AI News

Wordsmith: The Rising Scottish Legal Tech Startup Capturing Venture Capital Interest

Menlo Ventures, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm and a major investor in the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, has announced a strategic partnership with Anthropic to launch a $100 million initiative titled “the Anthology Fund.” This fund aims to invest in pre-seed, seed, and Series A AI companies.

One rapidly growing area within the generative AI landscape is customer support. This focus makes sense, considering the technology's ability to reduce contact center expenses while enhancing scalability. However, critics worry that generative AI in customer support may lower wages, cause job losses, and ultimately degrade the user experience. In contrast, supporters believe that generative AI will empower employees by allowing them to concentrate on higher-value tasks rather than replace them.

Reworkd's founders gained significant attention on GitHub last year with their creation, AgentGPT—an innovative, free tool for building AI agents that attracted over 100,000 daily users within just a week. This success secured them a place in Y Combinator’s summer 2023 cohort. However, the co-founders quickly recognized that the scope of developing general AI agents was too vast. Today, Reworkd has pivoted to focus on web scraping, specifically creating AI agents capable of extracting structured data from the public web.

On Monday, Google announced the introduction of its AI technology, Gemini, to teen students using their school accounts, building on its previous availability for personal accounts. Alongside this launch, the company is providing educators with new tools designed to enhance classroom learning.

In today's educational landscape, the intersection of students and generative AI has sparked a lively debate about tools like ChatGPT. Are these resources beneficial? (Absolutely! They expedite research and enhance learning.) Or do they pose risks? (Definitely! They can lead to misinformation and academic dishonesty.) However, several startups are embracing the rise of generative AI within schools as an opportunity, building innovative products they believe will thrive in this new market.

At the Augmented World Expo on Tuesday, Snap revealed an early version of its innovative real-time, on-device image diffusion model, designed to create immersive augmented reality (AR) experiences. The company also introduced new generative AI tools tailored for AR creators.

Content creators lead busy lives, often dedicating over 20 hours a week to produce fresh content for their unique online spaces. This commitment leaves little room for meaningful audience engagement. However, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, believes that artificial intelligence (AI) could provide a solution.

India might be distant from San Francisco's "uncanny valley," but it boasts a wealth of engineering talent, with many individuals transitioning to become founders and innovators in the AI startup landscape. The current AI startup ecosystem in India mirrors the early days of SaaS in the country: funding remains limited — especially when compared to the billions being raised by AI ventures in the U.S. and Europe. However, in sectors like generative AI, we can identify where venture capital is being invested. The focus is on home-grown talent, addressing region-specific issues while introducing novel solutions to challenges faced by their counterparts in developed nations.

Months after Microsoft secured a non-voting observer seat on OpenAI’s board, the tech giant has decided to step away from this position. In a letter sent to OpenAI on Tuesday, Microsoft expressed confidence in the AI company's progress and its future direction, as reported by Axios.

After securing an impressive $20 million seed round last year, Unlikely AI founder William Tunstall-Pedoe has kept the details of the U.K.-based foundation model maker’s technology closely guarded.

X, previously known as Twitter, has subtly implemented a change that seems to automatically include user data in its AI training pool for Grok. This update, noticed by users on Friday, could raise privacy concerns.

A letter from 11 AI researchers, including past OpenAI employees, calls for firms to adopt four principles protecting whistleblowers concerning AI safety. The principles advocate for open criticism, confidential reporting processes, and non-retaliation against employees raising concerns about AI risks, amid ongoing challenges at OpenAI.

Itamar Arel, CEO of AI startup Tenyx, announced the launch of Tenyx-70B, a refined version of Meta’s Llama-3 model that surpasses OpenAI GPT-4 in math and coding. Tenyx addresses "catastrophic forgetting" through selective parameter updates, promoting open-source innovation and reshaping AI dynamics.

SambaNova Systems has unveiled its Samba-CoE v0.2 Large Language Model, achieving 330 tokens per second while requiring only 8 sockets, outperforming competitors like Databricks and MistralAI. This efficiency breakthrough supports ongoing innovations and positions SambaNova as a key player in the AI landscape.