Saudi Arabia launches a billion-dollar AI accelerator to become a global AI leader, Cognition Labs raises $175M from Founders Fund, and Augment secures $252M to rival GitHub Copilot.
The Artificial Intelligence news, week 17/2024
Happy Saturday everyone!
I'm Rubén Colomer, GP at Next Tier Ventures and this is AI Weekly Digest, a weekly roundup of the latest news, funding rounds, tools, interesting reads, events, and jobs related to Artificial Intelligence.
News 🗞️📰
Saudi Arabia aims to become a global AI superpower. After creating a $100 billion fund to invest in AI and injecting an additional $40 billion, they are now setting up a billion-dollar accelerator that will provide financing, technological resources, and government contracts for companies that set up there.
Los Angeles is using artificial intelligence in a pilot program to predict homelessness and allocate social aid. The model integrates data from seven different county departments such as emergency visits, healthcare, public benefits programs, food stamps, income support, and services for individuals or data from the criminal justice system.
Coca-Cola has invested $1.1 billion in Microsoft Cloud and its generative AI capabilities through an agreement with Microsoft to align Coca-Cola's technology strategy across the organization, enable the adoption of cutting-edge technology, and promote innovation and productivity worldwide.
Rayban Meta glasses are updated and become multimodal. Now we can tell them to play music, recognize images, record videos or make video calls among many other things with the classic style of Rayban Wayfarers.
Adobe launches its third update of Firefly and gives it unmatched photorealistic quality, the ability to apply styles, more detail and precision, along with a greater variety of new editing options. (you can try it here)
Artificial Intelligence will create 1.61 million jobs in Spain in the next 10 years. Currently, 45.5% of Spanish companies already incorporate AI into their daily operations.
Tools 🧰🛠️
Anon is a tool (still in beta) that offers methods to integrate your applications with services that do NOT have APIs.
Llama 3 is now available for download on your mobile device using HuggingChat, accessible through the App Store or web. Simply select Llama 3 from the available models
Padboat helps you improve your sales pitch using realistic roleplays with AI
Wizad is a tool and mobile app that helps you publish content on your networks easily thanks to Generative AI
Sonnet is your end-to-end meeting assistant. Your meeting notes and CRM, automated. Sonnet records calls, takes notes, and manages relationships, so you can focus on your meetings.
Funding 💼💸
Cognition Labs: This six-month-old company, which recently launched Devin, considered the first AI software engineer, has just raised a $175M round from Founders Fund at a valuation of $2 billion.
Anon: This tool that allows you to integrate your applications with services that do NOT have an API, which we discussed in tools, has raised $6.5M in a round led by Union Square Ventures.
Augment: A GitHub Copilot rival that uses AI to help developers code, raises a $252 million round. The company is backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and other top investors. The platform can generate complete code, fix bugs, and optimize code performance. It is also capable of integrating with a variety of well-known code editors such as Visual Studio Code and Sublime Text.
BforeAI: The French predictive security company has announced its $15M Series A led by SYN Ventures. Previous investors such as Karma Ventures, Karista, Addendum Capital have also participated, and a new investment from the Partnership Fund for New York City has been added.
Nooks: The AI startup specializing in increasing the productivity of inside sales teams has just raised a $22M round. Its platform analyzes email, call and CRM data to identify sales opportunities and automate repetitive tasks.
Perplexity: Launches Enterprise Pro and announces a $62.7M round and partnerships with SoftBank and Deutsche Telekom.
Oden Technologies: Closes a $28.5 million Series B to drive AI solutions in the manufacturing industry. New investors in the round include Flat Capital, Sebastian Siemiatkowski (CEO of Klarna), Recurring Capital Partners and follow-on from existing investors such as Atómico.
Simbian: The Mountain View cybersecurity startup that has developed a platform that uses AI to optimize existing security tools has just raised a $10M round from several investors, including Coinbase.
