E48: 7/19/24
More info on OpenAI's secretive project Q-Star, OpenAI opening shop in Bellevue, MSFT's SpreadsheetLLM model trained on repetitive Excel tasks, and more!
Kicking off the weekend with Signify officially coming out of stealth with a $2.1M Pre-Seed fundraise, co-led by Founders’ Co-op and us at FUSE! Signify is building an AI-enabled compliance engine to accelerate manufacturing teams’ time to market. This is our second time partnering up with Martin, and couldn’t be more excited!
PNW AI News:
OpenAI files plans with the City of Bellevue to open major engineering offices with at least 40K square feet, expanding their footprint to the PNW
Microsoft just announced its AI-powered Designer is now in GA worldwide, bringing advanced image generation, editing, and design capabilities to users on mobile and Windows platforms
Researchers at Microsoft released an experimental AI model called SpreadsheetLLM, designed to train on repetitive work done in spreadsheets such as Excel and Google Sheets
In an interview, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott thinks LLM “scaling laws” of compounding parameter/training data sizes will hold, despite criticism of unscalability
Key AI Product/Research Updates:
OpenAI is developing a new AI project "Strawberry" (FKA Q-Star, Q*) to enhance its models' reasoning capabilities, leveraging a specialized form of post-training to adapt pre-trained models for autonomous web searches and "deep research"
OpenAI has released GPT-4o mini, a scaled-down version of its GPT-4o model, designed to replace GPT-3.5 Turbo
Researchers from Google DeepMind, Google, and UMass Amherst have introduced FLAMe (Foundational Large Autorater Models), a new open-source AI system designed to enhance the evaluation of AI-generated text
Salesforce announced Einstein Service Agent, an AI-powered autonomous customer service chatbot that leverages LLMs and company data to understand context, take action on issues, and provide personalized responses
Nvidia and Mistral's new model 'Mistral-NeMo' brings enterprise-grade AI to desktop computers, with a 12B parameter SLM that boasts a 128K token context window and can run locally
Competitive to Seattle-based EdgeRunner, which just raised a Seed this week
Hugging Face introduced SmolLM, a family of high-performing SLMs with 135M, 360M, and 1.7B parameters
OpenAI founding member and former Tesla Director of AI Andrej Karpathy just announced the launch of Eureka Labs, a new AI-integrated education platform
Its first offering, LLM101n, is an undergrad level course teaching students to train their own AI models
Mistral AI just launched Codestral Mamba and Mathstral, two new specialized 7B-parameter SLMs that achieve state-of-the-art performance in coding/math reasoning
Cohere is partnering with Japanese tech giant Fujitsu to develop 'Takane', an advanced Japanese language AI model for enterprise use based on Cohere’s Command R+
Cambridge researchers developed a new AI tool that can predict whether patients showing mild cognitive impairment will progress to Alzheimer’s disease with over 80% accuracy
AI startup Groq just released two new open-source AI models specializing in tool use, surpassing heavyweights like GPT-4 Turbo, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro on key function calling benchmarks
A new AI system, Instruct-MusicGen, lets users edit existing music based on text instructions, built on Meta's MusicGen model
Key AI Business/Investment Updates:
A new investigation revealed that tech giants including Apple, Anthropic, Nvidia, and Salesforce used content from 170K+ YouTube videos to train their AI models without creators’ consent
Tech giants including Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Amazon formed the Coalition for Secure AI (CoSAI), an open-source initiative aiming to develop best practices and address challenges in AI security
Donald Trump’s allies are reportedly drafting an AI executive order aimed at boosting military AI development, rolling back current regulations, and more
Signaling a potential shift in the country’s AI policy in deployments into military use cases
OpenAI is reportedly in talks with Broadcom to develop a new AI chip, hoping to reduce reliance on Nvidia and boost global semiconductor infrastructure
Anthropic launches $100 million AI VC fund with Menlo Ventures, called Anthology Fund, ramping up competition with OpenAI, to invest in applications deploying Anthropic's LLMs in production
PNW AI/ML/CV Fundings:
Artificial.Agency (Edmonton, Canada) raised $12.5M in seed funding led by Radical Ventures, joined by Flying Fish, Breakers VC, and more
AI-native approach to developing games with runtime intelligence and creating interactive and responsive game environments in player engagement – TFTD $16.2M
CEO: Brian Tanner
Signify (Seattle, WA) raised $2.1M in Pre-Seed funding co-led by FUSE and Founders' Co-Op, joined by the AI2 Incubator
Signify automates compliance for manufacturers by analyzing documents to ensure regulatory requirements are met throughout the product life cycle - TFTD $2.1M
CEO: Martin Ramirez
EdgeRunner AI (Seattle, WA) raised $5.5M in seed funding led by Four Rivers, joined by Madrona
Looking to be the enterprise standard for running AI models locally on any chip or PC on the edge – TFTD $5.5M
CEO: Tyler Xuan Saltsman
Markable AI (Bellevue, WA) raised $6.14 million through a combination of Seed-1A and Seed-1B funding in a deal led by Arbor Ventures
Image recognition technology designed to make visual content shoppable, using computer vision and deep learning technology to recognize fashion products in static videos and match them with exact or similar items from e-commerce sites – TFTD $10.58M
CEO: Joy Tang