Category: Top News

IBL News | New York

San Francisco – based Typeface.ai, which is building generative AI for brands, closed a $100 million Series B round.

With total capital raised of $165 million at a valuation of $1 billion, Typeface, launched in February 2023, said that its personalized content creation, a unified one-brand approach offer, has eliminated the barriers for enterprises to harness generative AI.

The investment was led by Salesforce Ventures with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Madrona, GV (Google Ventures), Menlo Ventures, and M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund).

Typeface provides a wide range of workflows across departments, including marketing, sales, product, and HR.

Recently unveiled new features include an advanced Image Studio for high-resolution product photography, video-to-text conversion, and selective image editing and regeneration.

Typeface has expanded through partnerships with Salesforce, Google Cloud, and Google Workspace.

The Typeface platform consists of three key components:

• A content hub where users can upload assets and guidelines for “on-brand” text and image generation.
   • Blend, which uses AI to train and personalize content to a brand’s voice and style.
   • Flow, which provides templates and workflows designed to integrate into existing apps and systems.

Typeface places emphasis on brand governance, content safety, and privacy. For example, using brand-approved wording and assets, a content marketing manager can generate an Instagram post, repurpose an event video into a blog post, or draft a follow-up email.

IBL News | New York

Microsoft, this week, announced new AI-powered shopping tools for its new Bing search engine and the Edge sidebar “to make it easier to discover, research, and complete your purchase all in one place.”

Microsoft’s shopping assistant generates a tailored Buying Guide that tells the user what to look for in each category, offers product suggestions, and shows the specifications of multiple, similar items next to each other in a compare table.

“Price Comparison and Price History are built-in browser features that help ensure you’re buying at the right place and time, and Edge helps you automatically apply coupons and cashback when shopping online,” said the company.

“Price Match will be rolling out soon in the US. Price History, Price Comparison, Coupons, Cashback, and Package Tracking are already available in select markets and built-in to Edge.”

Microsoft will get an affiliate fee when the user buys.
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IBL News | New York

Trying to avoid being left behind in the generative AI race, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) announced this month it will put $100 million in a new program to connect affiliated data scientists, strategists, engineers, and solutions architects with customers and partners to accelerate enterprise adoption an innovation.

The program, called AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, will include free workshops, engagements, and training. Use cases, best practices, and industry expertise will be part of the initiative.

“With over 100,000 clients having used AWS AI and ML services, now, customers around the globe are hungry for guidance about how to get started quickly and securely with generative AI,” said Matt Garman, Senior Vice President of Sales, Marketing, and Global Services at AWS.

According to AWS, healthcare and life sciences companies can pursue ways to accelerate drug research and discovery: manufacturers can build solutions to reinvent industrial design and processes; and financial services companies can develop ways to provide customers with more personalized information and advice.

AWS offers several generative AI services, such as Amazon CodeWhisperer, an AI-powered coding companion, and Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that makes foundational models (FMs) from AI21 Labs, Anthropic, and Stability AI, along with Amazon’s own family of FMs, Amazon Titan, accessible via an API.

Users can also train and run their models using high-performance infrastructure, including AWS Inferentia-powered Amazon EC2 Inf1 Instances, AWS Trainium-powered Amazon EC2 Trn1 Instances, and Amazon EC2 P5 instances powered by NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs.

Additionally, customers can build, train, and deploy their own models with Amazon SageMaker or use Amazon SageMaker Jumpstart to deploy some of today’s most popular FMs, including Cohere’s large language models, Technology Innovation Institute’s Falcon 40B, and Hugging Face’s BLOOM.

On April, AWS launched a 10-week program for generative AI startups and debuted Bedrock, a platform to build generative AI-powered apps via pretrained third – and first-party models. AWS also recently announced that it would work with Nvidia to build “next-generation” infrastructure for training AI models — complementing its in-house Trainium hardware.

Grand View Research estimates that generative AI products and solutions could be worth close to $110 billion by 2030.

Salesforce Ventures, Salesforce’s VC division, plans to pour $500 million into startups developing generative AI technologies. Workday recently added $250 million to its existing VC fund specifically to back AI and machine learning startups. OpenAI, the company behind the viral chatbot ChatGPT, has raised a $175 million fund to invest in AI startups. And just this week, Dropbox launched a $50 million AI-focused venture fund.

Accenture and PwC, meanwhile, have announced that they plan to invest $3 billion and $1 billion, respectively, in AI.

According to GlobalData, AI startups received over $52 billion in funding across more than 3,300 deals in the last year alone.

IBL News | New York

San Francisco – based data storage and management startup Databricks, this week, announced that it will pay $1.3 billion to acquire MosaicML, an open-source startup that enables businesses to build low-cost LLMs (large language models) with proprietary data.

Its two models, MPT-7B and the recent release of MPT-30B, had 3.3 million downloads.

The deal is expected to close during Databricks’ second quarter ending July 31.

“Every organization should be able to benefit from the AI revolution with more control over how their data is used. Databricks and MosaicML have an incredible opportunity to democratize AI and make the Lakehouse the best place to build generative AI and LLMs,” said Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder and CEO of Databricks.

Databricks intends to combine its Lakehouse Platform with MosaicML’s technology to offer customers a way to train and use LLMs with more control and ownership over how their data is used.

According to MosaicML, “combined with near linear scaling of resources, multi-billion-parameter models can be trained in hours, not days, and it will cost thousands of dollars, not millions.”

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.

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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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.

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.

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.