IMO Weekly Highlights - 12182023
IMO picked up a few pieces of notable news about AI and tech companies for the past week. This week, Google announced that its most powerful and capable generative AI model, Gemini, is now available to enterprises for their app development needs.
Dec 13th, Google announced that its most powerful and capable generative AI model, Gemini, is now available to enterprises for their app development needs.
Announced?last week, Gemini comes in three sizes: Ultra, Pro and Nano. With Dec 13th move, the Sundar Pichai-led company is making the Pro version of the model accessible via API. It can be used for free for now, but there are certain usage limitations, the company wrote in a?blog post.
Microsoft, one of the biggest winners of the generative AI boom so far thanks to its?early backing of OpenAI?and integration of the latter startup’s tech into Bing, Azure, and various other services, has been trying to avoid putting all of its AI eggs in one basket.
Dec 14th, the?company announced?that it is making?Meta Platforms’ rival open-sourced AI model Llama 2?available in Azure AI Studio, its cloud platform AI clearinghouse, in the form of a “model-as-a-service.”
Voice cloning is one of the areas rapidly emerging thanks to generative AI. The term refers to replicating a person’s vocal stylings — pitch, timbre, rhythms, mannerisms, and unique pronunciations — through technology.
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While startups including?ElevenLabs have received tens of millions?in funding for dedicating themselves to this pursuit, Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus VR has released its own free voice cloning program,?Audiobox?— with a catch.
Google?has done it again. Dec 13th, the search giant announced the launch of?MusicFX, a groundbreaking new experimental tool that enables users to generate their own music using AI. This latest innovation uses Google’s?MusicLM?and DeepMind’s watermarking technology,?SynthID, to create a unique digital watermark in the outputs, ensuring the authenticity and origin of the creations.?
San Francisco-based?Essential AI, a startup looking to reinvent how people work with the power of AI, emerged from stealth with $56.5 million in a series A round of funding on Dec 12th. The investment has been led by March Capital with participation from tech giants Google, Nvidia and AMD. Franklin Venture Partners, KB Investment and Thrive Capital, which led the seed round of the company, also participated in the round.?
While Essential is just a few months old, its founders, Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, bring years of experience in the AI space. They were close collaborators at Google, where they co-authored?a research paper?proposing the Transformer architecture that set a new standard for language understanding in 2017 and paved the way for?ChatGPT and most other AI advances?we see today.
Dec 12th, ?OpenAI-competitor?Cohere, which focuses on large language models (LLMs) for the enterprise, launched “build-your-own connectors.” This will allow companies to securely connect company data that sits on third-party applications like Slack and Google Drive, Service Now or WordPress to Cohere’s Command LLM.
A company representative said that “as far as we know” the offering is the first of its kind and comes after Cohere recently became “the first and only AI company that offers fine tuning across all four cloud providers.” According to a?Cohere blog post, this open-beta release will enable businesses to build AI assistants on Cohere’s upgraded AI platform that leverage information from hundreds of tools used in daily work and provide contextually relevant and accurate responses.