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By Stephanie Palazzolo

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Recent Editions

Photo by Midjourney.

The AI Chip Wars Rage On; The Rise of the AI Academic-Turned-Founder; Has No One Seen Black Mirror?

By Anissa Gardizy · Oct 9, 2023 7:00am PDT · 1 comment

When Microsoft took an early bet on OpenAI in 2019, investing $1 billion into the startup, it also placed a major bet on another project: creating a competitor to Nvidia’s graphics processing units, we reported back in April. Now, years later, Microsoft executives plan to unveil a chip designed for artificial intelligence next month at Ignite,... When Microsoft took an early bet on OpenAI in 2019, investing $1 billion into the startup, it...

Photo by Shutterstock.

Why Do We Need an OpenAI of Europe?

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Oct 5, 2023 7:00am PDT · 4 comments

As large-language model developers such as OpenAI, Meta Platforms and Google battle for global supremacy, European LLM providers are trying to carve off that region for themselves. That’s a bad idea.Let’s back up. A number of European Union members have poured resources into promising AI startups. In last Wednesday’s release of Mistral 7B, an... As large-language model developers such as OpenAI, Meta Platforms and Google battle for global...

Anthropic cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei. Photo by Getty.

Anthropic Makes OpenAI Look Cheap

By Amir Efrati · Oct 4, 2023 7:20am PDT

How much should a well-regarded artificial intelligence startup be worth on paper?That’s the question facing scores of sovereign wealth funds, mutual fund firms and other private equity investors looking at two marquee AI opportunities: OpenAI and Anthropic. OpenAI is in the middle of its second employee share sale in the last six months, and if... How much should a well-regarded artificial intelligence startup be worth on paper?That’s the...

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. Photo by Drew Angerer via Getty.

Microsoft CEO Says AI ‘Vicious Cycle’ Will Boost Google; Meta and OpenAI’s Other Rivalry

By Aaron Holmes · Oct 3, 2023 7:40am PDT

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. Photo by Drew Angerer via Getty.

Microsoft CEO Says AI ‘Vicious Cycle’ Will Boost Google; Meta and OpenAI’s Other Rivalry

By Aaron Holmes · Oct 3, 2023 7:40am PDT

CEOs often speak from both sides of their mouth, depending on who their audience is. On Monday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella painted a scary picture of how Google could multiply its power in the age of artificial intelligence. His doom and gloom comments, made before a federal judge in Washington, contrasted with an upbeat Nadella from February... CEOs often speak from both sides of their mouth, depending on who their audience is. On Monday, ...

Dave Rogenmoser, co-founder of Jasper. Photo by Bloomberg via Getty.

AI Startups Are Facing a Reckoning

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Oct 2, 2023 7:35am PDT · 10 comments

A reckoning may be coming for once-hot artificial intelligence startups. Among the most vulnerable: consumer apps (think Character.AI) and “thin wrapper” startups like CopyAI that merely provide a nice user interface on top of a third-party model from model developers like OpenAI. We got a sense of the slowdown last week, when Natasha and I... A reckoning may be coming for once-hot artificial intelligence startups. Among the most...

Photo by Midjourney.

AI Startups Are Trying to Make Usage-Based Pricing Happen

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Sep 28, 2023 7:00am PDT · 3 comments

Tech waves have often brought along with them corresponding changes in business and pricing models. For instance, when companies moved from using servers in their own data centers to ones hosted by public cloud providers, they also switched from buying packaged software a la carte to subscribing to cloud-based software, leading to the much-loved... Tech waves have often brought along with them corresponding changes in business and pricing...

Jony Ive. Photo via Getty.

Ex-Apple Designer Jony Ive and OpenAI’s Sam Altman Discussing AI Hardware Device; Why Open-Source and AGI Might Kill OpenAI

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Sep 27, 2023 7:20am PDT

If you were thinking of trading in your phone for the latest iPhone 15, you may want to hold off.Jony Ive, the renowned designer of the iPhone, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have been discussing building a new AI hardware device, Jessica and I reported on Tuesday. In a who’s who of tech, SoftBank CEO and investor Masayoshi Son has also talked to... If you were thinking of trading in your phone for the latest iPhone 15, you may want to hold off....

