Author: IBL News

Inflection AI, the Year-Old Startup Behind Chatbot Pi, Valued at $4 Billion
IBL News | New York

Inflection AI, which has a small team of around 35 employees and is led by ex-DeepMind leader Mustafa Suleyman, closed a $1.3 billion funding this week. The new capital raised by this one-year-old startup values this company at $4 billion.

The round was led by led by Microsoft, Nvidia, GPU cloud provider CoreWeave, and billionaires Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, and Eric Schmidt.

The Palo Alto, California-based Inflection sits now behind OpenAI (which has raised $11.3 billion to date) as the second-best-funded generative AI startup — edging out Anthropic ($1.5 billion). Well behind it are Cohere ($445 million), Adept ($415 million), Runway ($237 million), Character.ai ($150 million), and Stability AI (~$100 million).

This influx of capital will be used to continue expanding its computing capabilities further developing its AI-powered personal chatbot called Pi.

Specifically, Inflection says it’s working with Nvidia and CoreWeave to build what it claims is one of the largest AI training clusters in the world, comprising 22,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs.

“Personal AI is going to be the most transformational tool of our lifetimes. This is truly an inflection point,” Suleyman said in a statement.

According to Inflection, Pi is intended to be a “kind” and “supportive” companion, offering “friendly” advice and info in a “natural, flowing” style.

Pi is available to test via a messaging app or online.
- Instagram: follow @heypi.ai and click here to send Pi a DM.
- Facebook Messenger: click here to get in touch with Pi.
- WhatsApp and SMS: add +1 (314) 333-1111 to your contacts to message Pi.
- Online: talk with Pi at https://heypi.com
- Mobile: download Pi, your personal AI for iPhone or iPad. Pi will be available on Android soon.
June 30, 2023
The Websites Used to Train AI Identified by The Washington Post

IBL News | New York

Chatbots mimic human speech because the AI that powers them has ingested a huge amount of text, mostly scraped from the Internet. If they ace the bar exam it’s because it’s training data included thousands of practice sites.

The Washington Post analyzed those websites used to train AI, although companies like OpenAI didn’t disclose what dataset used.

The newspaper worked with researchers of the Allen Institute for AI and categorized the websites, with data from analytics firm Similarweb. Into a tree map of 11 categories.

It started looking inside Google’s C4 data set, which includes 15 million websites from journalism, entertainment, software development, medicine, and content creation, among other industries. Facebook’s LLaMa used it.

The three biggest sites were patents.google.com (which contains text from patents issued around the world), wikipedia.org, and scribd.com (a subscription-only digital library). Also, on the list: the notorious market for pirated e-books b-ok.org a, along with 27 other sites identified by the U.S. government as markets for piracy and counterfeits.

In the area of top business & industrial sites, these were some of the sites: fool.com, kickstarter.com, sec.gov, marketwired.com, city-data.com, patreon.com, myemail.constantcontact.com, finance.yahoo.com, prweb.com, entrepreneur.com, globalresearch.ca.

Top News sites: nytimes.com, latimes.com, theguardian.com, forbes.com, huffpost.com, washingtonpost.com, businessinsider.com, chicagotribune.com, theatlantic.com, aljazeera.com, RT.com (the Russian state-backed propaganda site), breitbart.com, and vdare.com (anti-immigration), among others.

Top Religious sites: patheos.com, gty.org, jewishworldreview.com, thekingdomcollective.com, biblehub.com, liveprayer.com, lds.org, wacriswell.com, wdtprs.com, bibleforums.org, etc.

Top Technology sites: instructables.com, ipfs.io, docs.microsoft.com, forums.macrumors.com, medium.com, makeuseof.com, sites.google.com, slideshare.net, s3.amazonaws.com, pcworld.com, sites.google.com, WordPress, Tumblr, Blogspot, Live Journal, etc.

Data sets used to train AI couldn’t access social networks like Facebook and Twitter, which prohibit scraping.

@kevinschaul and @dataviz_szuyu did all the hard work and built this great search tool for sites. A bunch of us already found their old personal blogs. Hope you’ll find the rankings as fascinating as I did https://t.co/xckLl15ZaS pic.twitter.com/7Q7zmzDC6w

— Nitasha Tiku @nitashatiku@mastodon.social (@nitashatiku) April 19, 2023

• Search Engine Land: Search the 15.7 million websites in Google’s C4 dataset

June 29, 2023
Custom AI Avatar Startup Synthesia Reaches a Valuation of $1 Billion

IBL News | New York

Startup creating AI-driven avatar Synthesia announced this month it raised $90 million in a Series C round led by Accel and participation from Nvidia, Kleiner Perkins, GV, Firstmark Capital, and MMC. To date, the company has raised $156.6 million, with a valuation of $1 billion post-money.

