The Focused Forest - Vol. 7

Welcome to another volume of my AI newsletter, handpicked stories from the fast evolving artificial intelligence ecosystem.

World Economic Forum has AI centre stage at it's Davos summit

The WEF had AI as a key talking point at it's Davos summit this week with leaders from the industry and government sharing their thoughts. "AI as a driving force for the Economy and Society was the major theme at Davos.

Overall advances in the technology have potential to solve global challenges but innovation and guardrails are essential.

Sam Altman: " "I think it's good that we and others are being held to a high standard. We can draw on lessons from the past about how technology has been made to be safe and how different stakeholders have handled negotiations about what safe means.

"We have our own nervousness, but we believe that we can manage through it, and the only way to do that is to put the technology in the hands of people.

"Let society and the technology co-evolve, and sort of step-by-step with a very tight feedback loop and course correction, build these systems that deliver tremendous value while meeting safety requirements."

Ursula von der Leyen: "I am a tech optimist and, as a medical doctor by training, I know that AI is already revolutionizing healthcare. That's good. AI can boost productivity at unprecedented speed. First movers will be rewarded, and the global race is already on without any question."

Antonio Guterres: "We need governments urgently to work with tech companies on risk management frameworks for current AI development, and on monitoring and mitigating future harms...And we need a systematic effort to increase access to AI so that developing economies can benefit from its enormous potential. We need to bridge the digital divide instead of deepening it."

Mark Zuckerberg is hoarding chips, Sam Altman looks to make his own.

By the close of 2024 Meta will be sat on a mountain of the most valuable commodity in tech- NVIDIA H100 GPU's. They're expected to purchase 350,000 in 2024 in their push to become an AI first business. An article in The Verge has reported that they will have a stockpile totalling 600,000 by year end.

AI firms are scrambling to get hold of AI GPUs in an effort to push the latest products, ultimately there is a well known shortage of chips, tensions between China and Taiwan are not helping and NVIDIA has a market share of 80%+, so much so their stock price has risen by 200% in 12 months.

Meta has been the biggest customer, last year shipping 150,000 H100 chips to the social media giant, that's more than other key accounts Google, Amazon, Oracle and Microsoft.

OpenAI may have another strategy. Sam Altman is apparently seeking investment in the Middle East for a new semiconductor venture to satisfy OpenAI's demand for chips and reduce reliance on NVIDIA.

Dialogue with TSMC about a partnership to fabricate the chips is in its early stages. Whether?this will be a sperate entity to OpenAI or not remains to be seen but the AI chip market is worth upwards of $1.5 trillion the venture will likely cost billions of dollars.

The world needs more chips, another supplier to take some market share from NVIDIA might be key to breaking the chip shortage.

AI @ CES 2024

In the last edition of The Focused Forest I touched on AI being at the forefront of CES 2024. It didn't disappoint, here are my top three of the most interesting AI first products on show.

Flappie Technologies have developed a catflap which used computer vision and motion sensors to detect if your cat is carrying birds, mice or other prey into the home, making them drop it before they can enter.

The Rabbit R1 is a gameboy like personal assistant device which runs on LLM tech and is essentially a personal assistant and received a lot of hype at CES and aims to remove the need for conventional smartphones. The palm-sized gadget has a screen, camera, button and a spinning dial. In essence, the R1 is designed as 'a pocket companion’ able to answer questions, order deliveries, play music, check bus times and even book flights.

Motion Pillow used AI to help snoring problems. Using AI motion detection system, the pillow inflates airbags and open the airway, there is an app to record sleep score, time and records snoring. The Motion pillow and its accompanying product, Motion ring won the CES 2024 Innovation Award in the Smart Home Category.

DPD UK disables AI Chatbot after customer shenanigans

UK delivery firm DPD has disabled its AI online chatbot after a disgruntled customer was able to make it swear and even write a poem criticising the parcel firm.

According to Sky News, customer Ashley Beauchamp was trying to locate a missing parcel but was finding the chatbot unhelpful.

"It couldn't give me any information about the parcel, it couldn't pass me on to a human, and it couldn't give me the number of their call centre. It didn't seem to be able to do anything useful," Mr Beauchamp, from London, told Sky News.

Mr Beauchamp then asked the bot to write a haiku describing "how useless" DPD are.

Still no sign of the parcel. Should firms be worried that a customer can derail an AI assistant so easily for all the public to see?

Google to build UK data centre to meet demand for AI

谷歌 are to invest $1 billion in a new data centre in the UK to meet "growing demand" for its AI and cloud offerings. The new site will be based in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire and will support AI innovation and reliable digital service for GCP customers.

Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s president and chief financial officer, said the data centre “represents our latest investment in the UK and the wider digital economy.” She added that it builds on previous investments like Saint Giles and Kings Cross offices, a multi-year research deal with Cambridge, and the Grace Hopper subsea cable connecting the UK with the US and Spain.

OpenAI claim copyrighted data impossible to avoid for AI model training

OpenAI claimed this week in a written testimony to a UK government committee that it would be impossible to devlop AI models without copyrighted data, arguing that AI models require such vast data sets for training that adhering to copyright laws would make them unworkable.

The written testimony stated that “virtually every sort of human expression” would be off-limits for training data. From news articles to forum comments to digital images, little online content can be utilised freely and legally.

This hard line stance has brought a lawsuit from over AI misuse of copyrighted works.

Venture

This is the first venture roundup of 2024 with data from Crunchbase .

Text to Speech platform ElevenLabs has achieved unicorn status with an $80M Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz , Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.

Acorai , the Swedish medtech firm have raised $4.5 million for their heart failiure detection device.

MitoSense, Inc. the Boston based biotech have raised $3.5M seed round via Cayden Capital Partners.

ExtraHop , a Seattle based cyber firm have raised $100M in capital growth from undisclosed investors.

ROKID MEDIA have raised $70M for their AR venture, total funding now at $535 million.

Luma AI , Palo Alto based AI 3D modelling startup raised $43 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz

That's all for this week, thanks for reading, if you have any suggestions or like the newsletter please reach out and share!