. Nvidia’s best-performing AI chips are reportedly sold out until 2024.
Microsoft may debut its first AI chip at Ignite 2023 to mitigate cost
OpenAI said to be considering developing its own AI chips: they currently rely heavily on Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs) and Microsoft’s partnership to access them.
Tesla Builds a New Home for ‘Dojo’ Supercomputer as AI Ambitions Rise
How Non-Tech Brands Use AI: Fashion: AI is disrupting fashion across analytics, shopping, virtual fitting rooms, fit assistance, personalized styling and design.
Education and the Future of Work 📚
Class Companion Raises $4M to Tap Into the Power of Practice: a new AI platform that empowers teachers to give instant, personalized feedback to students. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from the OpenAI Startup Fund, and notable angels including renowned operator and advisor Gokul Rajaram and AI luminary Andrej Karpathy, founding Research Scientist at OpenAI and former Senior Director of AI at Tesla.
PhysicsWallah to Introduce Generative AI Platform, Alakh AI: Alakh AI isn’t just another tutoring service or an AI tutor; it’s designed to be a unique “Study Companion.” Unlike traditional tutoring platforms, Alakh AI aims to be a student’s dedicated companion for both academic and non-academic support.
More than 70% of Higher Education Administrators Have a Favorable View of AI Despite Low Adoption To-Date: almost 48% of respondents say they have yet to utilize AI in their personal or professional capacities. Main barriers to AI adoption include data security concerns, the need for AI training programs, and ethical implications.
As AI Chatbots Rise, More Educators Look to Oral Exams — With High-Tech Twist
Google announces new generative AI search capabilities for doctors: Google hopes its new search offerings will reduce the amount of time clinicians need to spend digging through additional records and databases.
Startups and Tools 🛠️
Anysphere raises $8M from OpenAI Fund to build an AI-powered IDE: tens of thousands of people are on the Cursor platform and they have a “fast-growing” paying customer base. Annual recurring revenue is already over $1M — an auspicious start for a roughly one-year-old company.
Gradient raises $10M to let companies deploy and fine-tune multiple LLMs: Gradient customers don’t have to train LLMs from scratch. They offer models aimed at particular use cases (like data reconciliation, context-gathering and paperwork processing) and industries (like finance and law).
Saronic, a defense startup building autonomous ships, raises a $55M Series A
Dubbing by Eleven Labs: transform your videos and audio recordings into 29 distinct languages while preserving your original voice.
CallZen: conversational AI for customer success - transcribe and summarize conversations, agent performance monitoring, AI coaching.
Tech 💻
GPT-4 Code Interpreter has demonstrated remarkable proficiency in solving challenging math problems: researchers introduce MathCoder models, a family of models capable of generating code-based solutions for solving challenging math problems. Impressively, the MathCoder models achieve state-of-the-art scores among open-source LLMs on the MATH (45.2%) and GSM8K (83.9%) datasets, substantially outperforming other open-source alternatives.
Mitigating stereotypical biases in text to image generative systems: the RunwayML Research team mitigates stereotypical biases by finetuning Stable Diffusion-1.5 (26) and Stable Diffusion-XL (22) on synthetic data that varies across perceived skin tones, genders, professions, and age groups. For the same prompt and seed, their diversity finetuned (DFT) models generate more inclusive results.
Regulation and Policy ⚖️
The BBC is blocking OpenAI data scraping but is open to AI-powered journalism: it joins CNN, The New York Times, Reuters, and other news organizations in preventing web crawlers from accessing their copyrighted material.
Google provides legal protections for customers using its generative AI services: Microsoft and Adobe have made similar announcements in effort to give customers more confidence in using AI tools.
Resources
The GSV BIG 10: weekly coverage corner for the top 10 stories, insights, and major plays in learning and skilling.
Class companion seems pretty cool. I’d like to check it out