19th Edition 12/22/23

Google's Gemini woes, MSFT's Copilot can now create music, and AI hits Washington State legislation...

PNW AI News:

• Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson proposes AI task force to assess and report on risks

• Madrona-backed startup Fixie creates a viral AI Santa, using its tech to facilitate believable voice calls for the naughty and nice

• Bill Gates laid out an optimistic vision for AI's growing impact in 2024, sharing his thoughts in a new blog with predictions on how the tech will impact healthcare, education, work, and the broader innovation pipeline

• Wizards of the Coast doubles down on anti-generative AI stance, says artists' originalities are ‘what makes D&D great’

• Microsoft’s AI Copilot, integrated with the GenAI music app Suno, now boasts a music creation feature

PNW AI Fundings:

• Potato (Seattle, WA) raised $175K in Pre-Seed funding according to an SEC filing from undisclosed investors

  • A new AI infrastructure project to simplify model pipelines - TFTD $175K

  • CEO: Ryan Kosai

• 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

• CueZen (Seattle, WA) raised $3.5M in Seed funding from TCL North America

  • Generative AI engine designed to offer lifestyle data that drives behavior change for better health outcomes through hyper-personalized nudges - TFTD $3.5M

  • CEO: Ankur Teredesai

Key AI Product Updates:

• RunwayML, a video AI startup has introduced two new innovative features to its video generator platform: “Text-to-Speech" for adding synthetic voices (via Eleven Labs partnership) and "Ratio" for effortlessly converting videos into various size and file formats

• OpenAI released a prompt guide to optimize ChatGPT and LLM performance, offering six key strategies: providing clear instructions, supplying reference text, breaking down complex tasks, allowing models time to 'think,' utilizing external tools, and conducting targeted evaluations

• Newly published Apple research demonstrates transformative techniques to run advanced AI on iPhones, from assistants to 3D avatars — potentially ushering powerful new capabilities on mobile devices using DRAM computing

• Google publishes research on VideoPoet, a sophisticated LLM designed for generating videos like out-paining, video-to-audio conversion, stylization, and more

• Researchers from Northwestern University, Boston College, and MIT have innovated a brain-like synaptic transistor that performs associative learning at room temperature

• Fresh third-party testing just found that Google's new (and polarizing) Gemini Pro LLM lags slightly behind free OpenAI models like GPT-3.5 on most benchmarks

Key AI Business/Investment Updates:

• Leaked documents reveal TikTok parent ByteDance secretly relied on OpenAI's API to develop its Chinese ChatGPT competitor called ‘Project Seed’ - OpenAI closed their accounts immediately

• Anthropic is updating its terms of service to offer expanded copyright protection for its customers, allowing users to retain ownership of content generated via Anthropic's service

• AI startup Anthropic is reportedly in talks to raise an additional $750M in a Series E funding round led by Menlo Ventures

• Stability AI, known for its Stable Diffusion text-to-image model, introduces a paid membership for commercial use of its AI models

• IBM plans to acquire Software AG’s AI and cloud assets for $2.3B to enhance its AI and hybrid cloud capabilities. This acquisition includes "StreamSets" and "webMethods" platforms, and is expected to complete in 2024

• Airbnb is deploying an internal AI system to identify and block high-risk New Year's Eve bookings that could lead to parties — analyzing factors like trip duration and last-minute reservations to avoid destructive NYE rentals