The AI Rundown by Lightscape Partners – 3/04/24

Good morning, and welcome back to this week’s edition of The AI Rundown by Lightscape Partners.

Last week in AI:

• Figure AI, the humanoid robotics startup, raises $675M at a $2.6B valuation, announcing a partnership with OpenAI.

• Elon Musk sues Sam Altman and OpenAI, claiming breach of contract.

• Researchers uncover two previously unknown subtypes of prostate cancer using artificial intelligence in another scientific breakthrough.

Check out the AI conferences happening this month here.

If you’d like a quick refresher on industry terms and the current landscape of AI, skip to the bottom.

Top AI Stories of the Week

Figure AI announces a $675M funding round at a $2.6B valuation and a new partnership with OpenAI. Link.

• The startup developing a humanoid AI robot announces one of the largest fundraising rounds in 2024.

• The round saw participation from Microsoft, OpenAI Startup Fund, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions), Parkway Venture Capital, Intel Capital, and others.

• The collaboration with OpenAI will give Figure specialized AI models using OpenAI’s top-tier infrastructure.

• Figure will leverage Microsoft Azure for AI infrastructure, training, and storage.

Elon Musk sues Open AI, Sam Altman, and others, claiming they abandoned the company’s original mission. Link.

• The lawsuit claims OpenAI betrayed the original mission to develop artificial intelligence “for the benefit of humanity broadly”.

• Musk was approached in 2015 by Sam Altman and Gregg Brockman to form a nonprofit lab to develop AGI for the “benefit of humanity, according to Musk’s lawyers.

• A co-founder and eventual board member, Musk stepped down from the board in 2018 after claiming AI is “potentially more dangerous than nukes.”

• “Under its new Board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity,” the filing said.

Researchers claim artificial intelligence has helped in the discovery of two new prostate cancer subtypes. Link.

• The new prostate cancer “evotypes” could be used to better diagnose and treat prostate cancer.

• The researchers claim the discovery will also be valuable in situations where under- and over-treatments occur.

• AI was used in the analysis of DNA data to discover the two new “evotypes”.

Venture

Ideogram, a Midjourney rival, raises $80M. Link.

• The round was led by tier-1 VC firm Andreesen Horowitz (a16z) who will now have a board seat at the startup.

• The company aims to differentiate itself in the ever-growing ai image generation market.

Gradial, a startup bringing AI to enterprise marketing workflows, raises $5.4M. Link.

• The round was led by Madrona, with additional capital from General Advance, Outsiders Fund, and Space Capital.

• The startup is building a platform that will integrate with existing content management systems, automating routine marketing tasks.

Generative AI

Google Deepmind unveils Genie, a prompt-to-game AI system. Link.

• The new generative model makes video games from scratch.

• Using a written, hand-drawn, or photo prompt, Genie will create a 2-dimensional platform-style video game similar to Super Mario Bros.

• Genie was trained on 30K hours of 2D platform gaming videos scraped from the internet.

Microsoft announces Copilot for Finance available in Microsoft365. Link.

• Microsoft Copilot for Finance is the newest Copilot offering available on Microsoft 365.

• The tool aims to revolutionize how finance teams go about daily workflows.

• Key features:

  • Conduct a variance analysis in Excel using natural language prompts.

  • Simplify the reconciliation process in Excel.

  • Get a complete summary of relevant customer details in Outlook.

  • Turn raw data in Excel into presentation-ready visuals and reports.

Klarna announces its chatbot is handling the workload of 700 full-time staff. Link.

• Years after announcing they would no longer hire staff outside of engineering, the Swedish fintech company claims their OpenAI-backed chatbot handled 2.3M conversations.

• The AI assistants speak 35 languages and are available in 23 markets.

• Klarna says the bots are not only equivalent to human customer service, but are also available 24/7.

Tumblr and Wordpress in talks with Midjourney and OpenAI. Link.

• The deal would provide training data from users’ posts for the AI companies.

• The alleged deal follows the $60M deal between Reddit and Google announced last week.

Software + Hardware

Mistral announces Mistral Large, Le Chat, and a partnership with Microsoft. Link.

• The new model Mistral Large nears GPT-4 performance metrics.

• Le Chat offers a platform similar to ChatGPT to interact with the French-based LLM.

• The partnership with Microsoft will make the models commercially available on Azure.

Upcoming AI Conferences

IMAGINE AI LIVE ‘24

• Fontainebleau, Las Vegas, NV

• March 27 – 28, 2024

NVIDIA GTC 2024

• San Jose, CA and Virtual

• March 18 – 21, 2024

Get up to speed on the current landscape

• AI Term Glossary

• Current AI Landscape from Sequoia Capital

Thank you for reading the AI Rundown by Lightscape Partners. Please send any questions, comments, or suggestions to [email protected].