10/20/23

∆ Tech in the News

Labels Lawyer Up - Universal and other music labels are suing Anthropic over its use of copyrighted song lyrics via to train chatbot Claude 2

Facing Delays - YouTube's AI music generation tool is also paused pending negotiations with record companies over the rights needed to train AI software.

Early Adopters - Open AI has partnered with G42, led by UAE’s national security advisor Sheikh Al Nahyan, to pioneer AI solutions across the Middle East.

Thawing AI Cold War? - In response to Western AI isolationism, China proposes a new Global AI Governance Initiative promoting 'AI for All' nations.

Robo Retailing - Amazon Tests AI-driven robots, Sequoia & Digit to automate Warehouses with a staff of 750k+ robots, aiming for a 75% productivity boost.

AI Factories - Nvidia and Foxconn formed an alliance to build AI-powered factories in Taiwan to enhance autonomous vehicles and other AI tech.

˚The hottest thing in tech this week

Did Open AI Just Crack AGI?

All roads lead to AGI as rumors abound that OpenAI plans to release its autonomous agent ‘Jarvis’ at its DevDay in November. The company quietly updated its “core values” to make their primary focus achieving Artificial General Intelligence. A demo of GPT-4 Voice featured Jarvis - an agent “ready to assist with everything” including nearly unsupervised business negotiations.

If true, this update could fundamentally change the world as we know it. It may also explain OpenAI’s acquisition of Global Illumination as being to help train AI agents in a gamified real-world simulation. The agency has developed early-stage products for Instagram and Facebook as well as a MMORG.

In an earlier interview, Altman defined AGI as the “equivalent of a median human that you could hire as a co-worker” which sounds a lot like an AI agent to us. As we featured last week, AI agents are the next step for many LLM-based companies in every area from customer research to real estate.

Notable competition will come from Microsoft’s AutoGEN, framework that enables building LLM apps using multiple conversing agents. Google’s upcoming Gemini framework is also aiming to be an “incredible universal personal assistant” integrated throughout people’s daily travel, work, and entertainment.

Do you think OpenAI has cracked AGI?

News Bytes

• Meta AI decodes visual brain data via non-invasive neuroimaging

• The FCC voted 3-2 to restore Obama-era net neutrality protections

• Fugees' rapper Pras Michél requests mistrial over lawyer’s use of AI tool

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

OpenAI Tender - Thrive Capital may lead a purchase of employee shares at $80B+ valuation, 3x value at the last buyback and 60x annualized revenue.

Humanoid Robotics - SoftBank is reportedly considering investing $75M in 1X Technologies, a Norwegian robotics startup backed by OpenAI.

Closed Deals:

Techno Trucking - Nirvana Insurance closed a $57M Series B to use AI, telematics, and IoT, to reshape commercial fleet insurance.

“Strong Validation” - Hayden AI closed a $53M Series B led by Drawdown Fund to bring data-driven intelligence to the transportation industry.

Reality Check - Reality Defender was founded by ex-Goldman Sachs VP Ben Colman and just raised $15M to combat deepfakes with AI detection tools

AI-Driven Search - Objective closed a $13M round led by Matrix, to extend the reach of its AI-enabled search platform to developers.

Remote Access - Anyplace closed an $8.27M Series B for its model renting fully equipped apartments for remote work, with plans to expand the U.S service.

Companies to Watch:

“End-To-End Real Estate Platform” - HqO raised a $50M Series D for REX with 3000+ users 8000+ companies, & 400M ft² of property transacted.

Brite Future - Hivebrite closed a $37M Series B ($60M total) for its community engagement platform used by 900+ global clients including Yale and Boeing.

Device Intelligence - Fingerprint’s anti-fraud platform is used by 16% of the top 500 global sites and just closed a $33M Series C, giving them $70M total.

Grand Slam - Tennis star Lindsay Davenport and established investors backed Sports AI startup SwingVision’s $6M Series A led by Authentic Ventures.

Finds “Best Leads First” - Bluebirds raised $5M from Lightspeed and Y Combinator for its AI-powered sales insights tools.

Tesla Inventor Joins - Hieu Duong, lead inventor of Tesla’s innovative dry powder coating battery tech joins a tiny revenue-less startup, AM Batteries.

The Funding Beat (New)

Revroad Capital raised $61M to invest in U.S. AI, EV, SaaS, and manufacturing startups, the largest ever debut early-stage venture fund raise in Utah.

Tools

Riffusion - The Chainsmokers-advised free text-2-music app generates shareable "riffs" and just raised a $4M Seed to roll out more genAI products.

Ernie 4.0 - Chinese AI giant Baidu’s new model claims comprehension, reasoning, memory, and content abilities on par with GPT-4 and Google's LaMDA.

Autotab - AI Agents for boring real-world tasks via easy browser automation.

Fuyu-8B - An open-source Multimodal Architecture for AI Agents by Adept AI.

DALL-E 3 - OpenAi releases its latest AI image generator, to paid customers

If you have a deal or company that you would like to host on our next issue, drop us a line at @ [email protected].

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The Tech Buzz Team+