34th Edition: 4/5/24
A slurry of local LLMs run on-device, CHIPS Act funding comes to WA, OpenAI's near-instantaneous voice cloning, $100B investment into a MSFT/OpenAI supercomputer, quantum breakthroughs, and more...
This week's AI update is a dense one, but perhaps the most important edition since I began writing these… A joint Quantinuum/MSFT venture made perhaps the biggest quantum computing advancement in the last decade. MSFT/OpenAI reveal plans for a $100B+ supercomputer, following Amazon's $150B data center investment plans announced just last week. OpenAI's voice engine can clone any voice with only 15 seconds of input (huge risk of deepfakes). AWS' credit program extends to LLM credits, which all of our portfolio should now take advantage of. Anthropic exposes a large prompt-engineering vulnerability. The curtain was pulled on Amazon's "Just Walk Out" tech. Local LLMs on-device galore. Etc.
Let me know if you have any Qs. Here's the full scoop:
PNW AI News:
Microsoft and OpenAI are partnering on a $100B project to build a massive supercomputer, codenamed "Stargate". Already featuring 10K+ Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPUs, it will integrate into a larger network of AI clusters (including Nat Friedman's Andromeda cluster) for accelerated research
Amazon is discontinuing it's ‘Just Walk Out’ technology, which was promoted as AI-powered and cashier-less but revealed to rely heavily on hundreds of workers in India manually reviewing sales transactions
Cohere released Command R+, a new RAG-optimized AI model which claims to perform competitively against rivals like OpenAI on certain enterprise-critical tasks at lower cost
First available on MSFT Azure, so Cohere is now the 3rd LLM provider Azure is partnering with (behind OpenAI + Mistral)
AWS expanded its free credits program for startups to cover the use of major AI models from Meta, Anthropic, and Cohere, in addition to its own Bedrock platform
Tableau released Einstein Copilot, a beta of their new AI tool aiming to make intelligent recommendations in advanced data analysis and visualization
WA Governor Jay Inslee signed a bill into law that is aimed to develop WA's semiconductor design/manufacturing industries, drawing funding from the federal CHIPS Act
Modulus Therapeutics, a Seattle-HQ'd AI2 Incubator spinout using AI for cellular therapy, was acquired by Boston biotech company Ginkgo Bioworks on undisclosed terms
The AI2 Incubator launches an online forum called "Harmonious" for spotlighting NLP research whitepapers and discussing AI advances
Key AI Product Updates:
OpenAI debuts its Voice Engine, an expansion of their existing text-to-speech API, which allows uses to upload any 15-second voice sample to generate a synthetic copy of that voice
Massive controversy about how this could lead to proliferation of deepfakes ahead of the US election
Seattle's Oren Etzioni is working to solve this with TrueMedia.org
Mistral AI’s new open-source lightweight LLM, Phi-2, can be run on your laptop offline, keeping local data private and avoiding the output-censorship requirements of other online LLMs**
Download LM Studio here to try it
Anthropic researchers have detailed "many-shot jailbreaking", a technique used to unethically tamper with LLM outputs to avoid safety guardrails by repeatedly reinforcing incorrect outputs in the prompt
Has the risk of repropagating erroneous outputs for separate unsuspecting users
Quantinuum, using their H2 quantum processing unit (QPU) in partnership with MSFT's qubit-visualization system, has achieved a significant advancement in quantum computing (thought to be years away) by demonstrating the most reliable logical qubits to date
Logical qubit error rates 800X lower than physical error rates
Apple researchers introduced ReALM (Reference Resolution As Language Modeling), an AI system designed to understand ambiguous/slang references within conversations and on-screen elements
Princeton NLP researchers have developed SWE-agent, an open-source system that turns GPT-4 into an AI software engineering agent that can autonomously solve issues in GitHub repositories
With similar accuracy to viral AI agent Devin
Stanford researchers just introduced Octopus v2, a new framework for on-device AI agents that outperforms GPT-4 in accuracy by fine-tuning small language models (SLMs) with special functional tokens**
Apple is reportedly exploring AI-led personal home robots as a potential "next big thing" after the company's EV "Project Titan" project fizzled out
Opera released a new browser feature allowing users to download and use over 150 LLMs locally on their computers
**Trend of many attempts like Stanford's Octopus v2, Mistral's Phi-2, or Open Interpreter running LLMs and agents direct on local CPUs
Key AI Business/Investment Updates:
Taiwan-based chipmakers like TSMC, which supplies 60% of semiconductors to co's like Nvidia/Apple, and UMC halted some chipmaking machinery and evacuated staff at the facilities due to the magnitude 7.4 earthquake
YouTube CEO Neal Mohan has suggests OpenAI's text-to-video model, Sora, might be trained on YouTube videos in violation of the platform's terms.
Stoking the debate on creator rights and legal implications of AI data scraping/sourcing practices
Google announced plans to begin charging for new ‘premium’ AI-powered search features
Marking the first time Google puts any of its core search engine products behind a paywall, possibly due to spiraling infra/model costs
Elon Musk said Tesla is boosting compensation for its AI engineers to combat aggressive recruiting and massive offers from OpenAI, calling it the “craziest talent war” he has ever seen
FDA authorizes Prenosis software as first AI tool that can diagnose sepsis, a major step in federal compliance approval for AI diagnosis tools
Oracle and Palantir announced a partnership to deliver secure cloud and AI solutions, helping governments and businesses maximize data value for decision-making
PNW AI/ML Fundings:
Read AI (Seattle, WA) raised $21M in Series A funding co-led by Goodwater Capital and Madrona
Starting with AI-generated summaries of online meetings, expanding its feature set by adding AI-generated recaps of email conversations and messaging threads - TFTD $32M
CEO: David Shim
Clarify (Seattle, WA) raised $7.5M in Seed funding led by Gradient Ventures, joined by Ascend
A modern AI-enabled CRM that unifies customer data, automation and analytics under one platform to streamline collaboration - TFTD $7.5M
CEO: Patrick Thompson
AgentHub (Vancouver, BC) raised $2.5M in Seed funding led by First Round, joined by YC and several angels
An AI-first Zapier-like platform used to build powerful automations without writing the single line of code - TFTD $2.5M
CEO: Max Brodeur-Urbas
KredosAI (Seattle, WA) raised $2.1M in Seed funding led by an undisclosed investor, joined existing investors SeaChange and the R-Group according to an SEC filing
Helps companies collect late payments from customers, using AI to help communicate with customers who fall behind on payments - TFTD $3.1M
CEO: Balaji Sridharan
Soundry AI (Seattle, WA) raised $1M in Pre-Seed funding from Y Combinator and other undisclosed investors
A platform that uses gen AI to help musicians create audio samples for songs - TFTD $1M
CEO: Mark Buckler