E44: 6/21/24

Jun 21, 2024

In the latest of Microsoft's "Recall" feature fiasco, it has decided with its PC partners to press ahead with the release of the first Copilot+ PCs, despite delaying the AI-powered “Recall” feature to address security and privacy concerns
Microsoft's Azure AI team released Florence-2, a versatile foundation model for vision tasks on Hugging Face (in two sizes: 232M and 771M parameters), which excels in captioning, object detection, visual grounding, and segmentation
- ~Competitive to Seattle-based Moondream.ai

Anthropic introduces Claude 3.5 Sonnet, a superior AI surpassing its predecessor, Claude 3 Opus in reasoning, coding, and content generation
- ~Twice the output speed with no quality loss/cost inflation. The LLM race to the bottom continues

TikTok just launched its AI ‘Symphony’ toolkit for content creators, with digital avatars, translation features, a chatbot and more
Nvidia released ‘Nemotron-4 340B’, a foundation model that redefines synthetic data generation, fully open source, rivalling GPT-4 and others
The US Navy is deploying AI-powered underwater drones to better detect threats, with plans to expand the tech’s use in identifying enemy ships and aircrafts
- Shift towards autonomy for the warfighter
OpenAI's DALL-E 3 gets a tune-up with accuracy + RAG capabilities, despite the introduction of the more advanced multimodal GPT-4o
Meta releases a series of new AI models for audio, text, watermarking and more, all open-sourced
Color Health partnered with OpenAI to create an AI assistant using GPT-4o to help doctors craft personalized cancer screening and treatment plans
Google DeepMind published new research on the lab’s video-to-audio (V2A) system, which can generate detailed, synchronized soundtracks for videos

According to Clément Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, there has been a notable increase in AI startup founders looking to sell their companies
- Over-funded AI companies with little product market fit or COGS issues are looking for offramps
Universal Music Group is partnering with AI startup SoundLabs, using the company’s voice cloning technology to create and control AI models of their artists own voice’s for creative applications
AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems, a competitor to Nvidia, reportedly files for an IPO via S-1 filing
Launches Company for Safe AI, called Safe Superintelligence (SSI), with funding from NFDG (Daniel Gross and Github founder Nat Friedman)
French startup Poolside raised a $400M Series B at a $2B+ valuation from Bain Capital Ventures, Felicis, and others for its AI-powered software development tools
Dell, Nvidia, and Super Micro Computer are collaborating to build an AI server center factory for xAI’s massive supercomputer, which will train and scale its Grok AI chatbot

Daydream (New York, NY/Seattle, WA) raised $50M in seed funding co-led by Forerunner Ventures & Index Ventures and joined by Google Ventures & True Ventures
- Focuses on providing personalized shopping results by using generative AI, machine learning, and computer vision – TFTD $50M
- CEO: Julie Bornstein
Butterflies AI (Bellevue, WA) raised $4.8M in seed funding led by Coatue and joined by K5 Global, SV Angel, and Uncommon Projects
- Developer of an AI based character building platform which enables users to get realistic social-media like roleplaying experiences – TFTD $4.8M
- CEO: Vu Tran
Leasey AI (Vancouver, BC) raised $0.1M in Grant funding from DMZ Ventures
- Provide AI based alternatives, allowing property managers to list vacant properties on their websites, automating and optimizing the management of a real estate portfolio – TFTD $0.25M
- CEO: Juan Leal

Bite-Sized AI