29th Edition: 3/1/24
News outlet lawsuits, Amazon investing in the intersection of AI + robotics, Microsoft diversifying its LLM partnerships, Mistral cementing itself among the LLM leaders, and more....
This week is filled with news outlet/AI company legal drama - several other publishers are joining the lawsuit against OpenAI, with Sam Altman accusing the New York Times of “fabricated evidence.”
On the model side, Mistral is making moves with its MSFT investment + “Mistral Large” announcement. Also, I would encourage you all to take a look at the footage of Figure AI's humanoids in the BMW factory. Creepy. Enjoy!
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PNW AI News:
Microsoft invests $16.3M in Mistral, outlining their diversification strategy to partner with a "broad array" of AI companies to escape over-reliance on OpenAI to power products like Copilot
MSFT coming to terms with a multi-LLM world, as model switching costs for developers drop
Microsoft introduced Copilot for Finance, an AI chatbot to streamline financial analytics tasks in Excel/Outlook, with SAP and Dynamics 365 integrations
Amazon plans a $1B investment in startups focused on integrating AI and robotics for warehouse automation, which will be led by its CVC arm Alexa Fund
PSL partners with longstanding Bay Area firm Mayfield Fund to form an AI co-investing partnership
Mayfield and PSL Ventures will invest alongside each other in PSL Studio's AI spinouts
GoDaddy launches "Airo" tools, a set of AI products largely developed at their Kirkland engineering HQ, to unlock further growth
Instacart COO Asha Sharma left to join Microsoft in AI product leadership role
MSFT continuing to attract C-level talent for AI initiatives
Key AI Product Updates:
Nvidia, Hugging Face, and ServiceNow partner up to launch StarCoder2, a series of LLMs designed specifically for generating code
Comes in 3B, 7B, and 15B parameter varieties and can support 600+ coding languages
GitHub Copilot Enterprise is now in GA, promising to boost developer productivity with AI assistance tailored to an org's codebase, workflows, and open-source SBOM
Mistral AI introduces Mistral Large, a new LLM designed to rival GPT-4 and Claude 2
Mistral shifting from its open-source, offering Mistral Large through a usage-based API model, priced below GPT-4 Turbo
Security researchers discovered over 100 malicious AI models on HuggingFace capable of executing code on users’ machines and establishing backdoors
Swedish BNPL giant Klarna is touting the success of its OpenAI-powered customer service chatbot, which handled 2.3M conversations in the last month
They expect it to drive Klarna an additional $40M in profit in 2024
Apple announced major focus on GenAI initiatives in 2024, following the scaling back of its EV pursuit "Project Titan", including upgrades to Siri, Spotlight, and Apple Music
Researchers at Google DeepMind just unveiled Genie, an AI to generate interactive video games from just a text or image prompt, without any prior training on game mechanics
A new study form Cancer Research UK uncovered two previously unknown subtypes of prostate cancer using AI neural networks
Adobe announced Project Music GenAI Control, a prototype for easily generating and editing audio with AI, allowing creators to craft custom music tracks using text prompts
Vimeo launched Vimeo Central, an AI-powered video hub for enterprises consolidating video content, meetings, and analytics into one platform
Key AI Business/Investment Updates:
Figure AI officially announced its $675M funding round at $2.6B valuation from OpenAI Startup Fund, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, BMW iVentures, and more to build its AI humanoid robots (the round was still technically open when I reported on it last week)
Figure-01 robots already being commercially integrated into BMW's auto plants
Three new publications have followed New York Times in filing lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft, with The Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet alleging copyright infringement
OpenAI has clapped back in the NYT suit, accusing NYT of "hacking" ChatGPT and AI systems to fabricate evidence
Automattic, the parent company of Tumblr and WordPress, is reportedly nearing deal terms to provide AI training data from posts to OpenAI and Midjourney, sparking major backlash from users
Google is reportedly paying news publishers to utilize an unreleased GenAI platform through its Google News Initiative (GNI)
Glean raised a $200M Series D at $2.2B valuation from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, Sequoia, Iconiq, IVP , and more for its AI-powered work assistant
PNW AI/ML Fundings:
NLX.ai (New York City, NYC/Seattle, WA) raised $12M in Series A funding led by Cercano, joined by Thayer Ventures, Flying Fish, IAG Capital Partners, JetBlue Ventures, and Tech Square Ventures
Ai-driven no-code, multimodal conversation platform intended to build and monitor conversational applications for customer experience - TFTD $23.1M
CEO: Andrei Papancea
The Rundown AI (Vancouver, BC) raised $10M in Series A funding from Goodwater Capital and DCM Ventures
All-encompassing AI newsletter with over 500K daily readers - TFTD $12M
One of my sources for this newsletter!!
CEO: Rowan Cheung
NeuralFabric (Seattle, WA) raised $5M in Pre-Seed funding from Tribe Capital and Borderless Ventures
AI platform that promises to exponentially scale down the cost of building AI models via small language models (SLMs) - TFTD $5M
CEO: John Devadoss
Gradial (FKA Pano AI - Seattle, WA) raised $5.4M in Seed funding led by Madrona, joined by General Advance, Outsiders Fund, and Space Capital
Using generative AI to help marketing operations teams increase productivity by auto-building websites campaigns, and copywriting - TFTD $5.4M
CEO: Doug Tallmadge
Codified (Seattle, WA) raised $4M in Seed funding from Madrona, Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia, MVL, Soma Capital, and Vine Ventures
End-to-end data governance platform using generative AI to let users create data access rules by simply writing the policies in natural language - TFTD $4.8M
CEO: Yatharth Gupta