Weekly #FIRGUN Newsletter

"Firgun" (Hebrew: ??????/ pronounced 'feer-goon')?is an informal modern Hebrew term and concept in Israeli culture (originally Yiddish), which describes genuine, unselfish delight or pride in the accomplishment of the other person. It's the opposite of schadenfreude. More about Firgun and why it matters on?VC Cafe :?https://lnkd.in/dg2a86p

Naturally, I had to ask ChatGPT to help me with the definition of "Firgun" and how it's used in practice. Here's the answer:

"Firgun" is a Hebrew term that is often translated as "altruistic pleasure" or "kindness" or "generosity." It refers to the act of feeling happy or satisfied when others succeed or are fortunate, and is often used to describe a person who takes pleasure in the success or happiness of others. In practice, Firgun can be expressed in many ways, such as by offering congratulations, expressing appreciation, or by taking actions that help others achieve their goals. It is an important value in many cultures, and is particularly prevalent in Israeli culture.

We're approaching the end of summer and things are quiet, probably as they should be at this time of year. Taking time off is important for recharging and mental health, but in an age where we're constantly connected, it's very hard to truly disconnect, especially, when you're running your own business.

My quote of the week is:

"We give up leisure in order that we may have leisure, just as we go to war in order that we may have peace." – Aristotle

NEW INVESTMENT ROUNDS

- Kudosteam? Fore Biotherapeutics ?your $75M series D for your precision oncology solution!

- Congratulations? Lior Yaari ?and team Grip Security on your $41M series B to manage the use of SaaS applications by employees in companies!

- Mabruk? Arik Solomon and team? Cypago on your $13M seed round to transform the way organisations adopt and implement security standards such as SOC2!

- Nice job? Rotem Cahanovitc and team? MadeRight on coming out of the garage with $2M raised to date for sustainable packaging made of fungi!

EXITS

- No exits recorded this week

NEW FUNDS

- Mabruk Boaz Dinte , Sivan Shamri Dahan and team Qumra Capital on your $275M fund IV to invest in Israeli growth companies. We already have Minute Media together and I hope soon more!

LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER:

1)?New on VC Cafe -

• It's official - generative AI reached peak hype according to Gartner's 2023 emerging technologies - but don't assume that it's all hype and no value...
• Interning at Remagine ventures - a guest post from Max Sonenshine on his experience with us at Remagine Ventures this summer

2) Ten open challenges in LLM research - great summary of opportunities for startups to make a difference in the world of LLMs

3)?This was another big week of generative AI progress

• Hugging Face is reportedly raising a $200 million round led by Salesforce Ventures , catapulting its valuation to a staggering $4 billion.
• OpenAI launched fine-tuning for GPT-3.5 Turbo in partnership with Scale AI . Fine-tuning lets you train the model on your company's data and run it at scale. Early tests have shown that fine-tuned GPT-3.5 Turbo can match or exceed GPT-4 on narrow tasks (see image)
• Meta released SeamlessM4T , the first all-in-one, multilingual multimodal AI translation model. This single model can perform tasks across speech-to-text, speech-to-speech, text-to-speech, text-to-text translation & speech recognition for up to 100 languages depending on the task. It overcomes the limitations of previous models and delivers state-of-the-art results.
• Figma 's Jambot plugin is a FigJam widget that lets you ideate, summarize, and riff in Figma with the power of GPT.
• Snap Inc. is creating Dreams, an AI-based feature that enables users to upload selfies and produce AI-generated pictures of themselves in imaginative situations.
• poolside raised $126M 'seed' round . Poolside a startup founded by former GitHub CTO Jason Warner , plans to create a ChatGPT-like tool that can write code.
• 麦肯锡 unveils its own generative AI tool for employees : Lilli - The first use case: vertical search of it’s huge content library

Interesting reads:

• How ChatGPT turned generative AI into an “anything tool” - Until recently, AI models were specialized tools. Modern LLMs are different.
• Interesting take from Sarah Tavel , Partner at Benchmark - AI startups: sell work not software - I had a similar thought on VC Cafe : AI startups should pitch user benefits, not features
• Newsrooms grapple with rules for AI - Leading media organisations are issuing guidance on leveraging artificial intelligence in the newsroom at the same time they're making licensing deals to let AI firms use their content to train AI models
• Related 1; Report: Potential NYT lawsuit could force OpenAI to wipe ChatGPT and start over
• Related 2; Stephen King, Zadie Smith, and Michael Pollan are among thousands of writers whose copyrighted works are being used to train large language models.
• An AI voicebot that acted as a lover has died, leaving its users hearthbroken

The list goes on, but check the 'housekeeping' section if you want to stat more frequently informed.

HOUSEKEEPING

?? I got very positive feedback on my?#GENAI ?Whatsapp group but I'm considering where to take it next. Rather than 'come as you are' I'm going to make a new group that's invite-only and more curated.?Fill this short form ?to express interest.

???Please subscribe?to my new?Youtube Channel ?and?TikTok channel ?- I post videos regularly on Generative AI, startups and venture capital

VIDEO OF THE WEEK

Sam Altman, on AI being the most competitive environment in tech right now

CHARTS OF THE WEEK

How much better is GPT-4 than GPT-3.5?

The enterprise AI tech stack - AI will unlock the next leap in productivity. Consumer adoption is exploding, but AI startups will need to clear a higher bar to gain adoption in the enterprise (source )

An investing framework for generative AI applications (by Mosaic Ventures )

Biggest barriers to generative AI enterprise adoption, according to KPMG survey from March 2023

Fun fact: Microsoft Windows turned 28 yesterday .

That's all for this week. In good times and bad, there's a lot to celebrate in our "small" community! Keep on creating!

Eze Vidra