NeuBird: A startup that has developed a generative AI platform that allows companies to automate and optimize IT operations, has raised $22M in a seed round.
Parloa: A German AI customer service automation startup has just raised its Series B of $66M led by Altimeter Capital, bringing its total capital raised to date to $98M.
FlexAI: A French startup that allows you to train AI models in the cloud easily, has raised a new round of $30M. The company has a simple user interface that makes the platform easy to use, even for users without AI experience, as well as a pay-per-use model that offers greater freedom.
M&A 💰
Apple has acquired the Paris-based artificial intelligence startup Datakalab amid its push to deliver on-device AI tools.
Nvidia is acquiring Run:ai, a Tel Aviv-based company that makes it easier for developers and operations teams to manage and optimize their AI hardware infrastructure. The deal details are not being made public, but could be $700 million.
Interesting Reads 💡🤔
Apple has launched OpenELM, open-source small AI models designed to run directly on Apple devices and not in the cloud. The 4 new models are now available on Hugging Face
Accenture report on the change in work due to AI. Work, workforce and workers reinvented
Tech 🤖💻
Researchers from the University of Illinois Computer Science Department have demonstrated in this study that ChatGPT-4 can exploit software vulnerabilities thanks to the information present in security advisories published on specialized websites.
This Anthropic article explores the detection of "infiltrated agents" (also known as "sleeper agents" or "AI trojans") in LLMs. Infiltrated agents are LLMs intentionally trained to behave normally and helpfully on the surface, while actually hiding a dangerous hidden goal.
Phi 3 is a series of LLMs, with sizes ranging from 3B to 14B parameters, which obtain very good results in the benchmarks, giving some surprising data, such as the small 3B that exceeds ChatGPT in some points.
FinLangNet is a model designed to improve risk prediction in the financial sector. Adopting natural language processing techniques, FinLangNet uniquely models credit loan trajectories similar to linguistic structures. (link to Github repo)
Cohere Toolkit is a GitHub repo with open-source components for building chatbots with RAG
Adobe launches a new product, VideoGigaGAN, an artificial intelligence model designed to improve and enlarge low-resolution videos up to 8 times their original size. Based on a specific GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) called GigaGAN, it addresses challenges such as the strange artifacts commonly seen in scaling technologies.
Events 🪩🎉
AI Conference (June 2-7) - Las Vegas, Nevada, USA and Virtual.
An extensive event with sessions on generative AI, AIOps, and applied machine learning, including tutorials and a technology exhibition.
Artificial Intelligence & Intelligent Automation 2024 (June 3-5) - Frankfurt, Germany.
Explore intelligent automation and AI applications in European business environments.
AI and Big Data Expo North America (June 5-6) - Santa Clara, California, USA.
This event is key for professionals who want to explore innovations and strategies in enterprise technologies, including AI and machine learning.
Autonomous Innovation Summit 2024 (June 5-6) - Online.
Summit focused on autonomous innovation, covering advances in AI and its impact on various industries.
Generative AI Summit 2024 (June 10-11) - San Francisco, California, USA.
A focus on generative AI, with panels and workshops led by leaders in AI technology and applications.
The AI Summit London (June 12-13) - London, UK.
A highlight of London Tech Week with practical use cases of AI by global brands.
IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence (June 25-27) - Singapore.
This event brings together AI experts to discuss innovations and advances in the field, with a strong focus on AI research.
AI Engineer World’s Fair (June 25-27) - San Francisco, California, USA and Virtual.
This free event for virtual attendees focuses on AI software and hardware development, with a wide range of sessions and workshops.
Jobs 👩💻👨💻
Principal Engineer, Deep Learning (Outrider) - Remote - $160-170K / year
Product Research & Innovation Associate (Clarity AI) - Híbrid, Madrid, Spain
Staff Software Engineer, ML Serving Platform (Pinterest) - San Francisco, USA / Remote - $148-304K / year
Machine Learning Engineer (Pinterest), San Francisco, USA - $124-219K / año