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French President Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech during the Global Forum on Artificial Intelligence for Humanity (GFAIH) at the Institut de France in Paris, France October 30, 2019.
Hard Numbers: France forges ahead, Crushing consulting, Say hi to my AI avatar, OpenAI’s big buy, Stability finds some cash
21 billion: Accenture’s generative AI business is booming. The consulting firm’s practice, which helps companies use AI technology to become more efficient, now has $21 billion worth of contracts, up from $17 billion this time last year. It’s a business that’s booming as companies try to cut their costs.
500 million: An AI video startup called HeyGen raised a new funding round, valuing it at $500 million. The company offers AI avatars and voice-cloning services, giving people a photorealistic online version of themselves for virtual meetings, marketing, or whatever they can dream up. And it can translate their speech into various languages. Should we test it out for a future edition? Email us here if you like the idea.
105 million: OpenAI bought a search and analytics startup called Rockset for $105 million, the biggest purchase to date for the ChatGPT maker. Rockset is an enterprise-focused company and, as such, OpenAI said it wants to use its software to improve its data offerings for business customers.
80 million: Stability AI, the beleaguered company behind the popular image generator Stable Diffusion, has secured an $80 million recapitalization with existing investors, which they hope will help set the company back on stable footing.SUQIAN, CHINA - MARCH 4, 2024 - Illustration Mistral AI, March 4, 2024, Suqian, Jiangsu Province, China.
Hard Numbers: Mistral gets money, Amazon’s investments, Disco time!, Wary of AI news
6 billion: Europe has just one major player in the generative AI space: Mistral. The French startup raised a new $640 million funding round last week that boosts its overall value to $6 billion. While OpenAI, Anthropic, and other startups have largely proprietary or closed-source models, Mistral has focused on open-source models, marking a more open approach that might suit regulators in Brussels better.
230 million: On Thursday,Amazon pledged $230 million to invest in generative AI startups. That number includes $80 million for its second Amazon Web Services Generative AI Accelerator program, designed to incentivise AI startups to use Amazon’s cloud services.
5: Disco Corp., a Japanese semiconductor company, has seen its stock quintuple since 2022 on increased demand for chip packaging services. The profit margins are thinner for packaging compared with other facets of the chip industry, but increasingly in demand with ever-shrinking chip sizes.
52: Roughly half of Americans are okay with news written by AI. Some 52% of US respondents told surveyors at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism that they’re uncomfortable with news largely written by AI. Even more respondents felt uncomfortable in the UK, with 63% shaking their heads at AI-written news. Trust in the media is at historic lows in the US, and ambivalence to whether it’s written by humans or machines may be the clearest sign yet.Executive Vice-President Vestager and Commissioner Breton on fostering a European approach to Artificial Intelligence, in the European Commission. Brussels the 21/04/2021.
Let’s get some non-American options
In a recent interview, European Union antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said that Europeans should have AI tools that aren’t exclusively made by American companies.
“The choice should not be American or American,” Vestager told Politico. “Europe is open for business from everywhere. But I think it’s important that you have choice.”
Most of the largest AI firms are American. That includes Silicon Valley behemoths like Google, Meta, and Microsoft, but also startups like Anthropic and OpenAI, which make the chatbots Claude and ChatGPT, respectively.
That said, there is a tangible AI presence in Europe: Google’s DeepMind lab, once an independent British company, still largely operates in the UK. The French startup Mistral AI was recently valued at $2 billion, and the UK startup Stability AI, which makes the Stable Diffusion model, is worth $1 billion.
With so many major technology companies headquartered in the US, Europe has long struggled to both rein in overseas tech while boosting its own firms. AI presents a fresh opportunity to reassert its influence. European lawmakers and regulators, about to pass their first-mover AI legislation, simultaneously want to clamp down on the technology and enable its firms to compete on the world stage.
Photo illustration showing the DALL-E logo on a smartphone with an Artificial intelligence chip and symbol in the background.
Hard Numbers: Profitable prompts, Happy birthday ChatGPT, AI goes superhuman, Office chatbots, Self-dealing at OpenAI, Saying Oui to Mistral
$200,000: Want an image of a dog? DALL-E could spit out any breed. Want an Australian shepherd with a blue merle coat and heterochromia in front of a backdrop of lush, green hills? Now you’re starting to write like a prompt engineer, and that could be lucrative. Companies are paying up to $200,000 for full-time AI “prompt engineering” roles, placing a premium on this newfangled skill. It's all about descriptive fine-tuning of language to get desired results.
1: Can you believe it’s only been one year since ChatGPT launched? It all started when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted, “today we launched ChatGPT. Try talking with it here.” Since then, the chatbot has claimed hundreds of millions of users.
56: Skynet, anyone? No thanks, say 56% of Americans, who are concerned with AI gaining “superhuman capabilities” and support policies to prevent it, according to a new poll by the AI Policy Institute.
$51 million: In 2019, OpenAI reportedly agreed to buy $51 million worth of chips from Rain, a “neuromorphic” chip-making startup, meant to mirror the activity of the human brain. Why is this making news now? According to Wired, OpenAI’s Sam Altman personally invested $1 million in the company.
$20: You work at a big company and need help sifting through sprawling databases for a single piece of information. Enter AI. Amazon’s new chatbot, called Q, costs $20 a month and aims to help with tasks like “summarizing strategy documents, filling out internal support tickets, and answering questions about company policy.” It’s Amazon’s answer to Microsoft’s work chatbot, Copilot, released in September.
$2 billion: French AI startup Mistral is about to close a new funding round that would value it at $2 billion. The new round, worth $487 million, includes investment from venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz, along with chipmaker NVIDIA and the business software firm Salesforce. Mistral, founded less than a year ago, boasts an open-source large language model that it hopes will rival OpenAI’s (ironically) closed-source model, GPT4. What’s the difference? Open-source LLMs publish their source code so it can be studied and third-party developers can build off of it.