GenAI in News Feb 2024

GenAI Unicorn

In February 2024, Voice AI startup ElevenLabs became a new unicorn in the generative AI space after raising $80 million in a Series B funding round, reaching a unicorn valuation.

GenAI Product Launches

For the last week, significant new product launches in the Generative AI and Large Language Model space include:

1. GoDaddy launched three generative AI-powered products aimed at enhancing small business operations in customer service and digital advertising.
2. Salesforce introduced Einstein GPT, branding it as the world’s first Generative AI for CRM, to revolutionize customer relationship management with AI capabilities.
3. Capgemini announced a new suite of generative AI offerings, expanding its capabilities and showcasing its commitment to leveraging AI for business transformation.
4. Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, a premium mobile platform designed to bring advanced generative AI features to flagship smartphones.
5. Amazon developed generative AI tools to assist sellers in creating more engaging and effective product descriptions, simplifying the listing creation process.
6. Appen released three new products: Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback, Document Intelligence, and Automated NLP Labeling, aimed at enhancing data annotation and processing with AI.
7. Google launched AI tools for product imagery for U.S. advertisers and merchants, allowing for the creation and improvement of product images through generative AI.
8. Thoughtworks introduced a Generative AI Product Accelerator to help organizations in 2023 — further identify opportunities for applying generative AI to meet customer needs and innovate.

These launches highlight the diverse applications of generative AI across different sectors, from legal and marketing to customer service and mobile technology, reflecting the growing role of AI in driving innovation and efficiency.

Industry / Sub-Industry using Gen AI:

1. Material Science and Engineering: In the automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, electronics, and energy sectors, generative AI is revolutionizing material discovery and optimization through inverse design. This process enables the creation of materials with specific desirable properties, such as increased conductivity or magnetic attraction.
2. Semiconductor Industry: The use of generative AI in chip design, particularly through reinforcement learning for optimizing component placement, is significantly reducing the product-development lifecycle. This innovation allows for the completion of tasks in hours that would have previously taken weeks.
3. Manufacturing and Design: Generative design, powered by AI, is enabling the creation of parts optimized for specific constraints like performance, material, and manufacturing methods. This is especially evident in industries like automotive and aerospace, where it contributes to the development of lighter, more fuel-efficient designs.
4. Retail: Retailers are leveraging multimodal generative AI models for various purposes, including creating marketing materials, personalized shopping experiences, and product description generation. These AI models can generate content and images from text, improving customer engagement and SEO.
5. Banking and Finance: In banking, generative AI is applied to provide comprehensive risk assessments and tax compliance analyses, offering detailed reports and recommendations that speed up decision-making processes.
6. Human Resources: Generative AI aids in talent pool optimization and employee survey analysis, providing personalized recommendations for career growth and identifying engagement strategies.
7. Legal Sector: AI facilitates legal document automation and data summarization, speeding up the creation of first draft documents and extracting key insights from extensive legal texts.

Across these industries, the adoption of generative AI signifies a shift towards more efficient, innovative, and personalized processes. From material science to HR, and from chip design to customer service, generative AI’s impact is vast and varied, offering a glimpse into a future where AI-enhanced operations become the norm. The emphasis on customization and responsible use, alongside the exploration of new use cases, underscores the technology’s potential to revolutionize business practices across the board.

Generative AI and Cloud Providers:

• Google Cloud Platform (GCP) announced Gemini 1.5, their next-generation AI model, which brings a breakthrough in long-context understanding across modalities and enhanced performance. Gemini 1.5 is designed to be more efficient in training and serving, with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. It offers a long context window of up to 1 million tokens, providing developers and enterprise customers a powerful tool for building advanced applications with deep contextual understanding. Additionally, GCP’s GitHub repository for Generative AI showcases various resources, including notebooks and code samples, to help users develop and manage generative AI workflows using Google Cloud’s capabilities powered by Vertex AI.
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) focused on accelerating cloud migration and optimizing efficiency with Dynatrace during the Perform 2024 event. AWS Technical Program Manager Mark Jaggers discussed key migration steps, showcasing Dynatrace’s integral role in facilitating faster, more confident migrations to AWS Cloud. This includes how Dynatrace integrates into the AWS Migration Hub to aid in architecture generation and workload migration, as well as enhancing post-migration performance, utilization, security, and efficiency.
• Microsoft, in partnership with Dynatrace, addressed cloud modernization complexities with generative AI models at Perform 2024. They discussed leveraging AI for real-time business decisions and practical applications, underscoring the role of AI-powered observability in navigating the digital ecosystem and unlocking its full potential.
• Databricks highlighted several updates for data engineering and streaming, including Google Cloud general availability for Delta Live Tables (DLT) pipelines. This enables data engineers to effortlessly build reliable streaming and batch data pipelines across GCP environments. Databricks Workflows also received enhancements in control flow capabilities and introduced modular orchestration to simplify the management and monitoring of complex workflows.

