The Focused Forest - Vol.6

Happy New Year and welcome back to my weekly AI news roundup!

AI takes centre stage at CES 2024

The worlds largest consumer electronics trade show starts in Las Vegas tomorrow (9th January) and AI looks set to be front and centre with AI being integrated into a wide range of consumer goods from TV's, audio systems, cars and robotics to name just a few.

CES will feature more than 30 interactive discussions on AI and its impact on numerous industry sectors including entertainment, finance, agriculture and transport.

There will no doubt be an emphasis on generative AI which exploded last year as it came widely available to everyone seemingly overnight following OpenAI's launch of chat GPT in November 2022. CES themselves used Midjourney to generate the artwork for CES 2024 including 9 digital avatars for the branding and marketing campaign.

The 2024 conference will feature keynote addresses from Intel, Qualcomm, Snap and Walmart, Nasdaq, Siemens and HD Hyundai and are expected to have a recurring theme of AI throughout each. "It's literally everything," Marjorie Costello, editor and publisher of CE Online News, said. "It's like what digital was 20 years ago. Everything has AI now. AI is in TVs, audio, cars, retail, health care, robots."

Consumer electronics will still be the overall theme with Apple, Meta, Samsung, Microsoft, DELL, Lenovo and HP expected to feature new products.

Check in with next weeks volume for the story of the conference!

Google potentially considering 30,000 layoffs

2023 was the year of tech layoffs with around 240,000 professionals in the sector being subject to layoffs and restructuring, there was hope that this was starting to plateau towards Q3/4 but Google may be about to buck the trend with a massive restructure of their ad sales division.

Google have been focusing on AI advancements with Gemini and Bard but it looks like they may look to implement this internally which could lead to AI taking human jobs (AI apocalypse) leading to 30,000 job losses across it's ad sales division, reported by The Information .

Google intend to consolidate staff including through potential layoffs and reassignments within its large customer sales unit who oversee relationships with the major advertisers. Google plan to utilise machine learning techniques to increase advertising spend.

Google fired 12,000 staff at the start of 2023, CEO Sundar Pichai said “This has been a challenging time for any organisation. At Google, we have not faced a comparable juncture in 25 years. We recognised that if we had not taken action, it would have led to more adverse outcomes down the line. It would have lingered as a significant burden on the company, particularly amidst the global shifts we've witnessed this year.”

Perplexity Raises Series B

AI-powered search engine Perplexity has raised its series B. Since launching publicly a year ago they have amassed over 10 million monthly active users (including me) and have answered well over half a billion questions in 2023.

Their series B totalled out at $73.6 million in VC funding, led by IVP with additional support from NEA, Elad Gill, Nat Friedman and Databricks as well as new investors NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, Tobi Lutke, Bessemer Venture Partners, Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, Guillermo Rauch, Austen Allred, Factorial Funds, and Kindred Ventures.

Since their series A round in 2023 Perplexity have launched Copilot, a feature which develops follow on questions closely related to the original question which delivers more usable relevant information and reduces the need for prompt engineering according to Perplexity.

Here is the press release from CEO Aravind Srinivas

GPT Store is open for business

OpenAI 's delayed GPT store will open this week where users can buy and sell custom AI agents. GPT Store was announced on DevDay but delayed due to the renowned leadership saga which engulfed the business over a weekend in December.

In its first announcement in November, it was revealed that the company would let other people build AI agents, called GPTs, using its GPT-4 large language model. The store will be open to ChatGPT Plus and enterprise subscribers and will allow users to customise GPT-style chatbots.

微软 Executive joins OpenAI board.

Microsoft executive Dee Templeton has joined the board of OpenAI as a non-voting observer as part of a continued shakeup of the boardroom.

彭博资讯 reported on Friday that this observer position means Microsoft's representatives can attend OpenAI's board meeting but does not have voting rights.

Templeton is currently vice president for technology and research partnerships and operations for Microsoft.

Venture

I touched on Perplexity 's Series B earlier in the article. There is yet to be a reporting on VC deals for the AI space but many have predicted VC trends for 2024. Most indicate that AI will continue to command a premium in the investment market with AI/ML startups raising huge funds in 2024.

PitchBook reported that AIML companies raised $21.4 billion in 324 transactions through Q1-3 last year.

Expect generative AI, governance, cyber and healthcare to be top contenders for VC funding in 2024. It's going to be a massive year for startups.

That's all for the first edition of this year, next one is out Monday 15th January!

Have a great week!