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.

Israeli startups raised $1.676 billion in the not-yet-concluded third quarter of 2023, a 38% decrease compared to the corresponding quarter in 2022, but only a 14% decrease compared to Q2 2023. Happy Sukkoth!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"You can discover more about someone in an hour of play than in a year of conversation" - Plato

NEW INVESTMENT ROUNDS

- Congratulations Shachar Bialick and team Curve on adding ￡58M to your series C (bringing the total to ￡133M) to building a smart, connected finance card!

- Way to go Itay Barnea and team BioProtect Ltd on your $28M series E to commercialise your Biodegradable Balloon for rectal protection during prostate cancer radiation!

- Mabruk Arie Zilberstein and team Gem Security (acquired by Wiz) on your $23M series A to stop cloud-native threats!

- Well done Amir Krayden and team Senser on emerging from stealth with a $9.5M seed round for your zero-instrumentation production intelligence platform!

- Kudos Johnny Deutsch and team Creednz on securing a $7M seed round to to battle payment fraud!

- Mazel tov Guy Zyskind and team Fhenix on your $7M seed round for a confidential smart contract platform using fully homomorphic encryption!

- Big thumbs up Nir Shafrir and team Digma on your $6M seed round for your continuous feedback platform to validate developer and GenAI code!

NEW FUNDS

- Mabruk Gili Raanan and team Cyberstarts on the closing of $480M in new capital for early stage and follow on investments in Israeli cybersecurity startups. You're an inspiration!

LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER:

1) The death rates of startups spiked in Q3 2023 - by me on VC Cafe

I'll take the opportunity to share again the updated Israeli generative AI landscape published by Remagine Ventures last week

2) Apple Designer Jony Ive is joining Sam Altman and others to secure a $1 billion investment from Softbank to create a hardware device powered by AI.... sounds intriguing?

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

• OpenAI made several announcements this week. First, it shared that ChatGPT can now see, hear and speak. One impressive example: You can give ChatGPT a picture of your team’s whiteboarding session and have it write the code for you. ChatGPT can now browse the internet to provide you with current and authoritative information, complete with direct links to sources. It is no longer limited to data before September 2021. OpenAI is raising money on a valuation of between $80-$90 billion, 3x the valuation of earlier this year.
• Meta held its Connect event and announced a number of new AI powered features: New smart glasses with Rayban, a number of AI creator tools for Facebook and Instagram. And much more... echo3D did a good job capturing the whole thing: Emu (Expressive media universe) will allow for AI-based text-to-image functionality, built into the Facebook chat. AI stickers are coming to WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Facebook Stories. Create your own personalized stickers and share them with friends. Meta AI will include dozens of AI chatbot personalities to help you with your different interests. The chatbot will include personalities voiced by different celebrities, including Snoop Dogg and Tom Brady. A new AI Studio will allow developer and non-developers to train AI themselves for Meta’s messaging apps for personal and business purposes.
• Spotify is going to clone podcasters’ voices — and translate them to other languages. A partnership with OpenAI will let podcasters replicate their voices to automatically create foreign-language versions of their shows. Spotify also announced it will not ban AI made music.
• 亚马逊 announced that it will invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic . Amazon Web Services (AWS) will become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads
• Getty Images launches its own copyright/commercially safe image generator powered by 英伟达
• Google's Bard, now includes a feature that allows users to double-check the information it provides by evaluating whether there is content across the web to substantiate it, helping to address the problem of chatbots making things up.
• Microsoft is looking to reduce its dependency on OpenAI by directing internal researchers and resources to make smaller models that can take the place of GPT-4 in relevant situations.
• French startup Mistral AI released Mistral 7B , an LLM more powerful than Llama 13B across the board and even comparable with Llama 34B checkpoint. The model is truly open-source, released under Apache 2.0 license which means you can use it for commercial purposes as well.
• Abacus.AI open sources Giraffe 70B - a Llama 2 fine-tuned model featuring a 32k tokens context window, outperforming the recent SOTA model LongChat

Interesting reads:

• What Builders Talk About When They Talk About AI - "This wave of generative AI has the sort of economics that drive market transformations" - by Andreessen Horowitz
• Searchable Database of the 183,000 Pirated Books Meta, et al., Used to Train AI
• Beyond deep fakes

HOUSEKEEPING

?? Fill this short form?to express interest in my private ?#GENAI?Whatsapp group

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

VIDEO OF THE WEEK

Lex Fridman interviewed Mark Zuckerberg in the Metaverse using Meta's CODEC Avatar tech for photorealistic avatars, the result is pretty stunning

CHARTS OF THE WEEK

According to data by Carta the rate of startup shutdowns has been increasing. I wrote a blog post about it this week on VC Cafe

Marketing tech is becoming more and more technical and moving from the CMO to the CTO (source)

GenAI investment in 2023 so far... not including Anthropic's latest round

The ecosystem for AI agents by Activant Capital (source)

Never get another ticket with the new vision capabilities of ChatGPT

In our AI art corner, Mr Ugleh is an AI artist is creating viral art illusions, check it out

That's all for this week. Keep on creating. There's so much to celebrate in our "small" community!

Eze Vidra

#tech #gaming #ai #startups #israel #vc #venturecapital #innovation