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😺 $1.3 billion 🤯

😺 $1.3 billion 🤯

PLUS: Another $600 million spent on AI startups!

Pete Huang & Noah Edelman
June 30, 2023

Welcome, humans.

We’re starting a movement: boycott all clickbait-y AI content you see. You know what I’m talking about - it’s maddening! #NoMoreClickbaitAI

Here’s what’s going on in the world of AI today:

Inflection raised $1.3 billion for its personal AI, Pi.
Runway, Typeface, and Celestial raised > $100 million.
Google wants AI that can unlearn the data it was trained on.
OpenAI is being sued for scraping copyrighted data.

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AI Startups Are Raising Massive Rounds 💰

Created using Midjourney!

Yesterday, Inflection raised $1.3 billion from the likes of Bill Gates, Microsoft, and Nvidia for its personal AI, Pi. This is the 4th largest fundraising round in AI … ever.

$1.3 billion is staggering for a company that just recently launched its chatbot (our take: it’s cooler, slower, and more personable than ChatGPT).
Inflection plans to acquire a whopping 22,000 of Nvidia GPUs to build the largest GPU collection for an AI application … ever.

The money train doesn’t stop there!

Runway secured a $141 million Series C for its tech-to-video tools.
Typeface scooped up $100 million to help enterprises personalize content.
Celestial AI raised $100 million for its photonics platform.
Light Years Beyond, a vying “OpenAI for China”, was acquired by Meituan for a whooping $234 million.

Why it matters: Generative AI startups are raking in the big bucks, raising over $14 billion in the first 5 months of 2023 compared to $4.8 billion in all of 2022.

It’s got us wondering: is a bubble forming?

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WTF Is Machine (Un)Learning?! ⏪

Models like ChatGPT learn from data we throw at it.

But here’s the catch: AI is like that one friend who never forgets a secret. This can be a problem if we fed AI outdated, biased, or sensitive information.

Getting AI to “unlearn” information is tricky.

Completely retraining a model is costly, and even if you erase data from a database, AI can still infer what data it learned.

To tackle this issue, Google is launching the first ever “Machine Unlearning Challenge” to develop solutions for unlearning.

Why it matters: Privacy is a big hurdle in AI for many companies where data is delicate. We’re excited to see what folks come up with!

Around the Horn 🦄

A group of mainstream media outlets including NYT and WSJ are discussing forming a coalition to address AI’s effect on media.
GPT-4 is nearly as good as human tutors at teaching programming.
An Interview with Marc Andreessen about AI and How You Change the World (Stratechery).
How to build your own Discord/Slack bot using Supabase and OpenAI's GPT to help support teams.
OpenAI is being sued in a class-action lawsuit for scraping copyrighted data to train its models.