Europe Passes the world’s first comprehensive AI law

Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: EU passes the AI Act establishing “the world’s first comprehensive AI law” + Figure demo’s its conversational robot powered by OpenAI

💰 Funding: Cognition raises $21M and launches Devin ‘the first AI software engineer’

⚡️ Top News Stories:

1. EU lawmakers officially pass the AI Act, setting the stage for comprehensive AI regulation and transparency requirements.

• The AI Act, debated since 2021, saw some of its stricter regulations softened, including a proposed total ban on biometric systems for mass public surveillance.

• The AI Act will be enforced in stages, with different timelines for banning prohibited AI systems, enforcing rules against general-purpose AI systems, and applying regulations to high-risk AI systems.

• The Act identifies certain AI systems as prohibited, including social scoring and emotion recognition in public spaces, and designates others as high-risk, such as those used in critical infrastructure and law enforcement.

• Initially, the AI Act is not expected to directly affect US-based AI companies like OpenAI and Google until its full effect in 2025.

• The Act's approach to general-purpose AI tools, which emerged after the Act's proposal, was a significant point of discussion, leading to a two-tier system for classifying high-risk systems.

• The AI Act exempts open-source developers, researchers, and smaller companies from its potentially stiff fines, a move praised by the open-source community.

2. Figure unveils a conversational humanoid robot powered by OpenAI, showcasing advanced AI interactions and task execution.

3. OpenAI secured licensing agreements w/ two leading European publishers, Le Monde in France and Promotora de Informaciones SA (Prisa) in Spain, enabling the integration of French and Spanish language news content into ChatGPT, and enhancing the AI model's training and capabilities.

4. Google DeepMind has developed SIMA (Scalable, Instructable, Multiworld Agent), an AI agent designed to play video games more like a human, learning to interact in games through natural language and action, and focusing on cooperation rather than dominating gameplay

5. Anthropic launches Claude 3 Haiku, the latest addition to its Claude 3 AI model family, designed for speed and affordability while offering advanced vision capabilities.

6. Perplexity’s AI chatbot is integrating Yelp’s data, including maps, reviews, and business details, to enhance its responses to users seeking restaurant recommendations.

7. Cohere introduces Command-R, a new LLM optimized for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and tool use, designed for enterprise-scale production.

8. Google is restricting its Gemini AI chatbot from answering election-related questions globally in countries with upcoming votes in 2024, including the US, India, South Africa, and the UK, to prevent AI-generated disinformation.

9. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Senate Democrats are advocating for a bill to reduce the federal workweek from 40 to 32 hours, citing advancements in AI and automation as justification.

10. Apple has acquired DarwinAI, an AI tech company known for developing smaller, more efficient AI systems, signaling a push into generative AI and on-device processing for upcoming iOS and macOS updates.

11. Amazon introduces a generative AI feature enabling sellers to auto create Amazon product pages by simply pasting a link from their external website, aiming to streamline the process of listing products on Amazon.

💰 Top Funding News:

1. Applied Intuition, a software used by automakers to develop autonomous vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems, raised a $250M Series E, valuing the company at $6B. The round was led by Lux Capital, Elad Gil, and Porsche Investments Management S.A., with contributions from Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and notable angels such as Ray Dalio, Reid Hoffman, and Mustafa Suleyman

2. Cognition AI Inc. introduces Devin, a groundbreaking tool that autonomously generates code for entire engineering projects, including AI models. They just closed a $21M Series A led by Founders Fund.

3. Together AI, a leading AI platform for open-source models, offering serverless APIs for inference and fine-tuning, raised $106M in new financing led by Salesforce Ventures, w/ Coatue, Lux Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Emergence Capital, Prosperity7 Ventures, NEA, Greycroft, Definition Capital, Long Journey Ventures, Factory, Scott Banister, SV Angel, Clem Delangue, and Soumith Chintala.

4. Nanonets, which leverages deep learning to create a frictionless business workflow automation platform powered by autonomous AI agents, raised a $29M Series B led by Accel India, w/ Elevation Capital, YCombinator, and others. 

5. Unstructured, which specializes in the ingestion and preprocessing of unstructured enterprise data into LLM-ready formats,raised a $40M Series B led by Menlo Ventures, w/ Databricks Ventures, IBM Ventures, and other notable investors.

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