Founded in 2017 and with a workforce of 200 people, Co-founder and CEO Victor Riparbelli ensured TechCrunch that its company has 50,000 customers and is a sustainable business, with 35% of the Fortune 100 as clients.

Synthesia’s AI is trained on real actors, and actors are paid per video generated with their image and voice.

Some experts have expressed concern that tools like Synthesia’s could be used to create deep fakes. The startup responded that it vets its customers and their scripts and requires formal consent from a person before it’ll synthesize their appearance.
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June 28, 2023
Goldman Sachs Says that 300 Million Jobs Can Be Replaced by AI Automation

IBL News | New York

AI has the potential to automate 25% of the entire labor market, which translates to 300 million jobs, according to a research report by Goldman Sachs.

In a research report, the investment bank said that AI could automate 46% of tasks in administrative jobs, 44% of legal jobs, and 37% of architecture and engineering professions.

AI would be the least threatening to labor-intensive careers like construction (6%), installation and repair (4%), and maintenance (1%).

The study concludes that 18% of the global workforce could be automated, while in countries like the U.S., U.K., Japan, and Hong Kong, it’d be 28% of the workforce.

However, Goldman Sachs anticipates that displaced workers will become reemployed in jobs that emerge as a direct result of widespread AI adoption.

Last month, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce called for intense AI regulation at the federal level to ensure job security, national security, and economic stability.
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June 27, 2023
Mattermost Develops an Open-Source OpenAI Plugin that Integrates Into Its Workflows

IBL News | New York

The open-source collaboration platform Mattermost announced this week new solutions for Generative AI, including a customizable ChatGPT bot framework with full control, security, and data privacy. This solution is built to integrate with OpenAI and other cloud LLMs into Mattermost workflows.

As a service, Mattermost provides cloud offerings for authentication and performance. It faces competition from major players such as Slack, Atlassian, and Asana.

An example of an OpenAI integration is the open-source OpenAI plugin for Mattermost developed by Brightscout.

Two other examples of ChatGPT integrations built by Sebastian Müller include ChatGPT Mattermost Bot with OpenAI and ChatGPT Mattermost Bot with LLaMa — although this last version is not available for commercial use.

June 26, 2023
Opera Adds Prompts, ChatGPT, and ChatSonic, While Brave Introduces a Summarization Feature
IBL News | New York

The Opera and Opera GX desktop browsers released a suite of new features, as early access: AI Prompts, sidebar access to ChatGPT, and ChatSonic. Opera follows companies like Microsoft’s Bing, which added GPT-4 into its Edge browser in February.

Opera’s AI Prompts allow users to generate prompts by highlighting text on a website or typing it in.

Some of the prompts include:
- Explore
- Explain briefly
- Explain this article
- ELI5 (explain like I’m 5)
- Shorten
- Show me more relevant content
- Create a tweet
- Tweet this website like…
- What’s the main point
- Write a haiku
- Make a joke
Opera is integrating the ChatGPT and ChatSonic chatbots into its browsers’ sidebar. ChatSonic can also create images from text inputs.

The company, owned by a Chinese consortium, said that it plans to announce more AI-powered features in the future that would run on its own GPT-based model.

Recently another browser, Brave, introduced an AI summarization feature, powered by its own LLMs instead of OpenAI’s GPT, using a mix of three models: a question-answering model to get answers from text across pages, a classifier to weed out hate speech and spam, and a model that rewrites the sentences to present a concise result.

In addition, Brave Search also highlights relevant sentences in listed results as news articles. Previously, it just highlighted search keywords from the page description.

Like other offerings, Brave Search offers citations and links.

The company said that its LLM is trained to fight “unsubstantiated assertions,” referring to AI chat of other search engines like Bing.

“Given the current advancements in AI, it’s crucial to remind users that one should not believe everything an AI system produces, in much the same way one should not believe everything that is published on the Web. At the risk of stating the obvious, we should not suspend critical thinking for anything we consume, no matter how impressive the results of AI models can be,” the company said.

Other smaller players in the space, like Neeva and You.com, have also announced AI-aided search features.
June 24, 2023
An AI Chatbot Allows to Message Historical and Fictional Characters

IBL News | New York

A new GPT-3.5 turbo–powered app called Superchat allows users to chat with historical, fictional characters like Shakespeare, Einstein, or Cleopatra, and experts and representatives from different professions, like lawyers, chefs, or therapists.

