- The AI Agenda is a new newsletter from The Information that focuses on the fast-paced world of artificial intelligence.
- The newsletter aims to provide daily insights on how AI is transforming various industries and the challenges it poses for regulators and content publishers.
- It will feature analysis from top researchers, founders, and executives, as well as provide scoops on deals and funding of key AI startups.
- The newsletter will cover advancements in AI technology such as ChatGPT and AI-generated video, and explore their impact on society.
- The goal is to provide readers with a clear understanding of the latest developments in AI and what to expect in the future.
- Foundry Technologies is in talks to raise money at a valuation of $350 million, a significant increase from its previous valuation of $50 million.
- The increase in valuation highlights the trend of hot companies in the AI sector raising money at rapidly escalating valuations.
- Foundry is one of many AI startups that have experienced a meteoric rise in valuation this year.
- The company plans to rent servers to companies for running AI software.
- The risky pandemic-era fundraising trend of rapidly increasing valuations in short periods of time has returned.
The main topic is the emergence of AI in 2022, particularly in the areas of image and text generation. The key points are:
1. AI models like DALL-E, MidJourney, and Stable Diffusion have revolutionized image generation.
2. ChatGPT has made significant breakthroughs in text generation.
3. The history of previous tech epochs shows that disruptive innovations often come from new entrants in the market.
4. Existing companies like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are well-positioned to capitalize on the AI epoch.
5. Each company has its own approach to AI, with Apple focusing on local deployment, Amazon on cloud services, Meta on personalized content, Google on search, and Microsoft on productivity apps.
- The rise of AI that can understand or mimic language has disrupted the power balance in enterprise software.
- Four new executives have emerged among the top 10, while last year's top executive, Adam Selipsky of Amazon Web Services, has been surpassed by a competitor due to AWS's slow adoption of large-language models.
- The leaders of Snowflake and Databricks, two database software giants, are now ranked closely together, indicating changes in the industry.
- The incorporation of AI software by customers has led to a new cohort of company operators and investors gaining influence in the market.
Main topic: DynamoFL raises $15.1 million in funding to expand its software offerings for developing private and compliant large language models (LLMs) in enterprises.
Key points:
1. DynamoFL offers software to bring LLMs to enterprises and fine-tune them on sensitive data.
2. The funding will be used to expand DynamoFL's product offerings and grow its team of privacy researchers.
3. DynamoFL's solutions focus on addressing data security vulnerabilities in AI models and helping enterprises meet regulatory requirements for LLM data security.
Hint on Elon Musk: There is no mention of Elon Musk in the given text.
Milo, an AI assistant developed by founder Avni Patel Thompson, helps busy parents manage their children's schedules by sending text messages and scanning documents to predict and perform actions such as adding reminders to digital calendars or sending personalized text reminders. The startup recently received funding from OpenAI and was named one of the most promising startups of 2023 by VCs.
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) by American public companies is on the rise, with over 1,000 companies mentioning the technology in their quarterly reports this summer; however, while there is a lot of hype surrounding AI, there are also signs that the boom may be slowing, with the number of people using generative AI tools beginning to fall, and venture capitalists warning entrepreneurs about the complexities and expenses involved in building a profitable AI start-up.
Artificial intelligence (AI) stocks have cooled off since July, but there are three AI stocks worth buying right now: Alphabet, CrowdStrike, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. Alphabet is a dominant player in search, advertising, and cloud computing with strong growth potential, while CrowdStrike offers AI-first security solutions and is transitioning into profitability. Meanwhile, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing is a leading chip manufacturer with long-term potential and strong consumer demand.
Hugging Face, an AI startup, has raised $235 million in a Series D funding round, with participation from tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Nvidia, and IBM, and now has a valuation of $4.5 billion, signaling the growing demand for AI platforms and tools.
Paris-based startup Poolside AI has raised $126 million in a seed round led by French billionaire Xavier Niel and US VC Felicis, to develop an AI model that can write software code and eventually enable users to create applications without coding experience, with the company also opening a French subsidiary and relocating its HQ to Paris in a boost to the country's AI ambitions.
