Accenture invests $3 billion in AI

June 14, 2023

June 14, 2023

⚡ Today’s Highlights

  • 📰 News: Accenture invests $3 billion in AI

  • 💰 Funding: Synthesia, Mistral AI, Striveworks, and Medivis

  • 🦾 Tools: Automate workflows, summarize notes, and analyze data all in one doc with the power of AI

  • 📅 Events: The Open Data Science Conference 2023 starts today!

📰 Today's Top Stories

(5 min read) (Source: The New York Times)

TLDR: Accenture plans to invest $3 billion over three years in its data and AI practice, aiming to double its AI-focused staff to 80,000 through hiring, acquisitions, and training.

  • The company intends to leverage generative AI more in its client work and help customers across 19 industries increase their use of the technology.

  • Accenture's move reflects the growing trend among companies to enhance their offerings with generative AI, as technology leaders like Microsoft and Alphabet predict it will transform various job roles.

(7 min read) (Source: Meta AI)

TLDR: Meta Platforms will provide researchers with access to its new "human-like" AI model, I-JEPA, which can accurately analyze and complete unfinished images using background knowledge about the world.

  • The model's unique approach incorporates human-like reasoning, advocated by Meta's top AI scientist Yann LeCun, to avoid common errors in AI-generated images.

  • Meta emphasizes open-sourcing AI research to spur innovation, identify safety gaps, and reduce costs, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg highlighting the benefits of industry standardization.

  • In addition to research, Meta is integrating generative AI features into its consumer products, including ad tools for creating image backgrounds and an Instagram product that modifies user photos based on text prompts.

(5 min read) (Source: AMD)

TLDR: AMD announced its most-advanced AI GPU, the MI300X, which is set to challenge Nvidia's dominance in the AI chip market and could tap into the growing data center AI accelerator market.

  • The MI300X offers larger memory capacity than Nvidia's rival H100, making it suitable for running large language models used in generative AI applications.

  • AMD's Infinity Architecture combines multiple accelerators in one system, similar to systems developed by Nvidia and Google, while the company also introduced its own software stack called ROCm for AI chips. Lower GPU prices may contribute to reducing the high cost of serving generative AI applications.

  • Check out the full announcement on AMD’s YouTube channel:

(3 min read) (Source: OpenAI)

TLDR: OpenAI has released new versions of its text-generating models, GPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4, with a focus on function calling, which allows developers to describe programming functions and have the models generate the code to execute those functions.

  • The new GPT-3.5-turbo offers a significantly expanded context window, improving the model's ability to retain information from previous conversations. It now has four times the context length of the original version.

  • OpenAI has also reduced the pricing for GPT-3.5-turbo by 25% and for text-embedding-ada-002 by 75%, making the models more affordable for developers. The price reduction is attributed to increased efficiency in OpenAI's systems.

(3 min read) (Source: POLITICO)

TLDR: Google's launch of its AI chatbot Bard in the European Union has been delayed due to privacy concerns raised by the Irish Data Protection Commission, Google's main European data regulator under GDPR.

💰 Funding Alerts

1. Synthesia, the digital media platform for creating AI-generated videos, raised $90 million in funding, with the funding round led by Accel and strategic investment from Nvidia. Other investors include Kleiner Perkins, GV, FirstMark Capital, and MMC.

  • With the funds, Synthesia plans to advance its AI research and enhance its technology, particularly focusing on expanding the capabilities of its AI-generated avatars to perform a wider range of tasks.

2. Mistral AI, a 1 month-old French startup focusing on building and training LLMs and gen-AI solutions, raised $113 million in seed funding, with Lightspeed Venture Partners (Antoine Moyroud, Partner) leading the round. Other investors include Xavier Niel, JCDecaux Holding, Rodolphe Saadé, Motier Ventures, La Famiglia, Headline, Exor Ventures, Sofina, First Minute Capital, LocalGlobe, Bpifrance, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

  • With the funding, Mistral AI plans to assemble a world-class team and develop the best open source models for text-based generative AI. The company aims to address the challenge of making AI useful and is set to release its initial models in 2024.

3. Striveworks, a provider of machine learning operations (MLOps) for enterprise data science and analytics teams, raised $33 million in its first institutional fundraising round, with Centana Growth Partners (Ben Cukier, Partner) leading the round and participation from existing investors.

