10th Edition: 10/20/23

Amazon unveils AI robotic system to supercharge delivery, Geekwire Summit goes "AI", and Nvidia partners up with iPhone manufacturers...

PNW AI News:

• Amazon unveiled new AI-enabled robotic system Sequoia Robotics, set to supercharge delivery by 25% without reduction of human workforce

• Satya Nadella details Microsoft's ‘new era of AI’ in annual shareholders letter, citing NLP and sequential reasoning applied to O365 as the major new advantage in workplace productivity. Read full letter here

• AI-Themed GeekWire Summit polls opinion of tech public on AI adoption and future

PNW AI Fundings:

• Warmly (Coeur D'Alene, ID/Berlin, Germany) raised $11M in Series A funding led by Felicis, joined by Zoom Ventures, NFX, F-Prime Capital, Maven Ventures, and more

  • A digital meetings platform designed to provide insights on people one meets with via Zoom - TFTD $15.7M

  • CEO: Max Greenwald

• KindWorks.ai (Vancouver, BC) raised $1.5M in Pre-Seed funding from a consortium of Angels

  • Improve sense of purpose, impact, well-being, connection, collaboration, job satisfaction - TFTD $1.5M

  • CEO: Daniel Lozano

Key AI Product Updates:

• Meta's new AI system can generate images from brain data in milliseconds , decoding visual representations in the brain, potentially paving the way for non-invasive brain-computer interfaces

• IBM just developed a new brain-inspired AI processing chip called NorthPole, which can perform tasks like image recognition much faster while using far less power

• NVIDIA & Masterpiece Studio Launch New Text-to-3D AI Playground designed to simplify 3D art creation

• OpenAI has reportedly stopped the development of a new AI model called Arrakis, aiming for GPT4 performance with ~2.5x less compute, after it failed to achieve expected efficiency gains

• YouTube gets new AI-powered ads that let brands target special cultural moments 

• OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 ‘system prompt’ enforces rules for fair and copyright-compliant image generation, including translation of non-English input and a limit of four images at a tim

  • Response to Anthropic being sued by UMG?

• Viral AI creator Ghostwriter proposed a clearinghouse system for artists to license their voices to AI as a solution amid fears over synthetic media

Key AI Business/Investment Updates:

• Nvidia and iPhone maker Foxconn to build 'AI Factories' leveraging Nvidia chips to power various applications, including autonomous vehicles and LLMs

  • $NVDA stock excedes $1T market cap

• Infosys and Google Cloud expand alliance to help enterprises transform into AI-first organizations ,training 20K practitioners on Google Cloud’s generative AI technologies/integration suite

• AI company Anthropic sued for copyright infringement by Universal Music Group , as their model “Claude” scraped copyrighted song lyrics without permission for its content creation

• OpenAI in talks to sell employee shares at $86 billion valuation 

• Chinese tech giant Baidu just revealed its latest AI model Ernie 4.0, making claim that it matches the capabilities of leading models like GPT-4

• The U.S. is ramping up its restrictions on chip exports to China by closing various loopholes, focusing heavily on AI chips, including stringent Nvidia export blocks on chips

• Tata Consultancy, Asia’s largest outsourcing firm, is leveraging its partnership with Microsoft to develop AI-based software profit margins and drive growth