Generative AI Startups:

Here are some new generative AI startups that have emerged since February 2024, showcasing the diversity and innovation within the field:

1. Inworld AI focuses on creating AI-powered characters for video games, enhancing gaming experiences with natural language processing.
2. Runway AI offers a generative AI video editing platform, making it easier to produce short video clips from text prompts.
3. Sudowrite serves as a generative AI writing assistant, particularly for novel writing and storytelling.
4. Steve.ai is an online video creation platform that turns text prompts into video, aimed at generating animated content from scripts.
5. PlayHT specializes in text-to-speech software, converting written text into human-like audio in over 130 languages.
6. Quizgecko utilizes AI to automatically create questions for online quizzes, enhancing educational tools and engagement.
7. TalkPal is focused on language learning with an AI-powered platform offering personalized sessions in 57 languages.
8. Dubverse offers an AI video dubbing platform that can translate and dub videos in 30 languages.
9. Codeium provides an AI-powered toolkit and coding assistant, aimed at enhancing productivity for developers.
10. Fynt AI is working on autonomous systems for operational data in critical industries, starting with consumer goods.
11. Sapling.ai delivers language model integration for businesses, enhancing efficiency in communication and response composition.
12. askLio builds AI Copilots for procurement teams, aiming to save time and money in contract signing processes.
13. Marblism simplifies app development by generating database, back-end, and front-end based on product descriptions.
14. Lumona offers a product search engine that brings recommendations from trusted creators, simplifying the product discovery process.
15. Somn builds AI receptionists for healthcare clinics, handling tasks like appointment bookings and information retrieval.

These startups illustrate the expanding applications of generative AI across various sectors, including gaming, video editing, writing, language learning, business operations, and healthcare. Their innovative approaches highlight the potential of generative AI to revolutionize industries by automating complex processes, enhancing creativity, and improving efficiency.

New Generative AI Models

1. OpenAI introduced Sora: A new generative video model capable of transforming short text descriptions into detailed, high-definition film clips up to a minute long. This model represents a significant leap forward by utilizing diffusion models and transformers to process videos in chunks across space and time, aiming to train on a wide variety of video types. OpenAI has begun sharing Sora with third-party safety testers and a select group of video makers and artists to gather feedback and ensure safe deployment.
2. Google announced Gemini 1.5: This next-generation model delivers enhanced performance and a breakthrough in long-context understanding across modalities. Gemini 1.5 Pro, a part of this model family, is optimized for a wide range of tasks and introduces an experimental feature for long-context understanding, with a context window of up to 1 million tokens available in a limited preview. These advancements are part of Google’s effort to create more useful models and applications by significantly increasing the amount of information the models can process.
3. NVIDIA and Shutterstock partnership: NVIDIA announced a collaboration with Shutterstock to build AI foundation models for creating generative 3D artist tools. This partnership aims to train custom 3D models that can generate 3D assets from simple text prompts, leveraging NVIDIA’s generative AI cloud services to enhance the capabilities of creative professionals and streamline content creation.
4. Qualcomm’s generative AI features for Android smartphones: At the Mobile World Congress Barcelona, Qualcomm showcased its first demonstration of Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on an Android smartphone, running Stable Diffusion with LoRA to create high-quality custom images based on personal or artistic preferences. This technology allows for greater efficiency and customization of on-device generative AI use cases, including fine-tuned language vision models for different artistic styles and tailored personal assistants.

