GSV's AI News & Updates (12/22/23)
Kyron $14.6M Series A, Anthropic's $750M Fundraise, Harvey $80M Series B, AI Productivity Miracle, OpenAI Partners with Axel Springer, AI & Elections
AIR (AI Revolution) Show is the world’s leading event at the frontier of AI in EDU for educators, administrators, founders, investors, professionals, and AI explorers. Learn new skills and tools to make your career soar. Join us April 13-15 at the San Diego Convention Center for 3 days of AI exhibitions, keynotes, workshops, demos and meet-ups. Register for free now, capacity is limited.
General 🚀
Anthropic in Talks to Raise $750M: in a venture round led by Menlo Ventures that values the 2 year old AI startup at $15B not including the investment, more than 3x its valuation this spring.
ByteDance is secretly using OpenAI’s tech to build a competitor: internal ByteDance documents confirm that the OpenAI API has been relied on to develop its foundational LLM, codenamed Project Seed, during nearly every phase of development, including for training and evaluating the model.
Meta's Ray-Ban Glasses Added AI That Can See What You're Seeing: along with adding Bing-powered search into Ray-Bans as part of a new update, which ups the power of the glasses' already-available voice-enabled capabilities, Meta's glasses are gaining new abilities fast.
Runway introduces Generative World Models: a world model is an AI system that builds an internal representation of an environment, and uses it to simulate future events within that environment. The aim of general world models will be to represent and simulate a wide range of situations and interactions, like those encountered in the real world.
Ola Founder’s AI Startup Launches Indian LLM: Krutrim’s AI model can generate text in 10 Indian languages.
An AI Haunted World: “The AI genie is out of the bottle. Some of the choice about whether we want this world where AI is ubiquitous has already been made by the release of open source LLMs. LLMs that can observe, and, act, on the world around them are going to become common and will be more integrated into our work and life. We are going to live in an AI haunted world.”
OpenAI partners with major news publisher Axel Springer: the first-of-its-kind deal will deliver summaries of Axel Springer content (Politico, Business Insider, etc) in response to ChatGPT queries. At least half of the top 100 news sites are currently blocking OpenAI’s web crawler.
How Mistral AI, an OpenAI competitor, rocketed to $2Bn in <12 months
The AI trust crisis: People both overestimate and underestimate what companies are doing with our data, and what’s possible. This isn’t helped by the fact that AI technology means the scope of what’s possible is changing at a rate that’s hard to appreciate even if you’re deeply aware of the space. The future? Local models that run on their own devices vs models hosted in the cloud.
Marketplaces in the Age of AI: generative AI promises to revolutionize marketplaces again. It will not only transform how products and services are sold — but also how they are made.
Education and the Future of Work 📚
Kyron Learning raises $14.6M to expand its conversational AI technology: the interactive video platform allows students to interact with lessons by responding to questions via text or voice. Kyron’s conversational AI comprehends student answers and selects the relevant, pre-recorded responses provided by teachers. Kyron is also working on integrating generative AI to trigger AI-powered responses if a student needs further assistance.
Essential AI raises $56.5M Series A to build the enterprise brain: To reinvent how enterprises work, Essential AI is developing full-stack AI products that quickly learn to increase productivity by automating time-consuming and monotonous workflows.
Riiid Inc announces acquisition of Qualson: the acquisition combines Riiid's advanced AI assessment technology with Qualson's premium English language learning content.
AI Integration in University Curricula: A New Era in Education: how can universities achieve AI integration in university curricula to harness AI’s transformative power across all disciplines, rather than merely adding isolated AI courses?
After Transforming SNHU With Online Offerings, a Paul LeBlanc Steps Down to Tackle AI: what would a top-to-bottom redesign of education look like if we weren't trying to fit it into the existing models? And what we're really working on is what would a human-centered, a relationally centered version of education look like if it could be empowered by and supported by AI?
How could generative AI change early-years education?: staff shortages, creative burnout and administrative overload are the biggest issues facing the early-years education system today. AI has the potential to help.
The Reality of AI: Vanishing White Collar Jobs: Microsoft has entered into an agreement with the AFL-CIO (represents about 12.5M workers) regarding AI and the future of the workforce. AI may potentially pose a significant threat to many white-collar jobs, possibly leading to reduced opportunities for growth and job compression in fields like audio/video editing, market research, legal assistance, and customer support.
Bridgewater Assesses the Implications of an AI Productivity Miracle: what happens when cognitive tasks can be done at zero marginal cost?
An Anticipated Wave of AI Specialist Jobs Has Yet to Arrive: the marketing industry has been obsessed with AI this year. But jobs dedicated to this supposedly revolutionary technology aren’t keeping pace with the attention.
Startups and Tools 🛠️
Harvey, a legal generative AI startup, raises $80M Series B: co-led by Elad Gil and Kleiner Perkins with participation from OpenAI Startup Fund and Sequoia. The $80 million investment brings Harvey’s total funding to over $100 million and values Harvey at $715 million.
How to Build the Right Team for Generative AI: (1) you probably don’t need ML engineers, (2) prompt Engineering is a key skill set, (3) Product Managers and domain experts are increasingly important, (4) generalist full-stack engineers can outperform AI specialists.
Turn your ideas into songs with Suno on Microsoft Copilot: a new plug-in for the AI music creation tool Suno can generate custom songs in mere seconds.
Daydream: automate programmatic SEO from end-to-end - identifies search patterns, creates content at scale, and automatically improves that content.
Dewstack: effortlessly craft and manage AI-powered docs that elevate your content and empower your users with instant answers.
Findly: talk to Google Analytics for the reports you want, instead of manual exploration.
Tech 💻
Research papers on three big LLM questions: (1) reducing hallucinations, (2) enhancing reasoning capabilities of smaller models, and (3) understanding and simplifying the transformer architecture (how the models work).
AI Models in Software UI: approaches to where and how AI models are surfaced in software applications.
AI Agents in the Cloud (CrewAI): Soon after LLMs took the world by storm, developers started creating more focused, goal-oriented LLM apps modeled after human reasoning and problem-solving, which became known as AI agents. CrewAI is a library specifically designed to build and orchestrate groups of AI agents.
Regulation and Policy ⚖️
OpenAI launches ‘Preparedness team’ for AI safety, gives board final say: it said these teams providing almost a checks-and-balances-type system will help protect against “catastrophic risks” that could be posed by increasingly powerful models.
UK Supreme Court rules AI is not an inventor: the ruling follows a similar decision denying patent registrations naming AI as creators.
Anthropic expands legal protections and improvements to their API: Anthropic will defend customers from any copyright infringement claim made against them for their authorized use of Anthropic’s services or their outputs.
Meet Ashley, the world's first AI-powered political campaign caller: she is the first political phone banker powered by generative AI. She is capable of having an infinite number of customized one-on-one conversations at the same time. To some, it is an exciting new tool for conducting high-quality conversations on a large scale. Others worry this will worsen disinformation in the polarized landscape of American politics already battling "deepfakes," realistic but fabricated videos and images created using AI algorithms.
Other
Microsoft explores next-generation nuclear reactors for powering its data centers and AI projects
Pakistan’s former prime minister is using an AI voice clone to campaign from prison
Resources
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