The company, Gorilla Technologies, has also created its own characters, like an assistant named Aria. The artwork for the characters was created using Midjourney.

This chatbot can aid users with everyday tasks, like email writing or marketing expertise.

“The goal is to make AI technology accessible to everyone, not just people who know how to write great prompts,” explained Gorilla Technologies CEO Guglielmo Faglioni. “This app will be a great tool for kids who want to learn more about historical figures by chatting to cool characters like Shakespeare.”

The app is structured like a messaging app, allowing users to have multiple conversations with different AI chatbots at the same time.

A number of the characters are available for free with the app download, while others can be unlocked through a premium subscription of $70/year.

Like Superchat, other apps hoping to cash in the hype around AI chatbots are Quora’s Poe, where users can now make their own bots using prompts, the Korean Typecast, or the Israeli D-ID.

June 23, 2023
Vimeo Will Release an End-to-End AI Suite for Video Creation on Its Platform in July

IBL News | New York

Vimeo.com (NASDAQ:VMEO) announced this week it will be adding to its platform in July a suite of generative AI-powered video creation and editing tools that will include a script generator — including tone and duration —, a teleprompter, and a text-based video editor.

“It will enable anyone to create a fully produced video in minutes by automatically generating scripts in seconds, recording videos in one take using a built-in teleprompter, and deleting any unwanted content such as filler words (ums and uhs) and long pauses,” said the company.

“These new capabilities have expansive applications, from quickly creating highlight reels to hosting virtual events or company meetings to exporting quote clips for short marketing videos, or simply cleaning up a high-profile video before sharing,” said Ashraf Alkarmi, chief product officer at Vimeo.

Alkarmi continues, “We’re clearly only scratching the surface of what AI can accomplish for organizations and the people within them.”

The capabilities will be free for anyone to trial as part of Vimeo’s subscription plan.

June 22, 2023
A French Startup Created to Compete Against OpenAI Raises $113 Million

IBL News | New York

A Paris, France – based startup named Mistral AI, co-founded by alums from Google’s DeepMind and Meta and created a month ago, has raised $113 million at a $260 million valuation.

The round is led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Xavier Niel, JCDecaux Holding, Rodolphe Saadé, and Motier Ventures, in France; La Famiglia and Headline, in Germany; Exor Ventures, in Italy; Sofina in Belgium; and First Minute Capital and LocalGlobe, in the UK. French investment bank Bpifrance and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt are also shareholders.

The goal of Mistral AI is to compete against OpenAI by creating open-source language models and generative AI solutions while focusing on enterprise, not consumers.

“Open source is a core part of our DNA,” CEO Arthur Mensch noted.

It plans to release its first models for text-based generative AI in 2024.

The founders are all in their early thirties and have known each other since school when they were all studying across the field of artificial intelligence.

[In the picture above, CEO Arthur Mensch (center), along with his co-founders Timothée Lacroix (CTO – L), and and Guillaume Lample (Chief Science Officer – R)]

Guillaume Lample led the development of LLaMA, Meta’s Large Language Model, and he was leading the LLM team at Meta before he left to co-found Mistral AI.

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June 21, 2023
WordPress.com Launches Its AI Assistant for Creating Posts, Headlines, and Translations

IBL News | New York

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, announced the availability of an AI tool called Jetpack AI Assistant for the customers of its hosted service.

It integrates with the WordPress editor and is also available through the Jetpack plugin, allowing users to create, by adjusting the tone, unlimited posts, pages, structured lists and tables within a blog post, headlines, and translations in twelve languages.

The assistant also offers better spelling and grammar correction features than WordPress’s built-in tools.

Like ChatGPT, Jetpack AI Assistant utilizes a conversational system so content creators can chat with it in natural language.

When writing a post or a page, users can add an AI Assistant block to their content. They type in a prompt, and the AI Assistant starts generating text.

Automattic said that its AI Assistant, “still in the experimental phase, is free to use for all WordPress.com customers for a limited time.”

It added:

“Activate the block with the Inserter or the “/” command shortcut. (If you didn’t know, here’s a fun tip: Hit the “/” button while in the post or page editor and type the name of the block you’re looking for. In this case, it would be “AI.”).”

According to TechCrunch, Jetpack AI Assistant block will let users send 20 requests as a free trial. After that, they have to pay $10 per month to access the feature.

In the last months, Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Notion, and Grammarly have introduced AI-powered writing tools into their apps.
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June 20, 2023