11th Edition: 10/27/23

Azure revenue grows 24% QoQ due to AI usage, AI infiltrates reporting on the Israel/Palestine conflict's, and Bill Gates skeptical of ChatGPT...

As an intro before the usual AI update content, this LLM infra/ops stacks article by Insight Partners is a really good read. Helps illustrate the piecewise accrual of value sitting beneath the AI app layer.

PNW AI News:

• Microsoft announces collaboration with US Federal Government Archives to deploy AI search for individuals' military/criminal records from large digital files, freeing up staff

• Satya Nadella cites "Coming Age of AI" as Microsoft tops revenue and profit expectations. Azure revenue grew 24% to $31.8B, across Azure AI, LinkedIn commercial, Dynamics 365, and O365.

• Amazon earnings report for Q3 up 13% above already-high revenue projections, which analysts priced with skepticism due to the $4B investment into Anthropic. Both Amazon.com + AWS revenue #s exceeded expectation

• Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates believes systems like GPT have likely reached a plateau for now, according to an interview

PNW AI Fundings:

• Nectar AI (Seattle, WA) raise $2M in Pre-Seed funding from Flying Fish Ventures, BAM Ventures, CMDN, Trust Fund, Yale Index Ventures, XRC Ventures, Dash VC, and several angels

  • Social commerce platform intended to transform social engagement into a source of revenue - TFTD $2M

  • CEO: Misbah Uraizee

• Direqt (Seattle, WA) raised $4.5M in Seed funding from Dan Marino, Google exec Todd Parker, and several other strategic angels

  • Infra to train a custom AI chatbot on all of publishers' content, embedded directly in communication channels - TFTD $5.9M

  • CEO: John Duffy

• MangoBoost (Seoul, Korea/Bellevue, WA) raised $55M in Series A funding co-led by Shinhan Venture Investment and IMM Investment, joined by Premier Partners, Korea Development Bank, and KB Ventures

  • An DPU and AI infrastructure firm that specializes in developing advanced server accelerators with complete software stacks - TFTD $65.5M

  • CEO: Eriko Nurvitadhi

• RL Core Tech (Edmonton, AB) raised $780K in Pre-Seed funding from Flying Fish Partners and the University of Alberta

  • AI system intended to improve the efficiency and performance of industrial control systems - TFTD $780K

  • CEO: Martha White

Key AI Product Updates:

• MIT AI PhD candidates discover new neural network breakthrough powering an chatbot with human-like dynamic language, able to weave existing ground truth data with new context using "systematic generalization"

• With the multimodal Gemini AI model, Google wants to at least catch up with OpenAI's GPT-4. The model is expected to be released later this year

• Researchers in China have developed a system called ‘Woodpecker’ that can reportedly detect and correct hallucinations in multimodal AI models like GPT-4

• OpenAI created a new team to assess, evaluate and probe AI models to protect against what it describes as “catastrophic AI risks”

• Shutterstock just integrated AI into its platform, allowing users to modify stock photos from its library of 750M images

• NVIDIA Research introduces Eureka, an AI agent leveraging large language models to train robots in complex tasks

Key AI Business/Investment Updates:

• Qualcomm released some teasers on the Snapdragon 8, Gen 3 chip and it's AI-heavy, including features like AI-driven camera tools with ultra-fast speeds

• Alphabet's shares dipped by 6.2%. While they saw growth in Google search and YouTube, their cloud results were underwhelming. Despite this, CEO Sundar Pichai remains committed to leading in AI

• Lenovo and NVIDIA just announced partnership to provide end-to-end AI solutions that enable companies to easily build and deploy custom AI models on-prem

• AI has made the Israel-Hamas misinformation epidemic much worse. War propaganda is turbocharged with software that can pump out an endless supply of incendiary images

• CentML, a startup developing tools to decrease the cost of deploying ML models, raised $27M Series A from Gradient Ventures, TR Ventures, Nvidia and Microsoft Azure AI VP Misha Bilenko

• Zhipu (Chinese AI development company) raised $342 million from investors like China’s tech giants, including Alibaba Group and Tencent, emphasizes the adaptability of ChatGLM-6B, as it can efficiently run on consumer-grade graphic cards, showcasing its model versatility