🥊 Musk vs. OpenAI

🗞️ Your Weekly Round-Up

1️⃣ Elon Musk sues Sam Altman and OpenAI

You may already be aware, but if not, here's a quick rundown:

• Musk alleged that OpenAI deviated from its mission of advancing AI for the greater good.

• Founded to develop AGI for humanity's benefit, OpenAI was originally a not-for-profit venture.

• Musk claims the company has strayed away from its founding goal, favoring Microsoft's commercial interests over the open-source ethos it was built on.

But OpenAI isn’t holding back.

On Tuesday, Sam Altman and team released a statement filled with email evidence of communication between Musk and several OpenAI executives.

The conclusion? Somewhat damning:

• Musk acknowledged the company's need for funding to achieve AGI and compete with Google: "This needs billions per year immediately or forget it."

• He even supported the idea of making OpenAI a for-profit business: "A for-profit pivot might create a more sustainable revenue stream over time."

• In 2018, he suggested that Tesla acquire OpenAI so that the AI startup could always have a reliable source of funding.

Round 1 goes to OpenAI. Can’t wait for Round 2 🥊 

Read more: BBC

2️⃣ Anthropic releases Claude 3

This week, Anthropic released 3 state-of-the-art LLMs that give some serious competition to ChatGPT and Google Gemini. 

Here’s the TL;DR:

• Claude 3 Haiku is the quickest and most affordable model in the Claude 3 range and is ideal for applications that need swift responsiveness.

• Claude 3 Sonnet delivers robust performance at a more economical cost than competitors, making it ideal for enterprises. It's made for large-scale AI deployments.

• Claude 3 Opus, the best of all, excels at intricate tasks and mirrors human comprehension. It’s trained to perform well in open-ended scenarios and high cognitive processing tasks.

I wonder what’s happening in OpenAI and Google’s board meetings right now 👀

Read more: Anthropic Blog

3️⃣ AI PCs are here!

Mark your calendars for March 21st 📅

Microsoft is finally set to launch the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6, dubbed as the world’s first “AI PCs.” 

Powered by new Intel Core Ultra/Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processors, these machines are all about speed and smart computing, featuring advanced neural processing units (NPUs) to enhance AI capabilities.

But the most exciting part? AI Explorer. 

According to Microsoft, this feature will:

• Allow natural language searches across documents, web pages, images, and chats. 

• Keep a searchable history of your computer activity, offering context-aware suggestions and supporting text-based image editing.

Will Microsoft's AI PCs set a new standard for personal computing?? 👀

 Read more: Engadget

4️⃣ Accenture acquires Udacity

In an exciting move, Accenture is set to acquire the online education platform Udacity (pending regulatory investigation, ofc). 

Accenture also announced a $1B investment into LearnVantage, a homegrown cutting-edge learning platform. 

The goal? To arm the workforce with the AI skills necessary for the digital age.

It’s an exciting time to dive into GenAI education, given the critical need for upskilling workers in cloud, data, and AI technologies.

 Read more: TechCrunch

5️⃣ Haiper emerges from stealth

What is it? Google DeepMind veterans Yishu Miao and Ziyu Wang unveiled Haiper, a tool offering users the power to craft videos from text prompts.

Competition: OpenAI’s Sora, Runway, Pika.

Funding: $13.8M Seed.

Goal: To build an AGI system with complete perception abilities.

Read more: Haiper

6️⃣ US Army's AI experiment

In an experiment that blurs the lines between gaming and real-life warfare strategies, the US Army Research Laboratory is tapping into AI to explore its potential as a strategic planner in war game simulations.

Here’s the TL;DR: 

• The experiment focused on simple combat scenarios where AI chatbots acted as advisers, suggesting tactical maneuvers to secure victory. 

• OpenAI's GPT-4 outshined its counterparts, although not without its shortcomings, notably incurring higher casualties despite achieving objectives.

The military is stepping into a grey space here that’s filled with ethical, legal, and practical difficulties 👀

Curious to see how this shapes out. 

Read more: New Scientist

7️⃣ Synthflow AI launches appointment scheduling

AI agents are all the rage right now. 

Here is a brilliant use case 👇

• Synthflow is a conversational AI agent that helps salespeople book appointments and handle scheduling.

• It takes a couple of minutes to set up using no-code tools and boasts: 

  • Cutting-edge voice tech with 700ms latency.

  • The ability to handle interruptions and crosstalk.

  • 100s of realistic voices.

  • The ability to make outbound/answer inbound calls 24/7.

It’s absolutely wild to see it in action… check it out here!

Read more: Synthflow

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🎙️ New episode ft. Tereza Tizkova, Founding Member & Head of Growth at E2B

Hey team! This week, we had the pleasure of having Tereza Tizkova, Founding Member & Head of Growth at E2B, on the pod.

During the episode, she discussed:

• Trust, safety, and the challenges of building agents,

• The ingredients for reliable AI agents,

• How e2b creates safe playgrounds,

• The challenges of running agents locally,

• The buzz around multi-agent collaboration,

• And much more!

Catch the episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts today!

🤑 AI Fundraising News

• TravelJoy raises $10M in Series A funding to provide tools for travel entrepreneurs and business operators.

• Aktiia raises $30M in funding to provide optical blood pressure monitoring devices that use AI-driven technology to provide personalized, continuous, and medical-grade blood pressure and heart rate data.

• Topsort raises $20M in Series A funding to scale its clean AI advertising platform free of third-party cookie tracking and privacy-invasive data.

• Baseten raises $40M in Series B funding to help enterprises run machine learning workloads in the cloud.

• Overjet raises $53.2M in Series C funding to expand its AI platform and create a unified standard for dental providers and payers to improve patient outcomes.

• Multiverse Computing raises €25M/$27M to deliver more efficient LLMs using quantum-inspired algorithms.

• Hook raises $3.5M in Seed funding to develop technology that allows fans to legally remix popular music for social media use while ensuring artist compensation.

• Theia Insights raises $6.5M in funding to offer AI-based solutions for the global investment community, serving clients such as asset and wealth managers, ETF issuers, and investment banks.

• TollBit raises $7M in funding to offer AI bots and data scrapers a compliant way to compensate websites directly for content.

• PreemptiveAI raises $6.4M in funding for its "revolutionary" foundation model, which uses machine learning to interpret biomedical signals from smartphones and wearable devices to offer insights into human physiology.

🛠️ AI Tools to Check Out

• Alta: Writing made easy - built for content creators, social media managers, freelancers, and business owners. Check them out!

• Datatera AI: Convert any file, website, or email to a spreadsheet or CRM in seconds. Check them out!

🐦 Tweet Post of the Day

It’s the small things that make all the difference in UX :)