Welcome to AI Future - your weekly one-stop shop for all things AI.

This week is all about piling hundreds of millions into AI…especially one player who doesn’t mind charging absolutely nothing in return. Read on for more.

In the news this week:

• 😤 Meta steps up

• 🏥 Oracle plays in AI for healthcare

• 🇨🇳 China gobbles up AI chips

• 💰 Weeks-old AI startup raises $113 million

📰 AI in the News

Meta Gives It Away

There’s a joke that goes: Meta is the real “OpenAI” (Meta being the owner of Facebook/Instagram and OpenAI being the maker of ChatGPT).

Meaning, despite OpenAI’s name, they’ve actually been extremely closed - nobody has access to their underlying code, techniques, models, etc. Instead, they keep it secret and charge you to use it.

Meanwhile, Meta has been on a tear releasing research and models to the community. The major news from last week is that it’s making LLaMA, a fairly powerful language model, free and open for commercial use.

That means anyone can build and sell AI products using LLaMA without having to give Meta a single cent - unlike the millions some startups are having to pay OpenAI.

Meta’s likely incentive here is to foster a strong developer ecosystem around its model and giving it insider access to community projects that it can then build directly into its ecosystem.

OpenAI Wants AI Models to Use Programs

ChatGPT is useful, but the real power of AI will unlock when you can connect AI to other systems.

You don’t want ChatGPT to say, “Here’s how I would respond to this support ticket.” You want it to actually respond to the support ticket. But that would require you to give ChatGPT direct access to your customer support systems.

Developers and startups are sprinting to build these types of AI-powered layers, and OpenAI’s just released a new feature that makes it easier for them to get ChatGPT to talk in code (vs. English).

From here, we’re going to see more startups that “do things” rather than just say things: book flights, reply to support tickets, evaluate claims, etc.

More Stories

• Accenture plans to invest $3 billion into AI development over the next three years, along with having 80,000 employees working on AI projects. (link)

• Walmart, LinkedIn, and Meta are all launching internal generative AI “playgrounds” so employees can experiment with AI. (link)

• McKinsey offers its view on which jobs will get impacted by AI (link); BCG shares stats on who’s actually using AI at the moment (link)

• New “AI doctor” predicts the risk of death with 85% accuracy. (link)

• Paul McCartney will be releasing one final Beatles song using AI later this year (link)

• A Stack Overflow survey found that 77% of developers are ready to use AI but only 3% “highly trust” AI coding tools. (link)

• The European Parliament voted to pass draft legislation of the EU AI Act with an overwhelming majority. (link)

💡 Industry Insights

🏥 Healthcare

The “CAIO” in healthcare: What should a Chief AI Officer do, if you had to have one? Some opinions: 1) drive thoughtful use of AI, 2) drive workforce transformation while expanding “workforce” to include AI models and robots, 3) think CIO or Chief Digital Officer, but AI. As AI continues to anchor conversations every boardroom, is Chief AI Officer a real role or is it the latest renaming of what’s existed before? (link)

Oracle building specialized models: Oracle CTO Larry Ellison says they’re building specialized AI models for medical professionals and first responders. Specialized models are the future, and Oracle is betting that they have the industry knowledge and distribution to command the healthcare AI market. (link)

🏠 Real Estate

High leverage architecture: Enterprising architecture firms are leaning on newfound data and AI capabilities to build leverage. Zaha Hadid Architects claims it can generate 100,000 interior designs in a day using data that can inform seating configurations, ideal appliance placements and more. (link)

Robots talking to renters: EliseAI’s recent $35 million funding round in a tech down market is showing that AI has a role to play in talking to renters. EliseAI is an AI product specifically focused on automating conversations between current/potential renters and apartment buildings and handling them over text, email, phone, chat and more. The upshot: any customer support-like workflow might soon be mostly powered by AI.

🌎 World Affairs

The race to build: The International Supercomputing Conference recently released its annual ranking of the top 500 supercomputers in the world. The US places extremely well with 5 of the top 10 entries. But who’s unhappy? The UK and India - the former at 30th and the latter at 75th. UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wants to invest £900 million to climb the ranks, and a recent Q&A with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had prominent Indian figures wondering where India should be. Filling out the top 10: Japan, Finland, Italy, China. (link)

China wants chips: Chinese companies like ByteDance (TikTok creator), Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba are all building their own AI models. And AI models need a lot of chips. ByteDance alone has ordered $1 billion worth of NVIDIA chips this year. That’s more than all of China in 2022. We’re only halfway through the year… (link)

📈 Venture Deals of the Week

• Mistral, France’s OpenAI equivalent, raised $113 million in seed funding (!) and plans to release its models in 2024. (link)

• Synthesia, which creates scarily real AI avatars for professional videos, raised a $90 million Series C. (link)

• Elise AI, a conversational AI designed for real estate, snagged $35 million in funding. (link)

• Striveworks raised $33 million to help companies build, train, and deploy models at scale. (link)

• Vectara raised a $28.5 seed round for its “conversational search” that helps enterprises sort through corporate data. (link)

🛠️ Latest AI Tools

• Hotjar AI creates surveys and generates reports based on text responses to them. (link)

• Juri Flow lets you upload legal documents and ask questions to an array of AI lawyers. (link)

• Uizard’s Autodesigner is a text-to-design tool that generates mockups for apps and sites. (link)

• Fini lets you turn your knowledge base into a chatbot that integrates w/ Slack, Discord, and Intercom. (link)

• Scalenut automates your entire SEO workflow from researching to writing to optimizing. (link)

• Framer lets you design and publish a website in seconds from text prompts. (link)

• Receiptor lets you extract receipts and invoices from emails using AI. (link)

• Smart document startup Coda’s AI work assistant is now available. (link)

• Credal is the full suite of tools you need to securely adopt AI across your org. (link)

• SuperDashHQ provides ready-to-use components to incorporate AI into existing applications. (link)

• Composer is a no-code AI platform that lets you build, backtest, and execute trading algorithms. (link)

• Riverside has a free tool that transcribes any video in 100+ languages. (link)

• Google’s developer APIs (rivaling the OpenAI suite) are now generally available. (link)

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