OpenAI signs major partnerships w/ Vox Media, The Atlantic, and PWC
Plus OpenAI has identified AI-driven disinformation efforts from Russia and China
Today’s Highlights:
📰 News: OpenAI signs partnerships w/ Vox Media, The Atlantic, and PWC + identifies AI-driven disinformation efforts from Russia and China
💰 Funding: Valar Labs raises $22M to predict patient responses to cancer treatments
⚡️ Top News Stories:
1. OpenAI announces new partnerships, w/ Vox Media and The Atlantic for content, and w/ WAN-IFRA to help global newsrooms adopt AI.
OpenAI will integrate content from Vox Media's portfolio, including Vox, The Verge, New York Magazine and more.
The Atlantic's content will also be integrated into ChatGPT, and they are creating "Atlantic Labs" to explore AI's potential in developing new products
WAN-IFRA and OpenAI launched the Newsroom AI Catalyst to help equip 128 global newsrooms w/ AI tools for strategic initiatives, improve journalism quality, and tackle challenges like misinformation and privacy.
2. OpenAI reported disrupting five geopolitical influence campaigns using its AI tech, run by state actors and companies in Russia, China, Iran, and Israel.
AI was used for social media posts, article translation/editing, and political manipulation.
The efforts focused on Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltic States, and the US, among others.
Despite sophisticated tools, these campaigns struggled to gain significant traction.
3. OpenAI signs a deal with PwC to onboard 100K employees to ChatGPT's enterprise tier, and make PwC its first resale partner, w/ the aim of enhancing PwC's consulting services with ChatGPT's capabilities in data analysis, report generation, and client communication.
4. Anthropic introduces "tool use" for its AI chatbot Claude, enabling users to create personalized assistants that can interact with external APIs for tasks like email assistance, product recommendations, or order tracking.
5. Scale AI introduces the SEAL Leaderboards to provide a trustworthy and expert-driven ranking system for LLMs.
SEAL ranks LLMs on performance in coding, math, and instruction-following using unbiased data, expert evaluations, and transparent methodologies.
SEAL aims to prevent benchmark manipulation and overfitting, offering a reliable measure of LLM capabilities.
6. Major tech companies, including Google, Intel, and Microsoft, form UALink Promoter Group to create an open interconnect standard for AI accelerator chips, challenging Nvidia's proprietary NVLink.
7. US slows AI chip license approvals to Middle East, citing national security review, particularly affecting Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and Cerebras Systems' high-volume shipments to UAE and Saudi Arabia.
8. Google introduced AI-generated search results that quickly faced backlash due to bizarre and incorrect suggestions, which Google is now citing "data voids" and odd user queries for these errors, and as a result is limiting AI results for nonsensical queries and satire.
9. Jan Leike, a key OpenAI researcher, joins competitor Anthropic after resigning over safety concerns at OpenAI.
10. Mistral AI announces Codestral, an open-source LLM designed to assist with coding tasks.
11. Mistral AI hires a US general manager, w/ plans to hire even more staff, and target US businesses seeking AI alternatives.
12. Fable Studio announces Showrunner, a new streaming platform allowing users to create AI-generated content, including scenes and full-length episodes.
13. On The Ted AI Show, Helen Toner, the former OpenAI board member, revealed that the board was unaware of ChatGPT until its Twitter announcement, and criticized Sam Altman for keeping them in the dark about significant developments and safety efforts.
💰 Top Funding News:
1. Valar Labs, which has developed an AI-powered tool that predicts patient responses to cancer treatments, raised a $22M Series A led by DCVC and Andreessen Horowitz, w/ Pear VC.
2. Maven AGI, which leverages gen-AI to revolutionize enterprise customer support, raised a $28M Series A led by M13, w/ Lux Capital, E14 Fund, and notable executives from OpenAI, Google, HubSpot, and Stripe.
3. Plenful, which uses AI-powered workflow automation to streamline pharmacy operations, raised a $17M Series A, led by TQ Ventures, w/ Bessemer Venture Partners, Mitchell Rales, Susa Ventures, and existing investors.
4. Palantir secures $480M Pentagon contract to deploy the Maven AI warfighting system across the DoD.