OpenAI releases GPT-4o mini

Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: OpenAI releases GPT-4o mini, a cost-efficient small model + AI giants trained models using Youtube videos from the biggest creators w/o consent

💰 Funding: Menlo Ventures and Anthropic partner for $100M AI fund

⚡️ Top News Stories:

1. OpenAI announces GPT-4o mini, a cost-efficient small model priced significantly lower than previous models, enabling a broad range of applications.

• The model aims to balance high performance w/affordability, making it accessible for a broader range of uses compared to larger models.

• GPT-4o mini supports text, speech, and multimodal inputs, enhancing its utility across various AI-driven tasks.

• The new model still incorporates built-in safety features and employs advanced techniques to ensure reliable and secure responses.

• The model is now available in various OpenAI APIs, with fine-tuning options coming soon, accessible to Free, Plus, Team, and Enterprise users.

2. AI companies, including Apple, Nvidia, and Anthropic, have used subtitles from YouTube videos for training AI without creators' consent, violating YouTube’s rules, and sparking outrage amongst creators. Content from many of the most popular creators including MrBeast, PewDiePie, and MKBHD was amongst those affected. 

3. OpenAI introduced a new method to improve the legibility of language model outputs, named Prover-Verifier Games, which ensures that strong models produce text that weak models and humans can easily verify.

4. Mistral AI and NVIDIA unveil Mistral NeMo 12B, an enterprise AI model offering high accuracy, flexibility, and efficiency, capable of handling multi-turn conversations, math, common sense reasoning, and extensive context processing making it great for various applications, including chatbots, multilingual tasks, and coding.

5. Salesforce introduces Einstein Service Agent, an autonomous AI designed to revolutionize customer service by handling a wide range of issues without preprogramming, by using gen-AI and trusted business data to understand customer context and respond accurately, mimicking natural language interactions.

6. Google introduced Project Oscar, an open-source platform to help developers create AI agents that assist in various stages of the software development lifecycle.

7. Andrej Karpathy, ex-Tesla and OpenAI AI leader, launched Eureka Labs, an AI-driven education platform aimed at developing AI teaching assistants to support human teachers in guiding students through course materials.

8. Spotify is expanding it’s AI DJ w/ the launch of a Spanish-language version, which will be available to Premium users in select Latin American and Spanish markets.

9. Disney Music Group and AudioShake are collaborating to separate the individual instrument tracks (stems) of Disney's classic songs using AI, which will allow Disney to re-master old audio, create lyric videos, and facilitate film/TV licensing by providing isolated vocals and instrumentals from older hits.

10. Hugging Face introduces SmolLM, a series of small language models (135M, 360M, 1.7B parameters) trained on a high-quality dataset, emphasizing efficiency and performance.

11. Fujitsu and Cohere Inc. have announced a strategic partnership to develop and provide generative AI solutions for enterprises using the Japanese language, as they will jointly develop an advanced Japanese LLM, tentatively named Takane, to be used in private cloud environments for enhanced security.

12. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has requested Amazon provide details on its deal w/ AI startup Adept, after Amazon recently hired Adept’s CEO David Luan and others to create an AGI team, reflecting concerns over AI partnerships and potential antitrust issues.

13. Trump allies are drafting an AI executive order to launch projects for military tech and roll back current regulations, w/ a framework that proposes industry-led agencies to evaluate AI models and secure systems, differing from Biden’s safety-focused AI executive order.

14. Meta and Apple are withholding AI products from the EU due to what they view as vague and burdensome regulations, w/ Meta objecting to GDPR's unclear requirements for AI data use, and Apple opposing the Digital Markets Act, which demands product interoperability, citing privacy risks.

💰 Top Funding News:

1. Menlo Ventures and Anthropic have launched a $100M fund named the Anthology Fund to invest in AI startups.

• The fund targets pre-seed and Series A startups focusing on AI infrastructure, applications, consumer solutions, trust and safety, and societal benefits.

• Combining Menlo’s venture experience and Anthropic’s AI expertise, the fund aims to drive innovation and support the next generation of AI technologies.

• Startups funded will gain access to Anthropic’s AI models and Menlo’s venture support, fostering a collaborative ecosystem.

2. World Labs, founded by ‘Godmother of AI’ Fei-Fei Li, raised $100M in two funding rounds led by Andreessen Horowitz and Radical Ventures. World Labs is developing AI with spatial intelligence, enabling robots to understand dimensions, locations, and functions of objects, which enhances navigation and task execution in physical spaces.

3. Figma, after integrating new AI features into its platform, raised funding through a secondary share sale, valuing the company at $12.5Bn, w/ funding coming from Coatue Management,, General Catalyst, Atlassian, Franklin Venture Partners, Iconiq, Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, and others. 

4. Pindrop, which utilizes AI for voice authentication and fraud detection, focusing on combating threats from deepfakes and generative AI, secured $100M in debt financing, provided by Hercules Capital, Inc.

5. Exa, which is developing a search engine specifically designed for AI, using embedding models to provide precise and relevant search results, raised $22M in a Seed and Series A, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, w/ NVentures and Y Combinator.

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