NVTC Newsletter No. 15
Happy Tech Tuesday everyone! For those new here, welcome to the NVTC weekly newsletter. This week’s newsletter is necess(AI)ry. Generative AI is all the rage thanks to developments from companies like OpenAI and Stability AI. Get ready for a deep dive into the brave new world.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURES ⚡
🎢 Driving the Future – An independent car who don’t need no 3D map.
⭐ GenAI From the Block – Investors are dreaming.
⭐ Feeling Chatty? – OpenAI has a place you can go, if you don’t mind a line.
⭐ Big Tech, Big Bandwagon – Amazon and Adobe want in on the action.
🔮 Miracle Growers – Jasper, Hugging Face, and more.
NV Portfolio Highlight 🎢
If every tech company was a rock band, Wayve would be a heavy metal band. Wayve takes a pure machine learning approach to autonomous vehicles (AVs). Its technology is intense. Most AV models can only drive in the city where they’re trained and must be re-engineered with HD maps before venturing into unseen areas. Wayve’s deeper intelligence is capable of applying what it learns in new domains and in both passenger cars and delivery vans.
The company is part of a new wave (pun intended) for driverless cars. Previous approaches relied on super detailed 3D maps, but Wayve relies completely on deep learning. Much like human drivers, Wayve’s technology is constantly improving based on new driving experiences. The same algorithms that taught GPT-3 to write essays are being used to teach cars how to drive – Wayve’s AI-powered vehicles are much more like students than they are robots.
In May, Wayve announced a partnership with Microsoft to leverage Microsoft’s supercomputing infrastructure to scale Wayve’s technology. Wayve has multiple open positions for machine learning and software engineers, which you can read details on here.
A WEEK IN GENERATIVE AI 📖
Advanced open-source AI has sparked countless new startup ideas. Hype has dramatically shifted away from Web3 to what investors are now calling generative AI: AI that does more than just analyze; it creates. Since 2020, venture capital investment in the space has grown by 425%, totaling $2.1 billion this year. The sudden change can be attributed to companies like OpenAI, which led the charge for especially high quality AI models.
This past week, OpenAI launched a free preview of ChatGPT, an implementation of the company’s new GPT-3.5 technology. Anyone can enter the portal and talk with ChatGPT as if you were chatting with a friend at Sunday brunch or discussing the news with your boss. Examples so far have demonstrated notable progress in ChatGPT’s writing skills in comparison to GPT-3, although it still presents misinformation as fact.
Lensa AI, Instagram’s new darling enabling users to create “magic avatars,” has come under criticism this week. This criticism is part of a larger debate surrounding AI and its facilitation of deepfakes. Deepfakes are synthetic media representations where a person’s image is manipulated to encourage false information about them. Identity theft and impersonation are two major threats in a world with increased circulation of deepfakes.
Mommy-and-me time is adopting a third wheel: AI. Amazon launched a new Alexa feature called “Create with Alexa” which generates short stories for kids based on a few prompts. Parents worry about how to protect their kids from potentially inappropriate results. Fortunately, Alexa AI boasts three key safeguards, including content filtering, training via a curated dataset, and a carefully structured and restricted experience. Buzzkill, much?
Adobe is embracing AI-generated images, which directly contradicts stances recently held by companies like Getty Images and Shutterstock. Adobe accompanied its decision with an outline of the role it sees generative AI playing in the future. Although Adobe will require creators to affirm they have legal rights to their work, it appears to be the first company comfortable assuming the legal risk of AI-made art.
Startups To Watch 🔮
Jasper is an AI content platform on a growth rampage. In the span of 2 years, it acquired 100,000 paying customers and raised $125 million Series A funding at a $1.5 billion valuation. The company reports 100% growth in ARR in 2022.
Hugging Face is building the GitHub of machine learning. It hosts thousands of pre-trained machine learning models on its website. In May, it closed a $100 million Series C round, valuing the company at over $2 billion.
Stability AI is leading the charge for music- and image-generating AI systems. The company just raised a $101 million funding round in October, valuing the company at $1 billion post-money.
Descript is an AI-driven audio and video editing platform founded by Groupon’s former CEO, Andrew Mason. The company landed $50 million in Series C funding led by the OpenAI startup. Descript was valued at around $550 million and is well on its way to unicorn status.
Reddit Highlight 📈
I’ve spent every hour of my life for the past week trying to use ChatGPT to no avail:
Lucky for me, plenty of Reddit users have found their way into ChatGPT headquarters. In fact, there’s a whole Reddit with the AI’s responses to entertaining questions (r/ChatGPT).
Here’s a great one #freeChatGPT:
OUTRO
Feel free to reply to this email with all questions, feedback, or comments. We’ll be iterating and curating the NVTC newsletter according to your interests.
Join us on the NVTC LinkedIn group if you haven’t. Thanks for reading!