7/21/23

🚀 Weekly Tech Highlights

Announcement from OpenAI and More Commit to AI Transparency Amidst Regulation Talks - Major AI players including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Inflection, Meta, and Amazon have volunteered for model transparency, pushed by the Whitehouse and following OpenAI's recent FTC probe.

News to Receive a Major Boost Through LLM Partnerships and New Tools - OpenAI is teaming up with American Journalism Project while Google looks to connect its New Genesis tool to major news publishers.

New Stanford Studies Claiming that LLMs Getting Worse - A new Stanford and Berkeley study shows a decline in GPT-4's performance and another shows longer prompts are yielding less accuracy.

Tech Giants Microsoft, Apple, and Meta Continue the Battle for AI Dominance - Microsoft and Meta team up to provide free access to Llama 2 via Azure, while Apple tests the newest ChatGPT competitor - 'AppleGPT'.

TikTok Expands into New Markets with New Streaming Service and Elevate Program - TikTok’s streaming service will first be available to a number of non-US countries and a new partnership with Warner Music Group aims to identify the next wave of rising artists.

SAP Goes Heavy on AI with a $1B commitment Announced - Software giant SAP announces commitment to back AI with significant investment in startups Cohere, Anthropic, and Aleph Alpha accelerating the company’s $1B pledge to Gen AI startups.

🧠The hottest thing in tech this week

Chips Are Hot - Microchip capacity is a potential chokepoint on AI expansion

Demand for GPU servers in the US is outpacing supply from major providers.

Despite leading in the AI chip game, TSMC predicts a 10% sales drop in 2023 due to economic troubles and reports a 23% fall in Q2 profits, planning a quick capacity boost in response to the AI demand surge. The Taiwan-based manufacturer has also delayed its Arizona production facility launch till 2025 due to a skilled labor shortage, presenting a hurdle to the Biden administration's semiconductor production ramp-up plans.

Meanwhile, Tesla demand is pushing Nvidia to its limits. Struggling to meet Tesla's Nvidia hardware demands for self-driving systems, Elon Musk responds with a $1 Billion investment in a custom supercomputer, 'Dojo' which aims to enhance the Full Self Driving (FSD) feature by training machine learning models on video data from its vehicles.

This all hasn’t slowed NVIDIA’s venture capital splurge, the chipmaker recently invested in Adept's $350M Series B, CoreWeave's $221B Series B and Cohere's $270M Series C. But it could be why they are in talks to make a major equity investment in Lambda Labs, a startup that leases out GPU chips.

“We obviously need to train our neural net with data from millions of vehicles. The more training data you have, the better the results. Tesla is clearly at the cutting edge of AI development.” - Elon Musk, Founder of Tesla

🔓Deals Unlocked

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Closed Deals:

1. Tractable’ AI Appraisals - AI pioneer Tractable secures $65M from SoftBank, revolutionizing car and property damage appraisals with swift, AI-enabled methods.

2. AI Meets Industrial - In a $55M round led by Lingotto, Neura Robotics advances their AI-powered robots for logistics facilities.

3. Data Management, Reinvented - Hammerspace raised $56.7M from investors including Ark Invest and Samsung investors to bolster its AI-driven approach to optimizing business growth cycles.

4. AI That Balances Supply & Demand - Dallas Unicorn o9 Solutions scores $116M from General Atlantic and Generation Investment, to expand its AI-driven 'Digital Brain'.

5. $70M for The Digital Creators Bank - Karat funds its Series B from TriplePoint Capital and SignalFire, offering financial services for online creators with the support of industry leaders like Ludwig Ahgren and Pat Flynn.

6. Expanding the Electric Bike Market - Indonesian startup Maka Motors closed a $37M seed round co-led by AC Ventures, Korea’s SV Investment and East Ventures to produce 600,000 bikes by 2030.

7. Series A Powering LLMs with Clean Data - Unstructured.io raised $25M from M12 Ventures, Bain, and MongoDB to streamline enterprise data for large language models.

Companies on the rise:

1. Pioneering Private ML - [FedML] is growing start up backed by Camford Capital creating a future where anyone can create AI models based on their own private and siloed data.

2. Lambda Labs’ Push To Expanding GPU Leasing - Rumored to be in talks with Nvidia, [Lambda Labs] is looks to raise at a $1B valuation to continue its exponential growth in the high-demand GPU leasing market.

3. [Open Deal] Autonomous Vehicle Manufacturer Seeks to Add Runway - [Aurora Innovation] announced a common stock purchase agreement concurrent with the company's public offering raising $600 million through a private placement.

4. Language Tutoring Pioneer Finds its Groove - [Preply] the language app famed for its live tutors, reaffirms its commitment to AI as it looks to take foothold as an EdTech leader.

That wraps up this edition of The Tech Buzz. As always, we're grateful for your time and attention in staying up-to-date with the world of Tech and AI. We're excited to see how these developments reshape the tech landscape and bring new opportunities for growth.

Artificial intelligence isn't just the future—it's already shaping our present. Stay curious, stay informed, and most importantly, stay innovative.

Until next Week!

The Tech Buzz Team