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"It's a bit like designing the principle of evolution" AI Godfather on the promise and risks of advanced AI.

Google Deepmind unites researchers for an ImageNet of robot actions. Anthropic seeks $30B valuation.

Author

Tara Tan
October 12, 2023

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Strange Review. The recent events in Israel and Palestine have had a sobering effect on the world, and this sentiment seems to be reflected in the AI industry as well. Deepgram, a speech recognition startup, had to make the difficult decision of laying off 20% of its workforce, indicating the need for companies to exercise constraint in these uncertain times. Similarly, OpenAI, despite achieving a record revenue month for its mobile app, has reported a slowdown in its growth. These developments highlight the challenges faced by companies and investors in the AI world, as they navigate through the current global landscape.

Wishing for peace.

The Long Read

Godfather of Artificial Intelligence" Geoffrey Hinton on the promise, risks of advanced AI. Hinton has been called "the Godfather of AI," a British computer scientist whose controversial ideas helped make advanced artificial intelligence possible and, so, changed the world. Hinton believes that AI will do enormous good but he says that AI systems may be more intelligent than we know and there's a chance the machines could take over. Read the story.

“What do you mean we don't know exactly how it works? It was designed by people.” — Scott Pelley

“No, it wasn't. What we did was we designed the learning algorithm. That's a bit like designing the principle of evolution.” — Geoffrey Hinton

🔥 Latest news

  • OpenAI considers in-house chip manufacturing amid global shortage. OpenAI is reportedly delving into the prospect of manufacturing processing chips in-house amidst a worldwide shortage of these in-demand components. Sources familiar with the matter disclosed that OpenAI is actively exploring options, including evaluating an undisclosed company for potential acquisition to bolster its AI chip-making ambitions. https://tinyurl.com/5c6y7yey 

  • ChatGPT’s mobile app hit record $4.58M in revenue last month, but growth is slowing. There’s some good news and bad news for ChatGPT’s mobile efforts. On the positive side, the AI chatbot continues to see the number of app installs and its revenue grow, with September setting a new record on both fronts: 15.6M downloads and nearly $4.6M in gross revenue across its iOS and Android apps worldwide. However, according to new data from market intelligence firm Appfigures, revenue growth has now begun to slow, dropping to 20% growth as of September vs 30%-31% in July and 39% in August. https://tcrn.ch/48F97hf 

  • Google’s DeepMind robotics announced the work it has done with 33 research institutes designed to create a massive, shared database called Open X-Embodiment. The researchers behind the project liken it to ImageNet, a database of more than 14 million images that dates back to 2009. https://tcrn.ch/3F348JF 

  • Anthropic seeking $30B valuation through new fundraise. Anthropic is reportedly in advanced discussions to secure at least $2B in a new round of funding, according to reports from The information. The news comes on the heels of a significant $1.25B investment commitment from Amazon recently. Google, which acquired approximately 10% of Anthropic in 2022, is also anticipated to participate in this funding round. https://tinyurl.com/243a3v7t 

  • Adobe teases a new revolutionary photo editing tool. Dubbed Adobe Project Stardust, the object-aware editing engine automatically identifies individual objects in regular photographs, allowing them to be easily moved around and changed. https://tinyurl.com/2tvxyw55 

  • Andreessen Horowitz discusses investing in Ideogram, a Midjourney rival. The startup has plans to raise $75M to $100M in a new round seeking a pre-money valuation of $500M. https://tinyurl.com/yv2bd4ch 

🎓 Recent Academic Papers

  • Zephyr 7B Alpha: A new 7B parameter GPT-like model beats Llama 70B on MT Bench https://tinyurl.com/nhah4z8m 

  • Mitigating stereotypical biases in text to image generative systems: Runway’s latest paper that takes an important step towards better representation for all people https://tinyurl.com/55t4bpdw 

  • MetaAI unveils AnyMAL: Revolutionizing multimodal language models for seamless integration of text, images, videos, audio, an motion sensor data https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.16058 

  • Stable Signature by MetaAI: A new method for watermarking images created by open source generative AI https://tinyurl.com/2myfdku7 

🔧 Cool Tools and Experiments

  • ElevenLabs introduces AI Dubbing that can translate video and audio content in over 20 languages https://tinyurl.com/ycy49zyh 

  • Adobe adds new AI updates to Firefly, Illustrator and Lightroom, including Firefly Vector Model that can generate an array of editable vector graphics from text prompts https://tinyurl.com/58dd2cmp 

💰 Latest Startup Fundings

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