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Welcome to the second issue of AI Future - your weekly one-stop shop for all things AI.

Every week brings another big step forward in AI capabilities. This past week was no different!

In the news this week:

• 🎵 Video and Music AI

• 🍎 Start the Apple AI Clock

• 🤖 AI Chatbots and Mental Health

• 🛠️ Cohere Raises $270M

📰 AI in the News

Anticipating Apple’s AI

Number of times Apple said “AI” in its developer conference “WWDC”: zero.

Does that mean Apple isn’t working on AI? No, but it’s symbolic of how you should expect Apple to work with AI - a sort of “We don’t do buzzwords - we ship amazing products.”

Product announcements from the developer conference tied in some of the recent technology that power tools like ChatGPT, but none of them are significant enough to mention. Think “we made spelling autocorrect better”.

It’s now clear why Apple didn’t do anything related to AI: their new VR/AR headset is a really impressive technological feat, one that would require the attention of an entire company.

But the game is now on. The opportunity for Apple in AI is wide open - just imagine if Siri could actually talk and act like a human - and now that the headset is out, they can turn their full attention to AI. It’s anybody’s guess as to how they’ll play, but whatever they do, it’ll be amazing.

Making Headway in Text-to-Video/Music

Last week, AI startup Runway and Meta made big launches in the “text-to-video” and “text-to-music” spaces, respectively.

Context: AI can generate high-quality text (via ChatGPT) and images (via AI startup Midjourney). But video and music are both harder research problems. While AI-generated video/music are far from competing with Hollywood today, the AI community largely believes they could reach those levels very, very soon.

Runway (recently valued at $1.5 billion) publicly launched Gen-2, a tool that generates animated video based on your entered text. Showing is better than telling; see examples from the community here: 1, 2, 3.

Meta released MusicGen, their AI model to generate music using text (you can try it here). It’s the highest-quality model so far when it comes to musicality and sound quality/consistency.

With AI video/music, we get a front-row seat to just how fast AI is moving. And considering these models were spitting out nonsense just 6 months ago, who knows where we’ll be in 2024?

More Stories

• Why AI Will Save the World: Marc Andreessen (general partner, Andreessen Horowitz) makes a staunchly pro-AI argument amidst growing concerns about AI. (link)

• Can AI make older adults feel less lonely? (link)

• An overview of the widespread security risks AI browser extensions pose. (link)

• Nature, the popular scientific journal, is banning the use of generative AI in images and videos on the platform. (link)

• Lightspeed Venture Partners published an overview of the Fintech x AI market landscape. (link)

• 10 free generative AI courses from Google. (link)

💡 Industry Insights

🏥 Healthcare

Time savings for medical professionals: Over half of nurses’ time is spent on paperwork and communication vs. patient care. AI’s clearest opportunity is to eliminate as much of this time as possible - and it’s happening fast. Microsoft combined OpenAI’s GPT-4 model with its conversational AI subsidiary Nuance Communications to supercharge its clinical note-taking products. (link)

Loneliness and mental health: One of the earliest use cases for ChatGPT was simply someone to talk to. Purpose-built AI chatbots (e.g., Character.ai) for chatting use cases are seeing sky-high engagement metrics. Is this AI hype? Or is it a signal of AI’s potential to curb the loneliness crisis and cope with mental health issues? (link)

🏠 Real Estate

Real estate marketing: Software providers serving real estate agents are actively working on AI integrations to supercharge their customers’ marketing abilities. Keller Williams is building AI into their email marketing solution. Above all, waves of agents are leaning on ChatGPT to write listing descriptions, repurpose content and develop new call scripts/email templates. (link)

👩‍⚖️ Legal

Adobe covering legal cost: Adobe’s launching their AI tools to the enterprise with a sweetener: they’ll cover any legal expenses arising from copyright challenges. Legal risk is a top concern for many enterprises. Stable Diffusion (maker of an AI image generation model) is currently facing an ongoing lawsuit. (link)

EvenUp closes $50.5m in funding: EvenUp builds AI products that automate workflows for generating demand letters, targeting the nearly 300,000 personal injury attorneys in the US. Customers see 30% higher payouts on average by using EvenUp. (link)

📈 Venture Deals of the Week

• Cohere, an AI infrastructure platform for enterprises, raised $270 million at a $2.1 billion valuation. (link)

• AI efficiency platform Granica raised $45 million and launched out of stealth. (link)

• EliseAI, a conversational AI product for rentals, closes a $35 million Series C. (link)

• Contextual AI raises a $20 million seed to build generative AI for enterprises. (link)

• Hyro, which uses AI to improve text and voice communication for enterprises, secured a $20 million Series B. (link)

🛠️ Latest AI Tools

• OpenObserve uses AI to track, measure, and analyze huge amounts of digital data like logs, metrics, and traces. (link)

• WriteSonic’s AI Article Writer 5.0 can craft articles in your brand’s unique voice. (link)

• Uncrop lets you uncrop your photos to any image format. (link)

• Leapp lets you create custom learning plans for any topic using AI. (link)

• ReactPy enables you to code and design ML models in Python without Javascript. (link)

• Noodl AI transforms text prompts into UI, functions, and database queries for app development. (link)

• Synthesis launched a personalized math tutor for kids. (link)

• Liftoff is an AI interview prep tool that provides feedback on your mock interviews. (link)

• SuperAGI is an open-source framework to build, manage and run useful Autonomous AI Agents. (link)

• ClientZen consolidates and transforms your customer feedback into actionable insights using AI. (link)

• Surmount AI wants to automate your investing using AI. (link)

• Machined.ai writes batches of SEO-optimized articles at scale. (link)

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