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| Here is a look at today's AI briefing: - Anthropic is in talks to secure $750M at an $18.4B pre-money valuation.
- Pulitzer Prize-winning authors join lawsuit against OpenAI, Microsoft.
- Samsung's next Galaxy smartphones could have on-device AI.
- Google unveils VideoPoet AI for generating videos.
Beth
p/beth-duckett | |
| 1 | | Anthropic, an AI startup competing with OpenAI, is in talks to secure $750M at a pre-funding valuation of $18.4B, Reuters reports. Google and Amazon have also each pledged multi-billion-dollar investments in the company in recent months, making it one of the best-funded AI startups. More: - The latest funding round, which has not been finalized, would be led by venture capital firm Menlo Ventures.
- Sources told Reuters that Anthropic's valuation before the funding round is $18.4B, or more than four times its $4.1B valuation from March.
- Anthropic has declined to comment.
- In funding rounds in April and May, Anthropic raised a combined $750M. Later in the year, Amazon pledged up to $4B in Anthropic, and Google announced plans to invest as much as $2B.
Zoom out: - The startup, founded by former OpenAI staffers and siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei in 2021, developed a conversational AI chatbot, Claude 2, that competes against OpenAI's GPT series.
- Anthropic has billed itself as focused on AI safety and is registered as a public-benefit corporation.
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| 2 | | More authors, including Pulitzer Prize winners Kai Bird, Stacy Schiff, and Taylor Branch, have joined a lawsuit claiming that OpenAI and Microsoft used their copyrighted texts without consent to train GPT models. Julian Sancton, a New York Times-bestselling author, is spearheading the proposed class-action lawsuit that he submitted last month in Manhattan federal court. More: - Sancton claims that OpenAI used thousands of nonfiction books, including his own "Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica's Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night," to train its GPT models.
- An amended complaint filed this week revealed that Bird, Branch, Schiff, and eight other nonfiction authors have joined the lawsuit as plaintiffs.
- The suit accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of building a multi-billion dollar business on the backs of "the combined works of humanity without permission."
- "Rather than pay for intellectual property, they pretend as if the laws protecting copyright do not exist," it says.
- The complaint seeks an unspecified amount of monetary damages and a court order to halt the alleged infringement.
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| 3 | | Samsung's next Galaxy smartphones could have on-device AI. The company is expected to reveal its Galaxy S24 phones on Jan. 17 in the U.S. A newly leaked event invite hinted at AI's role in the devices with the phrase "Galaxy AI is coming." More: - The leaker, Evan Blass, shared a spec sheet he found for the phones, which will include the standard Galaxy S24, along with an S24 Plus and an S24 Ultra.
- Reports noted that Samsung's GenAI model, Gauss, could be included in the Galaxy S24 phones, powering tasks like image editing, email composition, document summarization, coding, and more.
- If so, it could make Samsung among the first smartphone makers to bring generative AI to its devices, potentially giving the phone maker an advantage over cloud-dependent models like ChatGPT.
Zoom out: - The company named its AI model after Carl Friedrich Gauss, the mathematician who pioneered normal distribution theory, a foundation of machine learning and AI.
- Gauss offers three capabilities. Gauss Language can write emails, summarize documents, translate content, and perform other tasks. Gauss Code, a coding assistant, helps in-house software developers write code, while Gauss Image can generate or edit images.
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| 4 | | Google unveiled VideoPoet, a large language model that can generate videos and more. According to Google, VideoPoet can perform text-to-video, image-to-video, and video-to-audio, as well as video stylization and video inpainting and outpainting. More: - VideoPoet stands apart from conventional video generation models, which are predominantly diffusion-based.
- The LLM excels in video generation through extensive pre-training on a massive dataset of videos and text-image pairs.
- According to Google, it outperforms competitors like Runway and Pika, creating longer, smoother videos with consistent motion, eliminating glitches seen in diffusion-based models.
- VideoPoet offers capabilities like simulating camera movements and visual styles and generating matching audio.
Zoom out: - Google recently announced its latest image generator, Imagen 2, which has improved photorealism, text rendering, and logo generation over its predecessor.
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| 5 | | About half of California voters worry that AI will take over their jobs within the next five years, according to a POLITICO|Morning Consult survey. The poll comes weeks before California lawmakers start a new session, where they're expected to deliberate on at least a dozen AI regulation proposals. 
Details: The survey revealed that roughly 50% of California's registered voters are either not very concerned or not concerned at all about AI replacing their jobs within five years. Meanwhile, voters also were split on whether AI will have a positive impact on their lives, with 43% saying yes and 39% saying it will have more of a negative impact. Why it matters: California lawmakers will consider a number of AI-related bills next year, including some intended to mitigate the impacts of AI job displacement on workers. According to Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda), Californians "are clearly demanding a balanced approach to regulating artificial intelligence," though she adds that state lawmakers "should learn from our mistakes failing to regulate social media and be proactive" about AI regulation. | | | |
| 6 | | AI mergers and acquisitions: - IBM announced it will buy Software AG's enterprise integration platforms for €2.1B ($2.3B) to boost its AI and cloud capabilities. IBM is acquiring the German software company's StreamSets and webMethods platforms, which together comprise its "Super Ipaas," or integration-platform-as-a-service business.
- Qlik, a data analytics company, announced its acquisition of Mozaic Data, an AI-based data management company, for an undisclosed sum. Through the deal, Qlik will accelerate data deployment and utilization across enterprises.
- Blank check firm BYTE Acquisition has merged with Airship AI Holdings, an AI-powered edge video, sensor, and data management platform. The deal had a pre-money equity value of $225M. The combined company will start trading on Nasdaq as "AISP" on Dec. 22.
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- Time magazine chose multimodality, constitutional AI, and text-to-video as the three biggest AI innovations of the past year.
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- In his year-end blog post, Bill Gates predicted the general populations of the U.S. and other high-income countries are 18-24 months away from using "significant" use of AI. "If we make smart investments now, AI can make the world a more equitable place," he wrote.
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 | AI and technology writer | | Beth is a contributing editor and writer of Inside's AI and Tech newsletters. She has written for notable publications like USA Today and the Arizona Business Gazette. During her time as a public policy reporter at The Arizona Republic, she received recognition with a Pulitzer Prize nomination and a First Amendment Award for her collaborative reporting on pension cost increases. Beth also authored a book on the solar photovoltaic industry in 2016. You can reach her at Beth.Duckett@yahoo.com. | | This newsletter was edited by Aaron Crutchfield | |
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