15th Edition: 11/24/23

OpenAI reveal's "Q-Star" on path towards AGI, Satya reinforces MSFT/OpenAI partnership, and Amazon aims to upskill the workforce with AI...

PNW AI News:

• Satya Nadella emphasizes Microsoft will never again be blindsided by OpenAI board upon Sam Altman's return, and will likely renegotiate control provisions

• Amazon has unveiled its "AI Ready" program, pledging to deliver free AI skills training to two million people worldwide by 2025

PNW AI Fundings:

• Panorama AI (Seattle, WA) raised $5.3M in Seed funding according to an SEC filing from undisclosed investors

  •  AI platform that helps firm add a language based interface to accelerate implementation timeline - TFTD $5.3M

  • CEO: Anish Chadalavada

• Natural Intelligence Systems (Boise, ID) raised $1.1M in Series A extension funding from undisclosed investors

  • AI technology intended to deliver small data set accuracy, continuous learning, and effective processing power - TFTD $12.3M

  • CEO: Paul Dlugosch

• ForecastOS (Vancouver, BC) raised $500K in Pre-Seed funding from undisclosed investors according to an SEC filing

  • The first unified AI management (AIM) platform for investing and backtesting - TFTD $500K

  • CEO: Charlie Reese

Key AI Product Updates:

• OpenAI researchers reportedly alerted their BOD about an AI breakthrough referred to as Q-Star, potentially posing “risks to humanity.” This issue was mentioned in a letter to OpenAI’s BOD, which was also linked to the firing of CEO Sam Altman

  • Q-Star, an algorithm capable of autonomously solving elementary math problems not included in its training data, represents a significant step towards AGI

• ElevenLabs introduces an AI Speech-to-Speech Converter, allowing users to transform and control their voice. This tool offers emotional range, nuance preservation, and consistent quality, ensuring clarity and authenticity in voiceovers

• Bard, Google’s AI chatbot, enhances its functionality with a new YouTube integration, enabling users to extract specific information from videos without watching them

• xAI is reportedly launching Grok, its ChatGPT competitor next week to X Premium+ subscribers, integrated directly into X

• Inflection AI just announced Inflection-2, a massive new 175B parameter language model and claims its capabilities exceed Google and Meta's top models and “is very close” to catching GPT-4

• Stability AI announced Stable Video Diffusion, an open source app for turning images into videos (the first of its kind), still in "research preview" phase

• Anthropic unveiled Claude 2.1, which boasts major improvements in accuracy, honesty, and technical capabilities, including a 200,000 token context window for processing up to 500-page documents

Key AI Business/Investment Updates:

• OpenAI has announced the reinstatement of Sam Altman as its CEO, following a series of dramatic events, including a failed attempt by the previous board to retain control and widespread employee protests

  • Following momentary period of Sam Altman joining MSFT after his initial firing

• Nvidia has reported a record Q3 revenue of $18.2 billion, a 206% year-over-year increase, driven predominantly by its data center segment which grew 279% annually