People thought the 4-week-old French startup raising $113 million was peak AI fundraising. Last week shattered that. Read on…

In the news this week:

• 💵 A $1.3 billion fundraising round

• 🌀 Stability AI chaos

• 👁️ Detecting eye disease using AI

• 🇪🇺 European industry cautions on regulation

📰 AI in the News

Inflection Point?

In “startups building AI chatbots”, there’s ChatGPT by OpenAI, followed by Claude by Anthropic, then everyone else.

That was the rough ordering until last week, when Inflection AI (started by Mustafa Suleyman - cofounder of Google’s AI lab DeepMind - and Reid Hoffman - cofounder of LinkedIn) announced they raised $1.3 billion at a $4 billion valuation.

Inflection AI is building Pi, a “personal AI for everyone”. Based on their job postings and public comments, that appears to mean making a uniquely customized AI model for every person, similar to the movie Her.

Compare that to ChatGPT, where everyone uses the same model.

There’s a lot of R&D that needs to happen, but one of the standouts: the training infrastructure. It’s expensive to train any model, let alone 7 billion unique models while maintaining quality.

That’s probably a good guess as to where the $1.3 billion cash is going to be spent.

Big Tech Investments in AI

The chatter last week doesn’t stop at big fundraising rounds.

It also revolves around who is participating. And for the Inflection round + two other large rounds for AI startups, people are noticing a trend:

• Inflection’s $1.3 billion round had major participation from Microsoft and Nvidia

• Runway raised $141 million with participation from Google and Nvidia

• Typeface raised $100 million with participation from Google and Salesforce

The takeaway? Big Tech is leaning into investments as a way to build strategic relationships with the generative AI category.

The cash almost doesn’t matter - Microsoft can plow hundreds of millions into Inflection because it doesn’t have the financial return objectives that a classic VC would.

Big Tech is fully awake now. Product teams have been shaken by the AI wave, and now corporate development arms are being asked how they could help advance their positions.

More Stories

• Databricks acquires MosaicML at $20 million/employee (link)

• An Interview with Marc Andreessen about AI and How You Change the World (link)

• 35% of the startups chosen for Y Combinator’s latest batch are AI-focused (link)

• Google wants to figure out how to remove info from AI models without impacting quality (link)

• Open source leader Stability AI faces concerns about internal chaos (link)

• Unity is building “text-to-video games” (link)

• 2/3 of those surveyed still are not using AI products (link)

💡 Industry Insights

🏥 Healthcare

AI is key to value-based care: AI can 1) help clinicians stay on top of an ever-growing mountain of clinical data, 2) surface the right data at the right time and 3) give nurses leverage and help them focus on patient care rather than paperwork. (link)

Detecting eye disease: The UK’s NHS is working on AI-assisted eye scans that can help detect over 50 retinal diseases with performance levels on par with expert ophthalmologists. The research is helping target the 10% of all NHS outpatient appointments that are related to eye problems. (link)

Count calories with a camera: Forget manually logging ingredients. SnapCalorie just raised $3 million to estimate calories in a photo. It’s not a new concept, but they’ve got better models and accuracy. (link)

🏠 Real Estate

Luxury agents comment on AI: They’re excited about: chatbots / customer experience use cases, using generative AI for marketing (including Adobe’s new Generative Fill to create custom photos) and automating work. What they’re watching: changes in SEO will drive demand for personal branding and video. (link)

👩‍⚖️ Legal

Games platform blocks AI: Valve, maker of the popular Steam gaming platform, drives immense discovery for new game publishers. But they’re concerned about copyright law as it relates to AI. So they’re banning games that use AI-generated artwork. The lack of clarity around AI and copyright could cause more platforms to stay conservative and block AI. (link)

Industry doesn’t like the EU AI bill: Europe’s leading companies have signed a letter saying the EU AI Act will jeopardize Europe’s ability to compete in the once-in-a-generation opportunity that is AI. Signatories include Renault, Siemens, Heineken and Airbus. (link)

We can use ChatGPT, you can’t: Everyone in law agrees that generative AI will be a big deal. But way fewer want their outside law firms using it. At issue: confidentiality, privacy, security. (link)

📈 Venture Deals

• Augmedics snaps up $82.5M to advance spinal surgery using AR and AI (link)

• Captions, a service to help creators streamline video production, raised a $25 million Series B (link)

• CalypsoAI, which validates AI apps before they launch, raised $23 million (link)

• WAVS AI, an AI music platform, raised $20 million (link)

• Outbound, a provider of AI agents for administrative tasks, snagged $16 million (link)

• Zenarate, an AI simulation training platform for agents, raised $15 million (link)

• BentoML, which helps devs build AI products w/ pre-trained models, secured $9 million in funding. (link)

🛠️ Latest AI Tools

• Journey creates interactive presentations to help customers win more deals. (link)

• Chatsonic is a ChatGPT wrapper with real-time data, images, and voice search. (link)

• Playground’s Mixed Image Editing combines real & synthetic images to produce photorealistic visuals. (link)

• PenParrot is an extension that brings ChatGPT to every text box in your browser. (link)

• Respeecher is an AI voice library for content creators. (link)

• Retrato is an app that turns selfies into professional photos. (link)

• AI Tools Website Ranking is a list of the most visited AI websites by web traffic. (link)

• Hour One transforms text, slides, & prompts into professional videos (includes templates & assets). (link)

• Factiverse detects mistakes, bias, dispute in news, reports, and documents. (link)

• Holler uses AI to analyze customer survey responses. (link)

• Airfocus AI Assist helps product managers be more productive using AI. (link)

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