The Focused Forest - Vol. 2

Welcome to Vol.2 of The Focused Forest, a weekly roundup of AI news.

There is only one place to start...

ChatGPT fires Sam Altman as CEO Friday morning, Greg Brockman quits, discussions to reinstate them both are already underway on Sunday.

OpenAI have ousted CEO Sam Altman on Friday morning. The board said it had lost confidence in his ability to lead the firm.

"The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI," the company said, citing a "a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities."

CTO Mira Murati will take over as interim CEO. Board Chairman Greg Brockman has also left his position as Board Chairman, it was said he would remain at the company but was confirmed late Friday he would depart too.

Until Sunday morning, when apparently Open AI's investors, including Microsoft are pushing for his reinstatement. The Information tech news website reported that OpenAI were optimistic they could reinstate Altman.

Jason Kwon, chief strategy officer said “We are still working towards a resolution and we remain optimistic,”

Kwon wrote, according to the Information. “By resolution, we mean bringing back Sam, Greg, Jakub, Szymon, Aleksander and other colleagues (sorry if I missed you!) and remaining the place where people who want to work on AGI [artificial general intelligence] research, safety, products and policy can do their best work.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, Altman is open to a return but has a list of conditions, including a new board being instated and an overhaul of the governance within the firm.

He is also apparently considering starting a new company with some former OpenAI employees focusing on AI hardware alongside SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son and former Apple design chief Jony Ive.

Don't be surprised if this story has developed overnight into Monday, we haven't heard the last of this yet.

Chip Off the Old Block: NVIDIA VS Microsoft

It's been a busy week of announcements in the semiconductor world. As the AI race hots up, so does the pressures on computing power and it looks like there is a chip arms race underway.

NVIDIA is introducing a new version of its H100 chip for AI computing. The H200 is expected to generate output twice as fast as the H100 in training and deploying LLM's and generative AI applications and is designed to be compatible with systems using the H100.

The transition looks to be completely seamless for companies using the old model and is expected to be available Q2 2024. NVIDIA are being supplied by Applied Materials Inc and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing for parts, cooling talk of a global chip shortage, for now.

Anticipation of the H200 intro is welcome news for an industry struggling to meet demand for chips in the generative AI boom. Cloud providers won't need to make any significant changes as they transition to the H200 and AWS, GCP.

Excitement over Nvidia’s GPU has?supercharged?the company’s stock, which is up more than 230% so far in 2023. Nvidia?expects?around $16 billion of revenue for its fiscal third quarter, up 170% from a year ago.

微软 enters the chat... and unveiled two chips at it's Ignite Conference on Wednesday.

The Maia 100 AI chip looks set to go head to head with NVIDIA's market leading products H100 and the upcoming H200. The second chip, Cobalt 100 is for general computing and is an Arm based product.

The chips will start to roll out early next year to Microsoft’s datacenters, initially powering the company’s services such as Microsoft Copilot or Azure OpenAI Service.

Both products will be build in-house at Microsoft and is part of a "deep overhaul" of its cloud server stack. "We are rethinking the cloud infrastructure for the era of AI. - Rani Borkar, Head of Azure Hardware.

Humane AI ?? Wearable tech nobody needs?

Human AI have announced the release of its AI powered wearable, a gadget focused around interacting with LLM's. The device doesn't have a screen but it can project text and images onto a users palm.

The AI Pin has a built-in speaker and camera, and a light flashes when those functions are turned on. Double-tapping the pin takes a photo or video, which can be viewed on Humane’s web app.

Features include language translation in real time, AI-powered messaging, all the usual email and comms tools you would expect and computer vision tool which could be used as a nutritional aide for identifying tools, Humane said on launch.

Orders are starting this week and will retail at $699 + a 24 month phone contract via T-Mobile.

Really good article here from The Verge.

Humane AI is a startup founded by former Apple Executives out of San Francisco and is partnered with Microsoft, OpenAI, Qualcomm and T-Mobile and raised $100 million in Series C in March this year, taking total funding to $200 million.

Meta ? Responsible AI

Meta has apparently broken up it's responsible AI team regulating the safety of it's artificial intelligence ventures with most of the team being redistributed to its Generative AI product and AI Infrastructure divisions.

In February Mark Zuckerberg said 2023 would be a "year of efficiency" essentially mass layoffs and restructuring across the firm.

AI regulation has possibly been the hottest topic across AI in the past few weeks as regulators, firms and governments begin to pay closer attention to the potential risks of generative AI.

I have posted about the space a lot recently with more to come in the next few days. Meta breaking up their responsible AI team bucks a trend in the industry.

Venture

Aleph Alpha have raised a massive $500 million Series B via Innovation Park AI, Bosch Ventures, Schwartz Group, HP, SAP and Christ & Company Consulting. Alpeh Alpha help firms deploy complex multi-modal and LLMs.

It's looks to carve out a nice corner of the market by setting itself aside from its US competitors OpenAI and Anthropic as AI regulation is accelerated.

May Mobility has raised $105 million in Series D funding through NTT group. May Mobility develops AV Technology for private and business customers. This deal is a good sign for a struggling space after Cruise suspended operations in San Francisco.

It's been a good week for drug discovery and biotech with both Eleos Health , a mental health startup, raising $40 million in Series B via Menlo Ventures and Ascidian Therapeutics raising A $40 million Series A (extension) via ATP (Apple Tree Partners) .

Forward Therapeutics, Inc. are developing small molecule for inflammatory diseases and have closed a $50 million series A via BVF PARTNERS, L.P .

Elucid have raised $80 million in Series C with Elevage Medical Technologies for its computer vision physician focused analysis product.

Funding data via Pitchbook.

That's all for this week!

Thanks for reading volume 2 of the Focused Forest, feel free to reach out with any feedback or suggestions!

Have a great week!