GSV's AI News & Updates (10/30/23)
Canva's Classroom Magic, Grammarly's Personalized Profiles, Google Backs Anthropic, 1M+ Paying GitHub Users, Perplexity raises $50M, Sizzle AI, Pegasus-1
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 showcase of the world's most important AI in EDU companies. Tickets are complimentary for Mavericks.
General 🚀
AI’s proxy war heats up as Google backs Anthropic with $2B: The funding deal reportedly involves $500M now and up to $1.5B later. Anthropic’s internal documents suggested that they would need to spend a billion by the end of 2024 to build their next-generation model, “Claude-Next.”
OpenAI’s Corporate Sales Come Under Pressure as AI Customers Eye Cheaper Options: Some clients are now purchasing OpenAI's software via Microsoft to combine it with other product offerings. Others are discovering that open-source models are more cost-effective for fundamental tasks.
Microsoft has over a million paying Github Copilot users: the company's Bing search engine, which has been integrated with OpenAI's ChatGPT, has resulted in users engaging in "more than 1.9B chats" so far.
Google’s Secret AI tool and Gemini Leaked: the first ever look at the multimodal Gemini and an extra, secret tool that Google has hidden from everyone, leaked as well.
OpenAI kills ‘Chat with PDF’ apps: We had a wave of products better suited as features rather than stand-alone companies. Wrappers are being squeezed by OpenAI on one side and incumbents on the other.
Google Search launches built-in tools for checking images and sources online: Google is tackling the issue of misinformation by providing users with additional details to assess what they encounter. This involves displaying an image's background, metadata, and descriptions from others.
OpenAI vs. Anthropic vs. Cohere: OpenAI’s GPT-4 is the best LLM for reasoning and complex tasks, but it’s expensive and slow—opening the door for companies like Anthropic (Claude) and Cohere (Command) to target developers with cheaper and faster models.
Education and the Future of Work 📚
Canva’s biggest education launch, Classroom Magic: a suite of AI tools for the classroom. The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence is unlocking endless opportunities for teachers and students to supercharge their creativity, save time on mundane work, and discover new ways of thinking in an increasingly visual world.
Reformat your teaching materials, class projects, and assignments in an instant - transform the content of presentations into summarized documents, or turn a whiteboard of ideas into a fully-fledged presentation.
Adapt content to different reading levels to further individualize the learning process.
Translate your teaching materials into 100+ languages with just one click
A range of strict safety measures to provide students and teachers with peace of mind when using AI in the classroom.
Grammarly’s new generative AI feature learns your style — and applies it to any text: “Because Grammarly works across apps and tools, we can understand a user’s unique style and preferences in the places they communicate to generate a personalized profile”.
AI might disrupt math and computer science classes – in a good way: “Math has always been evolving as technology evolves,” said Price. A hundred years ago, people were using slide rules and doing all of their multiplication with logarithmic tables. Then, along came calculators. “ChatGPT, just like the calculator and just like the slide rule and all the technology before, just helps us get at that core, real part of math”.
49% of teachers not prepared for AI impact, need urgent support
How AI can teach kids to write – not just cheat: Chat GPT’s ‘voiceless’ writing can help students find their writer’s ‘voice,’ and allow teachers to quickly analyze trends in student writing.
The Near-term Impact of Generative AI on Education, in One Sentence
Startups and Tools 🛠️
Perplexity has raised $50M at a $500M valuation: According to recent reports, Perplexity has been generating annual recurring revenue of $3 million as of this month.
Reality Defender raises $15M to detect text, video and image deepfakes: “Some of the greatest risks from AI-generated media stems from use and abuse of deepfaked materials on social media,” Colman said. “These platforms have no incentive to scan deepfakes because there’s no legislation requiring them to do so”
Luzia lands $10M in funding to expand its WhatsApp-based chatbot: the startup said more than 17 million users have interacted with Luzia to date, with 8 million of them active on a monthly basis. Adina Tecklu, a partner at Khosla Ventures, said that Luzia is positioned well to address the personal assistant market.
Intently: turn LinkedIn actions into sales opportunities, find look-alike leads for your pipeline, and track key accounts by using behavioral data.
Genie.ai: your AI Legal Assistant - understand, customize & negotiate any legal document like a pro with AI legal assistance.
Sync: an API for realtime lip-sync, sync any video to any audio in any language — no training required.
Infr: an open source database for memories.
Tech 💻
Stephen Wolfram: How to Think Computationally about AI, the Universe and Everything: Human language. Mathematics. Logic. These are all ways to formalize the world. And in our century there’s a new and yet more powerful one: computation.
Twelve Labs introduces Video-To-Text and Pegasus-1 (80B): Twelve Labs has collected over 300M diverse, carefully-curated video-text pairs, making it one of the largest video-text corpora there is for video-language foundation model training.
Regulation and Policy ⚖️
OpenAI forms new team to assess ‘catastrophic risks’ of AI: OpenAI says the preparedness team will “track, evaluate, forecast, and protect” against potentially major issues caused by AI, including nuclear threats.
Yann LeCun on Altman (OpenAI), Hassabis (Deepmind) and Amodei (Anthropic)’s Corporate Lobbying
Other
New Google Maps updates: Immersive View for routes and other AI features: Lens in Maps uses AI and augmented reality to help you quickly acclimate yourself — whether you’re navigating a new city or discovering local hidden gems.
What AI means for your product strategy - Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom)
Resources
The GSV BIG 10: weekly coverage corner for the top 10 stories, insights, and major plays in learning and skilling.
OpenAI's move of combining DALL-E, Advanced Data Analysis, and Browse into the same ChatGPT conversation is a game changer. Not only GPT-wrappers, but also low-code and no-code tools are in danger.