18th Edition: 12/15/23
RAGs, the proliferation of "Small Language Models", and Mistral rapidly approaching GPT-3.5 competitivity...
Theme of the week: retrieval augmented generations (RAGs) are becoming a very popular structure for personalization of model outputs from proprietary data. IBM Research does a great job explaining RAG use cases in the linked article^.
A very helpful modular framework for AI enablement in the enterprise courtesy of Sudarshan Chitre, SVP of Product at Ignition portfolio company Icertis.
PNW AI News:
Microsoft Research just released Phi-2, a surprisingly powerful 2.7B parameter ‘small language model’ (SLM) capable of running on a laptop or phone — matching or exceeding the capabilities of larger models
Microsoft announced a new agreement with the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the US, on a neutrality framework to protect future efforts by AI workers to unionize
UW Medicine and partners just secured $75M to advance "DNA typewriters" — cells that self-record biological data over time, blending AI and biotech
AI2 hires for Meta Sr. Research Scientist Ross Girshick to led development on the PRIOR (Perception Reasoning and Interaction Research) team
Jeff Bezos sat down for an extensive and wide-ranging discussion with Lex Fridman about his life, work, the future of humanity and what’s next for technology. He believes LLMs are a "discovery", not an "invention".
PNW AI Fundings:
Durable (Vancouver, BC) raised $14M in Series A funding led by Spark Capital, joined by Altman Capital, Dash Fund, South Park Commons, Infinity Ventures, and Soma Capital
AI-powered website builder and SMB platform to streamline business ownership - TFTD $20M
CEO: James Clift
Shelpful (Portland, OR) raised $3M in Seed funding from Sam Altman's Apollo Projects
Using AI and designed to nudge members as reminders for any number of things, from taking medication, to getting some exercise, to knocking out simple projects, and more - TFTD $3M
CEO: Sharon Pope
Inverted AI (Vancouver, BC) raised $4M in Seed funding led by Yaletown Partners, WUTIF Capital, Inovia Capital, Defined Capital, Blue Titan Ventures, and Dasein Capital
Uses probabilistic programming to develop an AI agent capable of automatic, safe and efficient vehicle control in a data-efficient manner - TFTD $5.6M
CEO: Frank Wood
Catio (Vancouver, BC/New York/SF) raised $4.8M in Seed funding from RRE Ventures, Hypernova Capital, Q Angels, and several angels
Cloud architecture platform enabling companies to excel with cloud native tech stacks, with the help of AI - TFTD $5.5M
CEO: Boris Bogatin
Tracer AI (Boise, ID) raised $5.6M in post-Series B funding from undisclosed investors
A brand protection data and insights SaaS (software-as-a-service) company intended to monitor high-risk verticals, identify active violators, and enforce intellectual property violations - TFTD $35.3M
CEO: Rick Farnell
Key AI Product Updates:
Mistral AI just released Mixtral, an open-source 45B parameter AI model using advanced “mixture of experts” architecture to match rivals with far lower cost
Outperforms GPT-3.5, Meta's Llama 2 on accuracy while running 6x faster, locally without dedicated GPUs
Has less safety guardrails than OpenAI or Meta's LLMs
Google’s AI-powered NotebookLM, developed using the new Gemini Pro, has transitioned from its experimental phase to fully live. It is designed to organize and summarize notes, highlighting key topics and generating questions for deeper understanding
Google’s “Project Ellmann” explores the use of Gemini to create a multimodal chatbot biographer, which aims to chronicle a user’s life story by analyzing mobile data, such as photos and search history
Xmas-themed tidbit: A new theory dubbed the "Winter Break Hypothesis" claims that ChatGPT has gotten lazier by learning that people relax more around the holidays — with statistically significant data to support it
Anthropic just announced that its Claude LLM is now accessible within Google Sheets via an extension and API access
Tesla just unveiled a dramatically revamped prototype of its humanoid Optimus robot, packing major improvements to speed, dexterity and balance that bring it closer to futuristic functions
Key AI Business/Investment Updates:
OpenAI just announced a partnership with Axel Springer to bring real-time news content to ChatGPT, with articles from brands like Politico and Business Insider set to be included in attributions to user queries
Google is under intense fire with revelation that their Gemini AI video was heavily edited to overstate the model's capabilities, misleading consumers
YouTuber "Greg Technology" successfully replicated Google's staged Gemini AI demo in real-time using OpenAI's GPT-4 Vision, showcasing voice and vision interactions
UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is scrutinizing Microsoft and OpenAI’s partnership for potential ‘relevant merger’ implications
Sports Illustrated's publisher ‘The Arena Group’ just fired CEO Ross Levinsohn, following controversy surrounding the outlet’s AI-generated content from AI authors, bios, and even full articles