- Foundry Technologies is in talks to raise money at a valuation of $350 million, a significant increase from its previous valuation of $50 million.
- The increase in valuation highlights the trend of hot companies in the AI sector raising money at rapidly escalating valuations.
- Foundry is one of many AI startups that have experienced a meteoric rise in valuation this year.
- The company plans to rent servers to companies for running AI software.
- The risky pandemic-era fundraising trend of rapidly increasing valuations in short periods of time has returned.
- The rise of AI that can understand or mimic language has disrupted the power balance in enterprise software.
- Four new executives have emerged among the top 10, while last year's top executive, Adam Selipsky of Amazon Web Services, has been surpassed by a competitor due to AWS's slow adoption of large-language models.
- The leaders of Snowflake and Databricks, two database software giants, are now ranked closely together, indicating changes in the industry.
- The incorporation of AI software by customers has led to a new cohort of company operators and investors gaining influence in the market.
- Google is planning to revamp its voice assistant, Assistant, with technology based on large language models (LLMs).
- The article raises the question of which software companies will benefit the most from the LLM boom.
- Tech giants like Google, Meta Platforms, and Microsoft are well positioned to incorporate LLMs into their products.
- However, investors have also placed sizable bets on general-purpose LLM developers, with over $12 billion in VC money going into six LLM providers in the past year.
- OpenAI is receiving a significant investment of $10 billion from Microsoft, but other LLM providers are also attracting substantial investments.
Hugging Face, an AI startup, has raised $235 million in a Series D funding round, with participation from tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Nvidia, and IBM, and now has a valuation of $4.5 billion, signaling the growing demand for AI platforms and tools.
AI startup Modular has raised $100 million in funding, bringing its total funding to $130 million, with the goal of fixing AI infrastructure for developers through its Modular AI runtime engine and Mojo programming language for AI. The company aims to simplify the complex deployment of AI across different hardware, making it easier to develop and deploy machine learning workloads. The Modular AI engine enables AI workloads to be accelerated and portable across hardware, while Mojo provides a single programming language to support existing Python code with required performance and scalability.
A new startup called Ideogram has launched with $16.5 million in funding and aims to differentiate itself from other AI image generators by offering reliable text generation within the image, such as lettering on signs and company logos.
The most promising AI startups in 2023, according to top venture capitalists, include Adept, AlphaSense, Captions, CentML, Character.AI, Durable, Entos, Foundry, GPTZero, Hugging Face, LangChain, Leena AI, LlamaIndex, Luma AI, Lumachain, Magic, Mezli, Mindee, Next Insurance, Orby AI, Pinecone, Poly, Predibase, Replicant, Replicate, Run:ai, SaaS Labs, Secureframe, Treat, Twelve Labs.
The surge in generative AI technology is revitalizing the tech industry, attracting significant venture capital funding and leading to job growth in the field.
Context.ai, a company that helps businesses understand how well large language models (LLMs) are performing, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding to develop its service that measures user interactions with LLMs.
AI21 Labs, a text-generating AI startup, has raised $155 million in a Series C funding round, bringing its total raised to $283 million and valuing the company at $1.4 billion, with plans to expand its workforce and accelerate its R&D efforts.
Betaworks' latest cohort of their Camp "thematic accelerator" demonstrates their strong interest in AI as augmentation rather than just a standalone product, with the belief that AI will be used to augment human workflows and behaviors in the next few years. The cohort consists of 12 companies, each receiving $500,000 in funding.
Chinese companies and research institutions, including Baidu and ByteDance, have opened their AI-powered large language models to the public after receiving approval from Chinese authorities, with Baidu's language model Ernie Bot now fully available for download and feedback.
AI has garnered immense investment from venture capitalists, with over $40 billion poured into AI startups in the first half of 2023, raising concerns about who will benefit financially from its potential impact.
Alphabet's AI capabilities are discussed, highlighting potential benefits for investors.
AI In brief X, formerly known as Twitter, has updated its privacy policy to state that it may train its AI models on user posts, with the policy change expected to take effect on September 29; however, CEO Elon Musk has clarified that private data, such as text in direct messages, will not be used to train the models.
Doug Lenat, a prominent figure in the field of AI, has passed away, leaving behind a legacy of pioneering work in neurosymbolic systems and machine reasoning.
AI21 Labs, an Israeli startup, has raised $155 million in its Series C round, with a valuation of $1.4 billion; the company offers API access to its language models and tools designed for various tasks like summarization and question answering.
US newspaper chain Gannett has temporarily halted the publication of AI-generated sports articles after the machine-written pieces received criticism for their errors and poor writing quality.
Generative artificial intelligence, particularly large language models, has the potential to revolutionize various industries and add trillions of dollars of value to the global economy, according to experts, as Chinese companies invest in developing their own AI models and promoting their commercial use.
Story Protocol, an open-source network for creators and intellectual property, has raised over $54 million in funding to simplify IP processes and address concerns related to AI, allowing artists to track and share revenues from their work.
IBM has introduced new generative AI models and capabilities on its Watsonx data science platform, including the Granite series models, which are large language models capable of summarizing, analyzing, and generating text, and Tuning Studio, a tool that allows users to tailor generative AI models to their data. IBM is also launching new generative AI capabilities in Watsonx.data and embarking on the technical preview for Watsonx.governance, aiming to support clients through the entire AI lifecycle and scale AI in a secure and trustworthy way.
Imbue, an AI research lab, has secured $200 million in Series B funding, with a valuation of $1 billion, to develop AI agents that can code using reasoning as their foundation model. The funding round included participation from Astera Institute, Nvidia, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, Notion co-founder Simon Last, and others.
Cathie Wood's Ark Invest predicts that AI software revenue will reach $14 trillion by 2030, and believes that Salesforce and The Trade Desk are attractive investments due to their potential in the AI market and their current valuations.
European AI startup Druid has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round to support its U.S. growth, which currently accounts for the majority of its revenue, as it expands its conversational business applications powered by generative AI.
Artificial intelligence and analytics firm Databricks has raised over $500 million in a Series I funding round, including strategic investor Nvidia, as it prepares for an anticipated IPO and expands its partnership with Nvidia to focus on generative AI. The fundraising round values Databricks at $43 billion and positions it as the eighth-most valuable private company globally. The company is closely monitoring the IPO market but will not be quick to go public, waiting for the macro environment to stabilize.
LastMile AI has raised $10 million in a seed funding round to develop and integrate generative AI models into apps, aiming to democratize generative AI for software engineers and simplify the AI developer journey.
Accenture has invested in Writer, a platform that uses generative AI to help enterprises create and shape content, with the aim of increasing productivity and driving business impact across various functions.
AI startup Darrow has raised $35 million in funding for its AI-powered data engine that searches for class action litigation potential, with active cases resulting from its insights currently totaling around $10 billion in claims, and plans to use the funding to expand its team, add new legal domains to its tools, and invest in technology assets.
Writer, a generative AI startup, has raised $100 million in a Series B funding round to develop industry-specific text-generating AI models, bringing its total raised to $126 million and valuing the company at between $500 million and $750 million post-money.
