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| Welcome to Inside AI! Here are today's top stories: - Inflection, known for its Pi AI assistant, raises $1.3B.
- Generative AI tool developer Runway nabs $141M.
- AI helps recreate 3D scenes based on eye reflections.
- Melinda French Gates concerned over lack of female representation in AI development.
- Valve's Steam rejects game for AI-generated art assets.
Beth
p/beth-duckett | |
| 1 | | What happened: Inflection, the startup known for its Pi chatbot, has raised $1.3B. The significant funding round, led by Microsoft, Bill Gates, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and new investor Nvidia, values the startup at $4B. Inflection now stands as the second-best-funded generative AI startup, trailing only OpenAI. 
Details: Inflection aims to develop a personal AI to assist individuals with planning, scheduling, gathering information, and performing other various tasks. It recently released Pi, its first AI chatbot product, which it says offers a more supportive, personal experience than other AI models. Quotable: Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said that "ambitious AI companies like Inflection AI are pioneering the industry with transformative products that are accessible, easy to use, and show the many possibilities of AI." Why it matters: The funding highlights how generative AI continues to capture investors' attention. It's no surprise that investors are pumping more funding into generative AI startups. In a recent report, CB Insights confirmed a "massive opportunity for investors to get in early on this potentially transformative technology." What the numbers say: According to CB Insights, 2022 set a record for the amount of investment pumped into generative AI-focused startups. Equity funding reached nearly $2.6B across 110 deals, up from $71M across 23 deals in 2017. Q1 2023 saw approximately $1.7B generated in 46 deals, per PitchBook data. An additional $10.68 billion worth of deals were announced but not completed. 
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| 2 | | Runway, known for its AI software that creates short videos from text prompts, nabbed $141M in a Series C extension round from investors including Google, Nvidia, and Salesforce Ventures. Runway's Gen-2 tool, which generates videos from text, has gained popularity among a diverse user base, from movie directors to small creators. More: - The Gen-2 software, released earlier this year, is described as the "first publicly available text-to-video model on the market." It also generates videos from existing images.
- The model is an upgrade from its Gen-1, which takes pre-existing videos and edits them using text or image prompts.
- Using the fresh funding, New York-based Runway plans to scale its research, expand its team, and launch more bring multi-modal AI systems.
- The $141M Series C extension values the company at $1.5B and brings its total funding to $237M, making it among the top 10 most well-funded generative AI startups.
Zoom out: - Runway is also one of the startups behind the popular text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion.
- In addition to Stable Diffusion, Runway's new iOS app relies on generative AI to alter the style of videos on iPhones using text and image prompts.
- Runway's AI Magic Tools have been used in movie and TV production, including "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" and "Top Gear America."
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| 3 | | University of Maryland scientists used an AI-driven method to recreate 3D scenes based on reflections in the human eye. The research builds upon Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), an AI technology that generates 3D representations based on multiple 2D images. More: - By capturing high-resolution images of individuals in motion and examining the reflections in their eyes, the researchers were able to identify objects in the surrounding environment.
- To remove iris artifacts from the eye images, the researchers relied on texture decomposition.
- They trained a 2D texture map to learn and eliminate the iris texture present in the images.
- In addition, cornea geometry was used to determine eye movements and camera angles for accurate scene reconstruction.
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| 4 | | Melinda French Gates has voiced concerns over the lack of female representation in AI development. In a recent CNN interview, French Gates highlighted the risks of bias becoming embedded into AI systems when there's a lack of diversity among creators. More: - French Gates said she is "very nervous because we don't have enough women, again, who are computer scientists, and who have expertise in artificial intelligence."
- Without that representation, "we will bake bias into the system," she added.
- According to a study by the AI Now Institute, gender and racial biases are perpetuated by flawed AI systems.
- The report revealed a significant gender disparity in the AI field, with over 80% of AI professors being men.
- At the time of the study's release, women made up only 15% of AI researchers at Facebook and 10% at Google.
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| 5 | | Steam, the PC gaming platform owned by Valve, has reportedly rejected a game for using AI-generated art assets. Valve cited unclear ownership of the AI-created art as the reason. More: - In a message to the developer, Valve said the game had AI-created art assets that appeared to use copyrighted material from third parties.
- As a result, Valve said it could not ship the game with those assets unless the developers confirmed ownership of the IP used in the AI's training dataset.
- Despite the developer's efforts to improve the AI-generated assets by hand, the game was rejected again upon resubmission.
- Steam hasn't disclosed a formal policy on AI-generated art, though it doesn't prohibit games featuring "content you don't own or have adequate rights to."
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- Generative AI startup Typeface, which specializes in personalized content creation for brands, raised a $100M Series B round led by Salesforce Ventures, valuing the company at $1B.
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 | AI and technology writer | | Beth is a writer and editor at Inside.com covering artificial intelligence and daily technology news. She has written the Inside AI newsletter since 2019. You can reach her at Beth.Duckett@inside.com. | | This newsletter was edited by Aaron Crutchfield | |
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