E41: 5/31/24

OpenAI's continued safety controversy, AI-native iOS 18, Mistral's Codestral, and a bit of fun with Google's "AI Overview" blunder

Back to our weekly cadence! I hesitate to call this a quieter week due to the high-profile OpenAI whisteblowing from ex-board members, AI in iOS 18 + Siri, Anthropic’s Claude “Tool Use”, and Mistral’s code LLM Codestral, but this update is on the shorter side…

PNW AI News:

• Amazon is using NLP in its FireTV to give users a new way to search semantically for TV shows and movies

  • "Alexa, show me a movie with baseball in cornfields"

• AWS CEO Adam Selipsky steps down and names his predecessor Matt Garman, citing in his resignation that GenAI "will be one of the biggest opportunities AWS has ever seen"

• PSL releases JACoB AI agent as open-source project to act as an "AI-automated Summer Intern", which integrates with Github, Figma, and automates mundane development tasks like pull requests

Key AI Product/Research Updates:

• Google’s newly unveiled ‘AI Overviews’ search feature is being bashed following an slew of bizarre and inaccurate responses that have gone viral

• Anthropic launched "Tool Use" across its Claude 3 model family, enabling the AI to interact with external tools and APIs

• Mistral just released Codestral, its first code-focused model for software development, fluent in 80+ languages like Java, C, C++, JavaScript, Bash, Rust, Fortran, and more

  • Outperforming other coding-specific rivals across major SQL/Python benchmarks

• OpenAI says it has begun training its new flagship AI model, set to replace GPT-4 as the backbone of ChatGPT

• Zapier has a new Chrome extension that puts AI in the browser, allowing users to summarize websites, translate content, learn from web pages, and automate tasks in real-time

  • As a Zapier power user, I really wanted to like this, but it’s pretty generic

• Apple is revamping Siri with AI on iOS 18 and beyond, enabling Siri to control hundreds of features in Apple-made apps and eventually 3rd-party apps

  • OpenAI appears to have cemented its deal with Apple, integrating GPT-4o into other aspects of iOS 18 as well

  • MSFT CEO Satya Nadella has expressed concern about this as a conflict of interest with their OpenAI partnership

• OpenAI announced ChatGPT Edu, powered by GPT-4o, designed for universities to responsibly integrate AI into academic and campus operations

• AI entertainment startup The Simulation launched Showrunner, a platform that allows users to generate and watch AI-powered TV shows set in virtual simulated worlds

• Scale AI introduced SEAL Leaderboards, a new evaluation metric for frontier AI models that aims for more secure, trustworthy measurements

Key AI Business/Investment Updates:

• Elon's xAI officially announced its $6B in Series B funding at $24B post-money valuation from Valor Equity Partners, A16Z, Sequoia, Cathy Wood's ARK, and more

  • xAI is planning to build its own AI supercomputer by fall 2025, requiring a "Gigafactory of Compute" comprised of ~100K of Nvidia's H100 chips

• Ex-OpenAI board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley speak out claiming that OpenAI cannot effectively self-govern, advocating for 3rd-party regulation

  • They also maintain their decision to remove CEO Sam Altman, alleging a "toxic culture of lying" and engaging in behavior commensurate to "psychological abuse"

• OpenAI reboots its Safety and Security Committee that was controversially folded earlier in May, led by none other than Sam Altman (^hmmm)

• OpenAI is re-launching its robotics team after discontinuing it in 2020, but has not announced its initiatives

  • OpenAI's in-house fund is already invested in Figure AI, 1X Technologies, Physical Intelligence, and more

• OpenAI just announced a series of new content partnerships for ChatGPT training data with Vox Media (The Verge, Eater, Vox, New York Magazine) and The Atlantic

• MavenAGI emerged from Stealth and raised $28M in Seed funding from Lux Capital, E14 Fund, and more for its customer support AI that autonomously resolves over 93% of issues and cuts support costs by 81%

PNW AI/ML Fundings:

• Stellis AI (Seattle, WA) raised an undisclosed Pre-Seed round from Mudita Venture Partners

  • Aiming to make AI accessible to any businesses, using it responsibly to foster growth and open new opportunities for all - TFTD unknown

  • CEO: Trent Gillespie

• Iris (Seattle, WA) raised an undisclosed Pre-Seed round from Caffeinated Capital

  • Developer of an AI assistant platform designed for dedicated operating system users - TFTD unknown

  • CEO: Ronith K