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🃏 Jack of all trades, master of… all?

PLUS: An Iowa school district is using AI to ban books

Author

Haroon Choudery
August 16, 2023

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Happy Wednesday, fellow humans. 👋

Lots of exciting new AI updates to share today, so let’s dive into it!

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🧵 In today's edition:

  • 🃏 Jack of all trades, master of… all?

  • 💰️ Investors wary of Early-Stage AI startups

  • ✍️ GPT4 helps moderate content

  • 🤑 AI Fundraising News

🤖 Top AI News

🃏 Jack of all trades, master of… all?

After conquering the soccer world, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have their eyes set on AI.

The oil-rich Gulf states are aggressively ramping up their AI capabilities and joining the global AI arms race by snapping up thousands of Nvidia's new $40k H100 chips, the "world's first computer chip designed for generative AI."

Why?

  • Saudi's King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Kaust) has secured 3,000 chips to power a new AI supercomputer.

  • The UAE is gobbling up chips to develop an advanced AI system called Falcon.

As the petrodollar windfalls, the Gulf states have bold visions of becoming global AI leaders and diversifying their economies beyond oil.

But their governments raise ethical concerns about misusing the powerful technology for state surveillance and oppression. Still, they're plowing ahead, partnering with Western AI startups and impressing VC bigwigs.

Overall: With cash to burn, data access, and top talent onboard, the Gulf states are positioning themselves as rising AI superpowers.

It will be interesting to see what Saudi Arabia and the UAE have in store for this AI revolution.

Read more: Financial Times

💰️ Investors wary of Early-Stage AI startups

The red-hot AI startup scene is finally cooling off as investors pump the brakes on overhyped seed deals.

VCs bet big on AI wrappers riding the OpenAI wave, but as industry titans like Adobe are crushing startups' traction with their offerings, investors are suffering AI seed fatigue.

The biggest concern is differentiation. When the boom first started, companies could get away with creating copycat AI models - VCs once deemed 75% of AI seeds investable, but now, only half seem viable.

The truth is that having a .ai in your domain name won’t cut it anymore. Startups need rock-solid defensibility to get funding in later rounds.

Overall: As the hot air seeps out of the hype train, investors demand “substance over sizzle.”

The AI cool-off means only the strongest startups will survive the Seed/Series A winter.

Read more: Fortune

✍️ GPT4 helps moderate content

AI Content moderation is crucial but challenging work, often causing mental stress for human reviewers. OpenAI’s newest approach could help streamline the process.

The approach uses GPT-4 to interpret nuanced content policies and instantly adapt to updates. This slashes the policy iteration cycle from months to hours, enabling faster responses to emerging harms.

How does it work? Experts first write a content policy, then label a small dataset accordingly. GPT-4 reads the policy and tries labeling the same data.

By analyzing where it erred, reviewers can figure out nuances and refine ambiguities in the policy wording.

Benefits include:

  • More consistent moderation aligning with the latest policies

  • Rapid iterations to address new threats

  • Less mental burden on human reviewers

Overall: OpenAI is also enhancing GPT-4's reasoning and improving its ability to detect unknown risks, helping inform new policies.

AI-assisted moderation holds promise for healthier online spaces. But as with any AI, results need monitoring to address biases. By offloading repetitive tasks, human moderators can focus on nuance and outlier cases.

Platforms can implement this today with OpenAI access.

Read more: OpenAI Blog

🤑 AI Fundraising News. n

Voiceflow, a platform for building conversational AI experiences, raises $15M

Grit raises $7M in seed funding to develop a platform that uses machine learning and static analysis to eliminate technical debt and allows developers to delegate implementation details to AI agents.

🗞️ AI Quick-Bytes

What else is going on?

  1. This weird camera turns photos straight into AI art

  2. WhatsApp is testing AI-generated stickers

  3. Browse AI helps companies build bots to scrape website data and put it to work.

  4. Kneron to release AI chip this year

  5. Google Photos adds a scrapbook-like Memories view feature aided by AI

  6. Fake Claim That OpenAI Has a New Billion Dollar Investor Mysteriously Appears on Stock Exchange Website

  7. An Iowa school district is using AI to ban books

  8. Humane will share more about its mysterious ‘Ai Pin’ on the same day as October’s eclipse

  9. Dating app Hinge is hiring a VP of artificial intelligence who could earn up to $398,000 a year.

🐦️ Tweet of the day

🏦 Banking analysts, this is for you!!

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And that does it for today's issue.

As always, thanks for reading. Have a great day, and see you next time! ✌️

— Haroon: (definitely) Not A Robot and @haroonchoudery on Twitter

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