E43: 6/15/24

Apple's action-packed WWDC, an AI is officially running for Parliament in the UK, MSFT rolls back several Copilot features like "Recall", Samsung's deal with TSMC to boost chip manufacturing, etc.

PNW AI News:

• Providence created new gen AI tool in 18 days to speed and improve responses to patient messages by prioritizing/triaging them to the relevant medical professionals

• Microsoft turns its new "Recall" feature of Copilot+ PCs into an opt-in experience, adding more layers of security after critics voiced concerns about the AI tool's privacy

• Seattle City and WA State leaders are in talks to create Seattle-based AI-focused incubator for startups, in conjunction with UW's CoMotion Labs program

Key AI Product/Research Updates:

• Apple kicked off its WWDC event with a series of AI announcements:

  • The OpenAI partnership will allow Siri to leverage ChatGPT/GPT-4o when needed for more complex questions

  • A next-gen Siri will converse more naturally, remember context across requests, and accomplish more complex tasks by gaining  ‘onscreen awareness’, with the ability to take actions and utilize on-device info via AI agent

  • New AI writing tools built into apps like Mail, Messages, and Notes

  • Photos get more conversational search by semantically querying computer vision-labeled metadata

    • Their GDPR/CCPA-inspired promise on AI security: “Your data is never stored or made accessible to Apple”

• Samsung just announced a series of AI chip developments, including a new manufacturing roadmap in partnership with TSMC

  • Predicting a 5x increase in its AI customer base and 9x revenue increase by 2028

• Stability AI releases SD3 Medium, its ‘most advanced’ text-to-image generating AI model yet

• Johns Hopkins researchers found that adding a simple ‘be concise’ instruction to chain-of-thought prompts can reduce the length of AI responses by 50% with minimal impact on accuracy, leading to >20% cost savings on API calls

• The U.S. Air Force and Space Force launched NIPR GPT, a new AI tool designed to assist with tasks like report summarizing and coding to improve info access across operations

• An MIT Ph.D. student and MSFT researchers developed DenseAV, an algorithm that learns a new language solely by associating audio and video signals by watching movies/YouTube

Key AI Business/Investment Updates:

• Mistral has closed its $640M Series B funding round led by General Catalyst, to continue developing its LLM suit beyond Mistral 7B, 8x7B and 8x22B mixture of experts (MoE) models, and more

  • Only ~12 months after its $112M Seed round

• An AI-powered candidate named ‘AI Steve’ is officially running for U.K. Parliament in next month’s general election

• Oracle announced new cloud infrastructure deals with OpenAI and Microsoft to ‘extend Azure AI’s capacity’ and scale deployment of AI models

• OpenAI added retired U.S. Army General and former NSA head Paul Nakasone to its BOD, a leading cybersecurity expert also joining their Safety and Security Committee

• OpenAI has reportedly doubled its annualized revenue to $3.4B so far in 2024

• Elon Musk threatened to ban the use of all Apple devices from his companies' offices following Apple’s partnership announcement with OpenAI, claiming that the integration of ChatGPT into operating systems poses an “unacceptable security violation”

  • Elon also withdrew his lawsuit against OpenAI one day before a key court hearing

PNW AI/ML Fundings:

• Archera (Bellevue, WA) raised $12.1M in Series A funding from Amplify Partners, Ridge Ventures, Leslie Ventures, PSL Ventures, and more

  • A cloud cost optimization solution for companies to save time and money on their cloud costs, without any risk - TFTD $22.4M

  • CEO: Aran Kanna

• VetRec (Seattle, WA) raised $500K in Pre-seed funding from Y Combinator

  • Provides AI-powered clinical note automation for veterinarians, utilizing AI technology to record and generate detailed SOAP-style notes for veterinarians – TFTD $500K

  • CEO: Kevin Cohen