Gen AI Leaders in news

From Labs to Leaders: 2024's Generative AI Predictions for Industry Champions - DATAVERSITY

In the past year, we have witnessed the explosive emergence of generative AI (GenAI) use cases. Its potential to…

www.dataversity.net

• In February 2024, key leaders in the generative AI industry, Alon Goren, Mike Finley, and Pete Reilly, shared their insights on the evolution and impact of generative AI across various sectors. They emphasized the technology’s potential to redefine business strategies, executive roles, and the future of industry-specific AI tools, indicating a transformative year ahead for generative AI applications. For more detailed insights, you can read the full article on DATAVERSITY.
• In February 2024, not related to Gen AI…. Elon Musk made headlines with Neuralink’s significant advancement in human experimentation by implanting a powerful computer chip in a living person’s brain. This step moves us closer to a future where computers can be controlled with our thoughts, potentially aiding people with paralysis, stroke, and other conditions. However, the initiative has raised concerns due to the lack of transparency and detailed information about the trial.

Generative AI and Government

• The Dutch government presented a comprehensive vision on generative AI, emphasizing the need for responsible development and application of this technology. They outlined four policy principles focusing on safety, fairness, service to human wellbeing and autonomy, and contributions to sustainability and prosperity. This initiative aligns with their aim to establish a strong AI ecosystem within the Netherlands and the EU.
• The United States Department of Defense (DoD) announced the establishment of a generative AI task force, reflecting its commitment to responsibly harnessing AI. This initiative aims to analyze, integrate, and employ generative AI tools across the DoD, ensuring national security while minimizing risks.
• McKinsey highlighted how generative AI offers unique opportunities for government leaders worldwide to enhance customer engagement, content generation, and efficiency in public services. For instance, the city of Heidelberg, Germany, launched the Lumi chatbot as the country’s first digital citizen assistant, simplifying access to government services for residents. Additionally, the US Department of Defense developed an AI-powered contract-writing capability to speed up procurement processes.
• Singapore proposed a Governance Framework for Generative AI, focusing on safety, alignment with human values, and promoting AI for the public good. The framework encourages democratizing AI access, leading innovation, and upskilling the workforce for sustainable AI development.
• The Biden-Harris Administration in the US announced key AI actions following an executive order to ensure America’s leadership in AI innovation while managing its risks. This includes launching the National AI Research Resource pilot to catalyze innovation and equitable access to AI research resources, and an AI Talent Surge to accelerate the hiring of AI professionals across the federal government.
• Microsoft unveiled its generative AI roadmap for government services, introducing the Azure OpenAI Service in Azure Government to provide advanced generative AI capabilities for customers requiring higher compliance and isolation levels. This includes deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot for government users, offering intelligent recap of meetings and simplifying tasks.
• The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) launched a consultation series on generative AI to understand the key policy implications regarding its development and deployment. This series aims to provide organizations with insights into the risks and concerns associated with GenAI, while noting the rapidly evolving nature of the technology.

Generative AI Products

• In February 2024, Anthropic introduced the next generation of its AI model family, Claude 3, which includes Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Claude 3 Opus. These models set new benchmarks in AI performance across a range of tasks, with each offering varying levels of capability and efficiency. They are designed to handle complex cognitive tasks with improved speed, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness. For more details, visit Anthropic’s announcement on their website.
• Additionally, the broader AI landscape saw other noteworthy developments. For instance, several companies across different sectors introduced innovative generative AI-powered products and partnerships. Notable mentions include Brilliant Labs, which raised $3 million for its AR glasses powered by generative AI, and Oxolo, a Germany-based startup, securing €13M in Series A funding for its text-to-video generative AI solutions. Furthermore, BackboneAI introduced generative AI tools for the industrial and automotive sectors to accelerate online sales, while Jasper expanded its platform to serve as an end-to-end AI copilot for marketing teams. Regie.ai unveiled a new AI model aimed at preventing AI hallucinations in sales content generation, showcasing the varied applications of generative AI across industries.

These developments underscore the rapid progress and expanding influence of generative AI technologies across various domains, from enhancing creative capabilities to streamlining business operations and customer engagement.