GSV's AI News & Updates (11/27/23)
OpenAI Saga Explained, NVIDIA Triples Revenue, Anthropic's Claude 2.1, Retorio's €9M Series A, Amazon's "AI Ready" Skills Training, Bard Understands YouTube
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 attendees.
General 🚀
11/17 Friday: OpenAI’s board fired CEO Sam Altman. Cofounder Greg Brockman also quits.
11/19 Sunday: Employees revolt and demand Sam and Greg be brought back.
11/20 Monday: OpenAI hires a new interim CEO, Emmett Shear. Altman and Brockman announce joining Microsoft to head up a newly created AI division.
11/20 Monday night: 743 of OpenAI's 778 employees sign petition and threatened to abandon the company and join Microsoft unless the board stepped down and reinstated Sam Altman as CEO. Microsoft confirms that it would welcome the entire OpenAI workforce. For a brief period, it seemed as if OpenAI might be reduced to a mere 30 employees, with Microsoft absorbing the remaining 95%.
11/21 Tuesday: OpenAI’s board announces that an agreement had been reached, where Sam Altman returns as CEO, the board is updated (Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo), and things mostly return to normal.
OpenAI Tender to Continue After Altman Returns: the employee stock sale led by Thrive Capital values AI OpenAI at $86B and is expected to close in December.
Opinions:
Nvidia's revenue triples as AI chip boom continues: Nvidia reported on Tuesday that its revenue soared 206% in the October quarter, to $18.1B from $5.9B a year earlier. Nvidia projected that revenue would soar to $20B in the January quarter, which would be an increase of 230% over the year-earlier number of $6.05B.
Inflection releases new LLM Inflection-2: Inflection-2 was trained on H100 GPUs (instead of A100s) and is claimed to be the world’s second-best LLM after GPT-4 based on benchmarks. Inflection-2 will soon power its consumer product PI (short for personal intelligence).
Anthropic announces Claude 2.1: the latest version of its AI assistant, with several major upgrades including a 200,000 token context window, reductions in rates of hallucination, and new tool use capabilities. The 200k context window translates to roughly 150k words, or 500+ pages of material. Claude 2.1 has also made significant gains in honesty, with a 2x decrease in false statements compared to the previous Claude 2.0 model.
Google Delays Launch of GPT-4 Rival Gemini: billed as Google’s flagship AI, the company has previously claimed that Gemini has 5x greater computational power than GPT-4.
Stability releases Stable Video Diffusion: their first foundation model for generative video based on the image model Stable Diffusion.
Education and the Future of Work 📚
Retorio raises a €9M Series A to expand their personalized AI coaching platform: At the heart of Retorio lies the proprietary Behavioral Intelligence, a cutting-edge technology that uses video analysis to identify and train successful behaviors of sales, service and leadership teams.
Amazon aims to provide free AI skills training to 2 million people by 2025 with its new ‘AI Ready’ commitment: new initiatives include (1) eight new and free AI and generative AI courses, (2) AWS Generative AI Scholarship, providing more than 50,000 high school and university students globally with access to a new generative AI course on Udacity, and (3) a new collaboration with Code.org designed to help students learn about generative AI.
Microsoft’s Generative AI for Beginners Course: the fundamentals of building Generative AI applications. Each lesson covers a key aspect of Generative AI principles and application development.
Google’s Bard AI chatbot can now answer questions about YouTube videos: Bard can now understand YouTube videos, summarize them or reference certain parts of a video for its answers. “If you’re looking for videos on how to make olive oil cake, you can now also ask how many eggs the recipe in the first video requires.”
This School Leader Believes AI Could Transform Education for Students With Dyslexia
Students’ Right to Write: in an age of generative AI, Jonathan Alexander explains why it is important to introduce students to as many forms of writing as possible.
Startups and Tools 🛠️
Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain implant startup, quietly raises an additional $43M: founded in 2016, Neuralink has devised a sewing machine-like device capable of implanting ultra-thin threads inside the brain. The threads attach to a custom-designed chip containing electrodes that can read information from groups of neurons (aka brain waves).
Off/Script launches an app to create and buy AI-designed fashion: Off/Script is a new community-powered product creation platform that allows anyone to conceptualize, share, and monetize product mock-ups. Off/Script works with an ecosystem of over 1,000 manufacturers to bring the concepts to life. Creators take home 20% of the sales, along with a $500 upfront fee.
Definite: the AI data analyst that never sleeps.
Dubecos: AI dubbing - your videos, now multilingual in hours.
Eleven Labs AI Speech to Speech Converter: transform your voice into another character and control its emotion and delivery.
Tech 💻
Cohere Launches Comprehensive Fine-Tuning Suite: new fine-tuning capabilities include Chat fine-tuning, Rerank fine-tuning and Multi-label classification fine-tuning.
The Q* hypothesis: Tree-of-thoughts reasoning, process reward models, and supercharging synthetic data.
Regulation and Policy ⚖️
Meta Splits Up Its Responsible AI Team: most employees on the Responsible AI team will move to Meta’s generative AI team.
Contrary to reports, OpenAI probably isn’t building humanity-threatening AI
Other
YC AI Startup Founders Debate the Creation of Artificial General Intelligence
Even GPT4V didn’t think OpenAI’s corporate structure was a good idea
OpenAI drama, except it's the Game of Thrones cast
Resources
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