SAP HQ in Walldorf, Germany. Photo via Getty.

ChatGPT Does Its Best Siri Impression; SAP Joins the Ranks of AI Assistant Providers like Google, Amazon and Microsoft

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Sep 26, 2023 7:00am PDT

SAP HQ in Walldorf, Germany. Photo via Getty.

ChatGPT Does Its Best Siri Impression; SAP Joins the Ranks of AI Assistant Providers like Google, Amazon and Microsoft

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Sep 26, 2023 7:00am PDT

ChatGPT might be coming soon to a fridge or bedroom near you.On Monday, LLM developer OpenAI announced upcoming voice and image capabilities for its AI-powered chatbot. These new features will allow users to do things like asking for a dinner recipe based on the ingredients revealed by a photo of their fridge contents or requesting ChatGPT to... ChatGPT might be coming soon to a fridge or bedroom near you.On Monday, LLM developer OpenAI...

Photo by Midjourney.

Amazon’s ‘Switzerland’ Days Are Over; Are LLMs Cheating on Benchmark Tests?; OpenAI Quietly Develops Customizable GPTs

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Sep 25, 2023 8:00am PDT · 1 comment

Looks like Amazon’s finally made its AI bet.On Monday, model developer Anthropic announced that it had raised as much as $4 billion from Amazon. As part of the deal, Amazon Web Services will become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider, and Anthropic will train and deploy its future models on AWS’ training- and inference-specialized chips, Trainium... Looks like Amazon’s finally made its AI bet.On Monday, model developer Anthropic announced that...

Photo via Jacopo Pantaleoni.

Nvidia Engineer’s Message to Google AI Researchers: Leave Your Company

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Sep 21, 2023 7:00am PDT · 7 comments

Jacopo Pantaleoni joined Nvidia in 2001 when the company had less than 500 employees. He worked on what was then a small research project to improve Nvidia’s graphics processing units so they could better render images on computers and gaming consoles.More than two decades later, Nvidia has more than 26,000 employees and its GPUs are at the... Jacopo Pantaleoni joined Nvidia in 2001 when the company had less than 500 employees. He worked...

Photos via Eiso Kant (left) and YouTube/VMWare Tanzu (right)

How GitHub Copilot’s Co-Creator Raised $126 Million to Compete with His Former Employer

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Sep 20, 2023 7:00am PDT · 2 comments

Recent interest in artificial intelligence has focused on large-language models that aim to do everything from writing Shakespearean poetry to solving math riddles. But more entrepreneurs and investors have begun to wonder if LLMs that specialize in one field or another can be better than general purpose LLMs like OpenAI’s.One of those... Recent interest in artificial intelligence has focused on large-language models that aim to do...

Photo via Midjourney.

The Rise of Startups That Help Other Startups Evaluate LLMs

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Sep 19, 2023 7:00am PDT · 1 comment

Photo via Midjourney.

The Rise of Startups That Help Other Startups Evaluate LLMs

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Sep 19, 2023 7:00am PDT · 1 comment

All but a handful of artificial intelligence startups typically fall into one of two camps.The first group uses a single large-language model, typically OpenAI’s GPT-4, to power their applications. These startups, which have often raised millions in venture capital, usually say, “If you’ve got the cash, why not use the top-of-the-line model?”But... All but a handful of artificial intelligence startups typically fall into one of two camps.The...

OpenAI's Greg Brockman (left) and Google's Demis Hassabis (right). Photos by Getty.

OpenAI Hustles to Beat Google to Launch ‘Multimodal’ LLM

By Jon Victor · Sep 18, 2023 7:00am PDT

As fall approaches, Google and OpenAI are locked in a good ol’ fashioned software race, aiming to launch the next generation of large-language models: multimodal. These models can work with images and text alike, producing code for a website just by seeing a sketch of what a user wants the site to look like, for instance, or spitting out a text... As fall approaches, Google and OpenAI are locked in a good ol’ fashioned software race, aiming to...

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer speaks during a news conference following a Senate bipartisan Artificial Intelligence Insight Forum. Photo by Bloomberg via Getty.

