GSV's AI News & Updates (12/04/23)

Amazon Q, Nolej $3M Seed, Carnegie Learning's LiveHint AI, Curriculum Associates Acquires SoapBox Labs, Gemini Delayed, Rebuilding Organizations for AI

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 🚀

• Interview: Sam Altman on Being Fired and Rehired by OpenAI

  • Other highlights:

    • Mira Murati (CTO) and Greg Brockman (Director) are also back with 3 researchers who left the same night.

    • Microsoft is getting a non-voting observer seat on the board.

    • No single employee or customer has left OpenAI.

    • Sam confirms Q* leak.

• How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia Is Powering the A.I. Revolution: The company’s C.E.O. bet it all on a new kind of chip. Now that Nvidia is one of the biggest companies in the world, what will he do next? Huang’s vision is to unify Nvidia’s computer-graphics research with its generative-A.I. research - image-generation A.I.s will soon be so sophisticated that they will be able to render 3D, inhabitable worlds and populate them with realistic-seeming people. At the same time, language-processing A.I.s will be able to interpret voice commands immediately. “The programming language of the future will be ‘human’”.

• AWS announces Amazon Q to Reimagine the Future of Work: A new generative AI–powered assistant that is specifically designed for work and can be tailored to your business to have conversations, solve problems, generate content, and take actions using the data and expertise found in your company’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems. 

• Stability introduces SDXL Turbo - A Real-Time Text-to-Image Generation Model: SDXL Turbo is based on a novel distillation technique called Adversarial Diffusion Distillation (ADD). Stability claims you can now “create as fast as you type.”

• Google Postpones Launch of Its GPT-4 Competitor, "Gemini," to Next Year: Gemini, first introduced at Google I/O 2023, was hailed as a groundbreaking, GPT-4 rival model equipped with remarkable multimodal capabilities. Google will delay the launch due to issues handling non-English prompts.

• The ‘Self-operating’ Computer Emerges: Advanced AI models could learn to take over all computer interactions just through conversational commands.

• Two Titans on the Future of AI (with Reid Hoffman & Vinod Khosla)

Education and the Future of Work 📚

• Nolej raises a $3M Seed: The startup launched NolejAI in July and is already being used by 50k teachers, via partnerships with schools and local governments in both France and the US. NolejAI lets teachers automatically create learning resources (like worksheets and quizzes) based on material like YouTube videos or news articles.

• Carnegie Learning Announces LiveHint AI: With its depth of research and breadth of input, LiveHint AI can help the student brain work at its strategic and conceptual peak, encouraging each student to not only get the right answer, but also to understand why that answer is right.

  

• Curriculum Associates Expands Student-Focused AI Capabilities with Purchase of SoapBox Labs: The acquisition will accelerate the use of voice AI in the classrooms of tomorrow, improving teaching and learning outcomes for Grades K–12 literacy, mathematics, and more. 

• How Do Teachers Feel About Their Jobs & the Impact of AI? New Survey Has Answers

• AI in EdTech: How it Breaks in Subtle Ways: Feldstein illustrates the critical need for prompt engineering and human intervention in AI-assisted educational tools.

• Reshaping the Tree: Rebuilding Organizations for AI: Just as the railroad chart was reinvented into the modern organizational structure, AI is pushing us to rethink and restructure our processes and workflows. Mollick outlines how Wharton Interactive leverages AI for tasks ranging from customer support to software development.

Startups and Tools 🛠️

• Together raises $102.5M to grow its cloud for training generative AI: Together aims to create open source models and services that help organizations incorporate AI into their applications. They have built a cloud platform for running, training and fine-tuning models that the co-founders claim offers scalable compute at lower prices than the dominant vendors (e.g., Google Cloud, AWS, Azure).

• Pika Raises $55M Series A to Redesign Video Making and Editing: The first version of Pika launched in beta on Discord in late April of 2023 and today has more than 500K users generating millions of videos each week. Top Pika users on Discord spend up to 10 hours a day creating videos with Pika. Pika was co-founded by Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng, both former PhD students in Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab.

  

• Solve Intelligence raises $3M Seed: Solve Intelligence is building an IP generation platform for legal professionals, starting with using AI to write patents.

• Tech Spark AI raises $1.4 million to create ChatGPT alternative: Spark Plug has partnered with educational institutions in the U.S. and Canada, with a particular focus on schools within underserved Black and brown communities. The product’s first iteration allows users to translate classic literature text into modern language, with Gen Z as its target audience. More specifically, the text translation is from standard text to African American Vernacular English (AAVE).

• These ex-Apple employees are bringing AI to the desktop

• Alfred: GPT-powered chatbot trained on your data to answer customer questions instantly and 24/7.

• PlAIwright: an AI-powered dialogue generation tool for interactive narratives.

• DearAI: use the power of AI to generate intimate, thoughtful, and beautiful letters.

Tech 💻 

• Meta AI unveils “Seamless” translator: a new suite of AI models called Seamless Communication that aims to enable more natural communication across languages in real time. SeamlessExpressive focuses on preserving the vocal style and emotional nuances of the speaker’s voice when translating between languages (vs monotone, robotic text-to-speech systems).

• ElevenLabs Grants: ElevenLabs will award 4000 small teams access to their voice platform for free for 3 months, to test and develop voice-enabled products. Established in 2022 by a former Google machine learning engineer and an ex-Palantir deployment strategist, ElevenLabs specializes in AI voice technology.

• $10M AI Mathematical Olympiad Prize: to expedite the creation of AI models capable of mathematical reasoning and problem-solving at a level comparable to high performing humans.

• JungleGym: an open source playground for Building Autonomous Web Agents.

Regulation and Policy ⚖️

• Is Argentina the First A.I. Election?: The two men jostling to be the country’s next president are using AI to create images and videos to promote themselves and attack each other.

• Sarah Silverman Hits Stumbling Block in AI Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Against Meta: The Judge refuted the claim that Meta's AI system is an infringing derivative work, stating that the AI models, like LLaMA, aren't adaptations of the plaintiffs’ books. The outcomes of these cases may set a precedent for how AI companies use copyrighted material for training purposes.

Other

• GPT-4’s potential in shaping the future of radiology

• Hugging Face CEO on What Comes After Transformers

• Bard’s Jack Krawczyk on the birth of Google’s AI chatbot & the creative potential ahead

Resources

• Subscribe to GSV’s N2K Daily Newsletter

• The GSV BIG 10: weekly coverage corner for the top 10 stories, insights, and major plays in learning and skilling.