🦄 Perplexity achieves unicorn status

🧵 In today's edition:

• 🦄 Perplexity achieves unicorn status

• 🧬 CRISPR x GenAI

• 👊 Microsoft is packing a punch

• 🎙️ New BWAI episode ft. Vinod Khosla, Founder of Khosla Ventures

• 🛠️ AI Tools to Check Out

• 🤑 AI Fundraising News

• 🐦 Tweet Post of the Day 

🦄 Perplexity achieves unicorn status

Perplexity becomes the latest AI unicorn in the US, securing $62.7 million in its latest funding round and propelling the company to a $1 billion valuation.

Here are the deets: 

• The funding round was led by big-name investors, including Daniel Gross, the former head of AI at Y Combinator, and OpenAI Co-founder Andrej Karpathy.

• Instead of presenting a list of links, Perplexity crafts a narrative answer supported by citations from its sources, providing users with a comprehensive and engaging experience.

• The company has demonstrated its potential for growth and sustainability with an annualized revenue rate of $15 to $20 million, primarily derived from its Perplexity Pro subscription service. 

• However, the looming presence of tech giants like Google, who are also exploring AI-native search experiences, poses a potential challenge to Perplexity's uniqueness.

Read more: Fast Company

🧬 CRISPR x GenAI

The world of gene editing has welcomed an exciting advancement.

Profluent, a GenAI startup based in Berkeley, has revealed an impressive AI system that can generate blueprints for microscopic biological mechanisms with the ability to edit human DNA.

Here’s the TL;DR:

• Drawing inspiration from successful language models like ChatGPT, Profluent's technology examines vast quantities of biological data, including existing CRISPR gene editors. It then learns to create entirely new gene editing tools.

• These synthetic editors, developed from the AI's understanding of nature's intricate mechanisms, provide unparalleled opportunities for scientific exploration.

• In a demonstration, Profluent managed to edit human DNA using one of its AI-generated gene editors, OpenCRISPR-1.

• In a notable move, the company has open-sourced this revolutionary invention. This allows individuals, academic labs, and companies to experiment with and develop this technology further freely.

Overall: While still in the early stages, this breakthrough has considerable potential to speed up the development of personalized medicines and treatments tailored to individual genetic profiles.

As this technology evolves, scientists foresee a future where precise gene editing becomes readily available, transforming the battle against inherited diseases and opening up new possibilities in medical care.

Read more: NY Times

👊 Microsoft is packing a punch

Microsoft just unveiled Phi-3, its smallest AI model to date. 

• Representing the next generation of the company's lightweight AI offerings, Phi-3 Mini is the first of three compact models slated for release, with Phi-3 Small and Phi-3 Medium to follow.

• Weighing in at 3.8 billion parameters, Phi-3 Mini has been trained on a curated data set designed to emulate a child's learning process.

• Inspired by bedtime stories and the gradually increasing complexity of children's literature, Microsoft's developers crafted a "curriculum" of artificial stories tailored to impart knowledge and reasoning abilities to the fledgling model.

• According to Microsoft, the Phi-3 Mini performs as well as models ten times its size.

Overall: Smaller AI models like Phi-3 offer numerous advantages, including reduced computational costs and enhanced performance on personal devices. 

As companies increasingly turn to AI solutions tailored to their specific needs, models like Phi-3 present an attractive option, delivering targeted capabilities while remaining accessible and affordable.

Read more: The Verge

🛠️ AI Tools to Check Out

• Blaze: Produce blog posts, social media content, and ad copy - all in your brand voice. Check it out!

• Too Long: Summarize any article with a single click. Get the summary in 9 different languages. Check it out!

• Kua AI: Expand your ecomm reach for higher sales. Repurpose your listings across platforms – Amazon, Shopify, WordPress, and more. Create review blogs and social posts to promote them. Check it out!

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🤑 AI Fundraising News

• Oden Technologies raises $28.5M in Series B funding to launch a suite of AI products for manufacturing.

• Prime Intellect raises $5.5M in Seed funding to create a decentralized AI platform and protocol giving access to compute and intelligence.

🐦 Tweet Post of the Day

So it turns out… businesses don’t need an AI product or service to do well??

Kudos to Rippling 👏