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AI Startups Expect Funding Slowdown From SVB Collapse

March 14, 2023

March 14, 2023

⚡ Today’s Highlights

  • 📰 News: Another bank gets seized but Fed lending program may prevent things from getting worse

  • 💰 Funding: AI startups have been booming in the global VC deal landscape

  • 🦾 Tools: AI for analytics, fine-tuning GPT-3 models, and creating VR spaces from text prompts in seconds

  • 📅 Events: The International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction continues today and the European Chatbot & Conversational AI Summit starts tomorrow!

📰 Today's Top Stories

(4 min read) (Source: Reuters)

TLDR: Silicon Valley Bank's closure on Friday, the second-largest bank failure in history, raised concerns among startups about their ability to pay their employees. However, regulators announced on Sunday that depositors would be able to access their funds on Monday, temporarily relieving fears. 

It snowballed from there. Regulators also seized New York-based Signature Bank ($110 billion in assets) on Sunday in the third-largest bank failure in U.S. history. To avoid panic, the Federal Reserve announced an emergency lending program aimed at preventing a wave of bank runs that could threaten the stability of the banking system and the economy as a whole. The government announced that taxpayers will not bear any costs associated with the new plans.

Some company executives, who had all of their funds in the bank, took to social media to beg for relief. While the announcement provided relief for many, it remains unclear when startups will be able to access all of their SVB funds, causing continued anxiety for some. The CEO of Rad AI, a radiology-tech startup with 65 employees, expressed relief but also nervousness about what could happen in the future and the need to assess moving forward.

The Big Picture: While this is good news for startups, the closure of Silicon Valley Bank has prompted questions about the funding environment for startups, especially since many of them rely heavily, if not solely, on the bank for support. Shareholders and some unsecured creditors will not receive the same protections as depositors.

(14 min read) (Source: Platformer)

TLDR: Microsoft has laid off its entire ethics and society team as a part of recent job cuts affecting 10,000 employees. Despite still having an Office of Responsible AI, Microsoft no longer has a dedicated team to ensure its AI principles align with product design during the company's push to make AI tools available to the mainstream.

During an initial round of layoffs in October, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of AI, John Montgomery, stated that the team would be putting more energy into individual product teams. However, in March, the remaining employees were informed that the rest of their team was, in fact, being let go. The situation illustrates the persistent tension that technology companies face as they strive to build socially responsible products while competing for market share and profits.

The Big Picture: AI Ethics teams face a delicate balance between building socially responsible products and competing for market share, profits, and recognition. They are responsible for anticipating potential misuse of technology, saying "no" or "slow down" to product development, and outlining risks that could lead to legal complications for the company.

As a result, tensions can arise between product teams and AI ethics teams that sometimes boil over into the public view. Microsoft's move came just as the ethics and society team was preparing to address the potential effects of OpenAI tools release to a global audience.

(3 min read) (Source: Techcyte)

TLDR: Techcyte has partnered with Mayo Clinic to develop AI algorithms and workflows on the Techcyte Clinical Pathology AI Platform. The platform analyzes digital images of liquid-based samples and identifies and classifies target objects using deep learning algorithms. Techcyte AI experts will work with Mayo Clinic to create diagnostic testing with increased accuracy and efficiency to improve the practice of lab medicine and patient outcomes.

💰 Funding Alerts

It looks like everyone is afraid to discuss funding right now with the whole historic economic crisis thing going on. Businesses are scrambling to reorganize and find safe places to keep their funds. The good news is, there will likely be a new wave of financial oversight/risk management that comes into Silicon Valley (and tech startups as a whole) from this.

So today, instead of funding news, we’ll be going over the growth that AI has seen in the startup ecosystem. The AI market has captured the attention of venture capital investors around the world, with 3,198 AI startups receiving $52.1 billion in funding across 3,396 VC funding deals in 2022, according to data analytics firm GlobalData.

However, despite the hype that 2022 brought (thanks mostly to OpenAI starting a product-launch race between the big tech firms), 2022 actually saw a decline in VC funding activity across sectors. Compared to 2021 (seemingly the last year of lending/investing ‘easy money’ in a low-interest rate environment), there was a 41.8% decline year-over-year in funding deal value. While AI deal volume fluctuated throughout 2021 and 2022, there was a rebound in both deal volume and value in Q4 2022 (once again, ChatGPT hype).

