AI21 Labs, an AI research lab and product company focused on natural language processing (NLP), announced a $64M funding round valuing the startup at $664M. AI21 Labs recently released "Ask Ruth Bader Ginsburg," an AI model trained to respond to questions in the same way as the late Supreme Court justice. Background: - Tel Aviv-based AI21 Labs is focused on both AI research and commercial applications.
- It was founded in 2017 by serial entrepreneur and Stanford professor emeritus Yoav Shoham; CrowdX Ltd founder Ori Goshen; and Mobileye NV founder and Hebrew University professor Amnon Shashua.
- AI21 has raised $118M to date.
What it offers: - AI21 Labs created AI21 Studio, an NLP-as-a-service platform for developers to build chatbots, virtual assistants, and other text-based applications.
- AI21 Studio includes Jurassic-X, an advanced NLP system that powers the Ruth Bader Ginsburg model. That system was trained on 27+ years worth of Ginsburg's legal writings and speech.
- AI21 Labs describes the bot as an experiment to pay homage to the late justice and highlight the possibilities and shortcomings of current AI systems, noting that it doesn't always respond as Ginsburg would.
- On the product side, AI21 created and released the AI writing assistant Wordtune, a Grammarly competitor, and its cousin Wordtune Read, which analyzes and summarizes documents.
CTECH BY CALCALIST 
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Volunteer researchers released an open-source large language model, Bloom, that's free to try and download on AI startup Hugging Face's website. At 176 billion parameters, Bloom is similar in size to OpenAI's GPT-3. More parameters generally equal a more effective and sophisticated model. About Bloom: - The text-prediction model can write and summarize texts, create poems and recipes, output code, and more.
- It supports 13 programming languages and 46 languages — the first LLM of this scale that's multilingual.
- The open-access project is a collaboration between Hugging Face and two French supercomputing groups. Together they formed BigScience, an international research group made up of more than 1,000 volunteers.
- The volunteers were granted $7M worth of computing time on the Jean Zay supercomputer in France. They trained Bloom using the carbon footprint equivalent of a Paris-to-New York flight.
More: - Hugging Face pledged a free web app for people to try out Bloom without needing to download it.
- To protect from misuse, users must legally agree not to use Bloom for malicious purposes.
- Unlike other large-language models, Bloom was made available with the code and datasets used to train it. It's part of an effort to further democratize large-language models that generate and respond to text and enable researchers to reduce their potential harms.
Zoom-out: - Earlier this year, Meta gave researchers free access to OPT-175B, a 175-billion-parameter language model, as well as its pre-trained models and the code to train and deploy them.
- It also released its smaller counterpart, OPT-66B, for unrestricted download, meaning there's no access request required.
- In November, OpenAI removed the waitlist for developers to access GPT-3's API.
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XPeng Robotics, a unit of Chinese EV maker XPeng, raised $100M as it seeks to introduce household robots in 2024. VC firm IDG Capital led the funding, with XPeng participating. More: - XPeng formed its robotics unit in 2016 and has focused mostly on R&D. Its specialties include robot interactions, AI, robot powertrains, autonomy, and locomotion control.
- The new capital will go toward robotics hardware and software R&D, recruitment, and technology and product development.
- Last year, XPeng showed off its first concept, a robot pony/unicorn geared for children. The ridable device uses object recognition, lidar, sound field sensory capabilities, and more to navigate obstacles, track objects, and interact emotionally.
THE SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
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Enterprise AI SaaS company SymphonyAI said it's acquiring financial crime detection business NetReveal from BAE Systems. The financial terms of the deal weren't disclosed. More: - NetReveal's platform provides financial crime, risk management, and fraud detection and prevention for banking, financial markets, and insurers.
- SymphonyAI said the purchase will allow it to sell more software to financial institutions and grow its financial vertical. (It currently offers Sensa for financial crime detection through Symphony AyasdiAI.)
- It's SymphonyAI's largest acquisition to date, CEO Sanjay Dhawan told Bloomberg. The company sells packaged AI solutions in the B2B sector and counts a number of portfolio companies.
- Backed by billionaire and chairman Romesh Wadhwani, the company plans to grow its workforce by 10% this year and is exploring an IPO.
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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened special investigations into two fatal accidents involving Tesla vehicles. More: - NHTSA investigators are probing two recent Tesla crashes, one in California and one in Florida.
- On July 6 near Gainesville, Florida, a 2015 Tesla crashed into the rear of a stationary tractor-trailer at a rest stop, killing both the driver and a passenger in the Tesla. It is unclear if Autopilot was on at the time of that crash.
- The second crash under investigation occurred on June 7. A 2018 Tesla Model 3, with its advanced driver assistance system activated, ran a red light and struck and killed a pedestrian in San Diego.
Zoom-out: - The update comes after an NHTSA June report found 392 crashes involving vehicles using driver-assist technology over 10 months. Nearly 70% of these (273) involved a Tesla, though the automaker claims some of the most commonly used autonomous driving technologies.
Some of this information first appeared in Inside Tech.
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 |  | Beth is a writer and analyst at Inside.com covering artificial intelligence and daily tech news. Since starting work at Inside, she has covered various topics including virtual reality, drones, and e-commerce. Prior to that she was a public policy and investigative reporter for The Arizona Republic, where she won a Pulitzer Prize nomination and First Amendment Award for reporting on the rising costs of pensions. Reach her at Beth.Duckett@inside.com. |   | | Editor | Aaron Crutchfield is based in the high desert of California. Over the last two decades, he has spent time writing and editing at various local newspapers and defense contractors in California. When he's not working, he can often be found looking at the latest memes with his kids or working on his 1962 Ford. | |
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