  • Striveworks plans to use the funds to expand its team by hiring more engineers, salespeople, and marketing professionals. This expansion will help drive growth and enhance capabilities to better serve their customers. Additionally, Striveworks aims to simplify the model lifecycle management process with their user-friendly, no-code platform called Chariot, making it more accessible and effective in fast-paced environments.

4. Medivis, a medical tech company, raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by Thrive Capital (Kareem Zaki, General Partner), with participation from Initialized Capital and Mayo Clinic, among others.

  • Medivis focuses on establishing augmented reality as the new standard in surgical navigation.

  • Medivis plans to use the funds to scale engineering efforts, obtain regulatory clearances, and globally commercialize its augmented reality solutions across multiple specialties, including neurosurgery, orthopedic surgery, interventional radiology, and reconstructive surgery. The company aims to provide clinicians with unprecedented visual guidance during surgical procedures, ultimately improving patient care and safety.

🦾 Trending Tools

  • Coda AI is a work assistant for the all-in-one doc for teams. Automate workflows, summarize notes, analyze data, and generate content. Collaborate seamlessly and unlock productivity with all the latest AI-powered features.

  • Bito AI, powered by ChatGPT and OpenAI, boosts developer productivity. With personalized AI assistance, Bito helps developers write code, explain syntax, generate tests, check security, improve performance, and more. Join a growing community of 100,000+ developers.

  • Clipdrop, the image editing tool from Stability AI releases Uncrop. A free alternative to Adobe Photoshop’s Generative Fill feature. Use AI to adjust and create new dimensions for any image.

  • Pensieve AI can help analyze any PDF document with ChatGPT. Simply upload any PDF file and ask questions to uncover valuable insights. Extract information from legal, financial, and training files effortlessly.

  • AI Spend is an intelligent monitoring tool helping users optimize OpenAI costs. With user-friendly dashboards, notifications, and analytics, track usage, cost trends, and model performance.

👀 More Reading:

🌎 Fresh Content

1. Two Minute Papers broke down and demoed some of Photoshop’s incredible new generative AI features including the generative fill feature that took over social media. (YouTube)

2. AI and machine learning tools are being used by Amazon Web Services to fight wildfires and could play a critical role in fighting the wildfires that have been filling Canada and the USA with smoke. (YouTube)

📅 Upcoming Events

The Open Data Science Conference 2023 (June 14-15, 2023 / Tobacco Dock, London, England + Virtual) helps you build job-ready skills and stay up-to-date with the latest advances in machine learning, NLP, LLMs, data analytics, responsible AI, and more with ODSC East’s expert-led, immersive, training sessions. With 300 hours of content, the conference features a wide range of sessions for data scientists at every level, from beginner to expert.

🧠 Prompts

Harness the expertise of ChatGPT to delve into behavioral economics and its role in optimizing customer conversions with these compelling prompts. This prompt will help you assess the current gaps in your business and understand the principles of behavioral economics that can be applied to subtly influence customer behavior towards making a purchase. Tailor the prompt to your business for an in-depth analysis and practical strategies to drive conversions.

Optimizing Conversion Through Behavioral Economics

  • Prompt: "Act as an expert in behavioral economics. I'm interested in identifying opportunities in my business to improve sales and customer conversions. Could you examine my business and suggest principles that can be applied to subtly steer customers towards making purchases or converting? Begin by confirming you're ready, and then please ask me for the information you need t start providing feedback."

That's all for today's email! If you want more please follow us at the social channels linked below, or check out our website!

How'd you like today's email?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Share our newsletter: If you like our work please share/forward this email with your friends, colleagues, and family. It's the best way to support us!

If this email was forwarded to you please sign up here to continue receiving them.

Want your content, product, jobs, or event featured in our newsletter? Reply to this email with the details, and our team will reach out to you.

Do you use AI for work? Tell us how, and you could be featured in our newsletter!

Check out our website for more resources, including a list of AI investors, products, events, and twitter follows.

For an archive of all our posts, click here.

We'd love to hear from you! You can always leave us comments or feedback by replying to this email!

Powered by AI. Curated and edited by Humans.