One thing to note. Despite the short-term subdued funding activity, long-term prospects are likely to be promising; AI is not going anywhere. The 2008 bubble didn’t destroy the proliferation of mobile tech and the internet. Whatever happens this year, while it may affect markets, will not hinder the impact AI will have on our lives over the next decade.

So strap in folks, all of this economic chaos might have a very bright light at the end of the tunnel.

🦾 Trending Tools

  • Assisterr is an AI-powered web3 tool providing analytics for decentralized networks and online communities. Its algorithms use machine learning to offer valuable insights and help users make informed decisions. Users can ask the ChatGPT interface any web3-related question, track their portfolio, and share results with the community.

  • Trudo AI is a no-code platform for building OpenAI apps that enable users to fine-tune GPT-3 models with spreadsheets and enhance their apps with memory. With a cost estimate feature and no coding required, users can generate accurate results from two or more columns of relevant data in their CSV files. Trudo AI can be used for chatbots, generative AI, API automations, data science, and code generation without any coding knowledge needed.

  • Versy is a no-code SaaS platform that allows SMEs, startups, and marketing agencies to create, measure, and monetize engaging metaverse experiences on their own websites. It provides a toolset that enables users to create experiential metaverses with extreme simplicity.

  • Cuely is a chatGPT Plus service that offers a pay-as-you-go model. It features a step-by-step prompt editor for users new to prompt engineering and eliminates the need for OpenAI logins and server downtimes for experienced users. Cuely is cross-platform and can be accessed on the web, desktop, and mobile via the Slack app.

  • AI Product Photos by CreatorKit generates e-commerce product photos using the CreatorKit Diffusion Model based on Stable Diffusion, without modifying the original image. Designed to solve the problem of insufficient product images for videos, the model ensures images are true to the original. Unlike other AI image models, it produces images optimized for e-commerce without altering the original product photo.

👀 More Reading

🌎 Fresh Content

1. Marques Brownlee made a great breakdown of a Reddit post from user u/ibreakphotos about Samsung’s “space zoom” being fake. It seems that Samsung’s camera isn’t actually capable of taking a high-resolution picture of the moon, it simply uses AI to recover/add the texture of the moon to photos even when the moon’s surface isn’t clearly visible. Marques recreated some of the experiments from the original post proving the results to be true. (YouTube)

2. Bing Chat has been getting a lot of updates recently (after users experienced its unhinged phase) and has improved greatly within the limits set on it by Microsoft. Matt Wolfe revisited the chat service and discussed some of the new updates and how it fares against ChatGPT. (YouTube)

3. We all know Abraham Lincoln was a wrestler but that’s the face of a man getting ready for a steel cage match. Check out the rest of the thread, it’s definitely worth it. (Twitter)

🧠 Resources

This article from Dataconomy delves into the fundamental steps necessary for creating AI, as well as the tools and techniques that are crucial for constructing strong and dependable AI systems.

 📅 Upcoming Events

  1. Don’t miss the 18th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI) (March 13-16, 2023 / Stockholm, Sweden + Virtual). Researchers from across the world present their best work to HRI to exchange ideas about theory, technology, data, and science furthering the state-of-the-art in the field. The conference theme for HRI 2023 is “HRI for all” and will focus on key HRI theories, methods, designs, studies, and technical advances that aim to understand and promote inclusion and diversity in HRI.

  2. The 3rd Annual European Chatbot & Conversational AI Summit (March 15-16, 2023 / In-Person at Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh, Scotland + Virtual) is a two days conference and exhibition designed to host industry executives, and adopters of Conversational AI, Chatbots, Virtual assistant, voice technology and Conversation design. The summit will reflect the latest tendencies and recent application changes in the Conversational AI space in the European market.

  3. Microsoft will be hosting a virtual event titled "The Future of Work: Reinventing Productivity with AI" (March 16, 2023 / Virtual). The event will be hosted by CEO Satya Nadella and CVP Jared Spataro, and will focus on how AI will revolutionize the way people and organizations work. While Microsoft has not disclosed any specific announcements, it is speculated that the event will primarily focus on Office.

  4. Data Innovation Summit ANZ (March 16, 2023 / Crown Conference Centre, Melbourne, Australia) is the largest and the most influential annual Data and AI event represented across several regions, bringing together the most innovative minds, enterprise practitioners, technology providers, start-up innovators and academics, working with Data Science, Big Data, ML, AI, Data Management, Data Engineering, IoT and Analytics, in one place to discuss ways to accelerate AI-driven Transformation throughout companies, industries and public organizations.

 💼 Jobs

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