Why So Desperate?

In March this year,?Roshan Patel, the founder of Walnut, pulled a prank on desperate investors. He created a fake LinkedIn profile by the name Chad Smith, along with an?AI-generated picture. Then, all he had to do was mention he was a Stanford dropout, working on a stealth AI startup, and going through YC — that was it!

Within 24 hours, he?received a message?from a venture capitalist expressing interest in the startup after “hearing about him from mutual acquaintances”.

It is funny how venture capitalists funding AI startups are getting fooled by founders created by AI. We will not be surprised if someday they start funding startups that are actually started by AI.?

The fact is, VCs are ready to fund everyone and anyone who is in the generative AI space. But, there seems to be a new prerequisite/pattern to this — a majority of them are investing in AI startups founded or cofounded by graduates from premium institutions, namely Stanford, MIT and Harvard.?

There are exceptions like Stability AI, where the founder,?Emad Mostaque, claimed to have a master’s degree in computer science from Oxford, but?was found to have only a bachelor’s degree.?Midjourney?founder?David Holtz, on the other hand, is from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he graduated with a dual degree in physics and maths.?

Besides universities, most VCs are also backing startups created by former big tech companies and AI labs. One of the examples includes Reka, an AI startup that?raised $58 million in funding?from a slew of venture capitalists, where the founders have all worked on big AI projects at Google DeepMind, Meta AI and Microsoft.?

Read the full story here.

Duolingo’s Secret Sauce?

Duolingo was one of the?first few companies?to get early access to?GPT-4?even before it was made available to the public. It even launched two innovative GPT-4 powered features called ‘Role Play’ and ‘Explain My Answer’, which are available under?Dualingo Max.?

In an exclusive interview with?AIM,?Klinton Bicknell, head of AI at Duolingo, shares interesting new capabilities that were unleashed because of GPT-4, alongside challenges, opportunities, and more.?

Check out the complete interview?here.

AI Engineers, Not Prompt Engineers

The erstwhile ‘prompt engineers’ now like to be called ‘AI engineers’, and a lot of experts believe that this is the future. In other words, we are going to see a?rise in AI engineers?when compared to ML or LLM engineers in the coming months.

AI guru Andrej Karpathy also expresses similar views on the topic, where he said that “prompt engineer” as a term for this role could be misleading and even cringe as it requires a lot more than just prompting.?Read more here.

OpenAI Travel Diaries?

Sam Altman?and his team created quite a buzz with their world tour, garnering inputs from all across the world, some in the form of interesting conversations and handwritten notes. “One of the fun parts of the trip was how diverse and broad the stories are of how people are using it [ChatGPT] at whatever they want to get better at,”?said?Altman.

But, in reality, did Altman’s discussions with the power brokers, developers and researchers really materialise??Read to find out.

OpenAI Disables ChatGPT ‘Browse’ Feature?

OpenAI recently?announced?that it has temporarily disabled the ‘browse’ feature on ChatGPT within two weeks of?releasing its beta version.?The reason: The company said that the browse feature showed content to users that it had not intended to. Now, OpenAI has retracted the feature till they fix the problem.?Read more here.