Why Musk-Altman-Zuckerberg Summit is a Sideshow; Nvidia Adds Databricks to Investment Portfolio

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Sep 14, 2023 7:00am PDT

On Wednesday morning, dozens of U.S. senators and tech executives including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and xAI’s Elon Musk filed into the Kennedy Caucus Room just north of the U.S. Capitol. The chamber has held hearings on the sinking of the Titanic, the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Watergate scandal, but this time it was... On Wednesday morning, dozens of U.S. senators and tech executives including OpenAI’s Sam Altman,...

From left to right: Vipul Ved Prakash, Percy Liang and Chris Ré. Photos via Stanford University and SambaNova Systems.

GPU Cluster Startup ‘Together’ in Talks For Third Financing in 9 Months

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Sep 13, 2023 7:01am PDT

We’ve got news about an artificial intelligence startup that’s part of the recent trend of back-to-back funding rounds.Together, a startup providing developers with compute and software to train and run open-source AI models, is in talks with venture firms to raise up to $60 million in new funding, which would be its third financing event in... We’ve got news about an artificial intelligence startup that’s part of the recent trend of ...

Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifies in Congress in December 2018. Photo by Bloomberg via Getty.

Google Trial Puts LLMs On the Docket; Databricks Projects Explosive AI Spending

By Jon Victor · Sep 12, 2023 7:00am PDT

Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifies in Congress in December 2018. Photo by Bloomberg via Getty.

Google Trial Puts LLMs On the Docket; Databricks Projects Explosive AI Spending

By Jon Victor · Sep 12, 2023 7:00am PDT

Artificial intelligence developers are undoubtedly lapping up a couple of stories my colleagues published Monday about Nvidia leveraging its hardware dominance to muscle into cloud services and Databricks projecting big corporate spending on artificial intelligence services. But first, today’s news.The trial over the U.S. Department of Justice’s... Artificial intelligence developers are undoubtedly lapping up a couple of stories my colleagues...

Photo via Midjourney.

Nvidia, DataDirect Networks Shine in Latest Inference and Storage Benchmark Results

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Sep 11, 2023 9:02am PDT

Since ChatGPT’s launch last November, much of the discussion around artificial intelligence has shifted from awe and amazement to more pragmatic questions such as how to manage exploding compute costs associated with developing and using it commercially. Luckily, new findings from MLCommons, a non-profit that develops evaluations and... Since ChatGPT’s launch last November, much of the discussion around artificial intelligence has...

John Giannandrea. Photo via YouTube/TechCrunch.

Apple Enters the AI Race, Boosting Google in the Process

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Sep 7, 2023 7:00am PDT

In the race to win the large-language model race, one big tech name has not surfaced as a contestant: Apple. Until now.My colleague Wayne Ma reported on Wednesday that Apple created a team four years ago, long before the current generative AI hype cycle, to develop large-language models. In other words, Apple may not be as much of an LLM laggard... In the race to win the large-language model race, one big tech name has not surfaced as a...

Generated by Pika Labs.

A Rival to Runway Emerges; Meta’s AI Drama; A Robotics Vet Becomes a VC

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Sep 6, 2023 7:00am PDT

In the past two months, the number of people using a Discord server dubbed Pika has quietly grown from zero to more than 160,000. Thousands of users post requests such as, “a sleek, electric car silently glides across the screen against a backdrop of futuristic cityscapes” and “clouds move with breeze.” The server spits back three-second... In the past two months, the number of people using a Discord server dubbed Pika has quietly grown...

Chart by Shane Burke.

What We Can Learn From AI Startups in Y Combinator’s Latest Batch

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Sep 5, 2023 7:01am PDT

Chart by Shane Burke.

What We Can Learn From AI Startups in Y Combinator’s Latest Batch

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Sep 5, 2023 7:01am PDT

Tomorrow, dozens of startups will take to the virtual stage to pitch their ideas as part of Y Combinator’s iconic Demo Day, though some well-known investors have already gotten an early look at them. This year, more than 60% of the group—or 134 startups—are building applications or tools around artificial intelligence, mostly related to... Tomorrow, dozens of startups will take to the virtual stage to pitch their ideas as part of Y...