A new startup called Ideogram has launched with $16.5 million in funding and aims to differentiate itself from other AI image generators by offering reliable text generation within the image, such as lettering on signs and company logos.
The most promising AI startups in 2023, according to top venture capitalists, include Adept, AlphaSense, Captions, CentML, Character.AI, Durable, Entos, Foundry, GPTZero, Hugging Face, LangChain, Leena AI, LlamaIndex, Luma AI, Lumachain, Magic, Mezli, Mindee, Next Insurance, Orby AI, Pinecone, Poly, Predibase, Replicant, Replicate, Run:ai, SaaS Labs, Secureframe, Treat, Twelve Labs.
ControlRooms.ai, an AI-powered analytics startup, has raised $10 million in a Series A round to automate the industrial troubleshooting process and minimize downtime for heavy industries like chemical and energy plants. The platform predicts manufacturing plant behavior and detects potential problems before they are noticed by engineers or operators.
Context.ai, a company that helps businesses understand how well large language models (LLMs) are performing, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding to develop its service that measures user interactions with LLMs.
Newspaper chain Gannett has suspended the use of an artificial intelligence tool for writing high school sports dispatches after it generated several flawed articles. The AI service, called LedeAI, produced reports that were mocked on social media for their repetitive language, lack of detail, and odd phrasing. Gannett has paused its use of the tool across all the local markets that had been using it and stated that it continues to evaluate vendors to ensure the highest journalistic standards. This incident follows other news outlets pausing the use of AI in reporting due to errors and concerns about ethical implications.
AI21 Labs, a text-generating AI startup, has raised $155 million in a Series C funding round, bringing its total raised to $283 million and valuing the company at $1.4 billion, with plans to expand its workforce and accelerate its R&D efforts.
AI has garnered immense investment from venture capitalists, with over $40 billion poured into AI startups in the first half of 2023, raising concerns about who will benefit financially from its potential impact.
X's updated privacy policy reveals that it will collect biometric data, job and education history, and use publicly available information to train its machine learning and AI models, potentially for Elon Musk's other company, xAI, which aims to use public tweets for training its AI models.
Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings is set to launch its artificial intelligence (AI) foundation model, Hunyuan, at its Global Digital Ecosystem Summit, as it competes with other Chinese companies in the market for large language models (LLMs) following Beijing's approval of generative AI services.
Imbue, a woman-led AI research startup, has raised $200 million in a Series B funding round led by the Astera Institute, valuing the company at over $1 billion, but it could be years before it reveals a product. Imbue's focus is on developing AI "agents" that can simulate human decision-making to complete complex tasks, and it has access to 10,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs to build these agents. The startup is still in the early stages and has not yet released a demo of its agents.
Despite the hype around AI-focused companies, many venture-backed startups in the AI space have experienced financial struggles and failed to maintain high valuations, including examples like Babylon Health, BuzzFeed, Metromile, AppHarvest, Embark Technology, and Berkshire Grey. These cases highlight that an AI focus alone does not guarantee success in the market.
The global AI market is projected to reach $2 trillion by 2030, with companies like Amazon and Meta Platforms making significant investments in AI to drive growth and diversify their offerings.
Cathie Wood's Ark Invest predicts that AI software revenue will reach $14 trillion by 2030, and believes that Salesforce and The Trade Desk are attractive investments due to their potential in the AI market and their current valuations.
The United States and China lead in AI investment, with the U.S. having invested nearly $250 billion in 4,643 AI startups since 2013, according to a report.
Ernst & Young has invested $1.4 billion in AI technologies and launched a new AI-powered platform, EY.ai, to help organizations adopt AI and unlock economic value responsibly.
Full-stack generative AI platform, Writer, has secured $100 million in a Series B funding round led by ICONIQ Growth, with participation from WndrCo, Balderton Capital, and Insight Partners, as well as Writer customers Accenture and Vanguard; the funding will be used to invest in industry-specific language models and add capabilities to its models, enabling organizations to accelerate growth, increase productivity, and ensure governance.
Israel is investing NIS 30 million ($8 million) to develop artificial intelligence applications in spoken Hebrew and Arabic, aiming to reduce the existing gaps in language processing and advance innovation in the country.
