OpenAI Triples Its Valuation and Now It's Valued at $80 Billion

OpenAI plans to sell existing shares in a tender offer led by venture firm Thrive Capital, in a deal that values the San Francisco-based company at $80 million, tripling its valuation in less than ten months, The New York Times reported. Under this deal, employees will be able to cash out their shares. Early last year, the venture capital firms Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and K2 Global agreed to buy OpenAI shares in a tender offer, valuing the company at around $29 billion. Last January, Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI, bringing its total investment in the San Francisco start-up to $13 billion. Since then, Anthropic, an OpenAI rival, has raised $6 billion from Google and Amazon. Cohere, a start-up founded by former Google researchers, raised $270 million, bringing its total funding to more than $440 million. Inflection AI, founded by a former Google executive, also raised a $1.3 billion round, bringing its total to $1.5 billion. .

OpenAI’s Sora Can Generate Video Games, Too

OpenAI Shows 'Sora', an AI Model that Generates Photorealistic Videos

ChatGPT Tests a Memory Feature that Remembers Users' Conversations Over Time

Brave's AI Assistant Integrates the Open-Source Mixtral 8x7B as the default LLM

Brave announced that its AI browser assistant 'Leo' integrated the open-source LLM Mixtral 8x7B as the default model. The free version is rate-limited, and subscribers to Leo Premium ($15/month) get higher rate limits. In addition, the privacy-focused Brave made improvements to the Leo user experience, adding clearer onboarding, context controls, input and response formatting, and a general UI polish. Mixtral 8x7B, an open-source LLM released by the French start-up Mistral AI, gained popularity and usage among the developer community since its December release. It currently outperforms ChatGPT 3.5, Claude Instant, Llama 2, and many others, according to the LMSYS Chatbot Arena Leaderboard. Mixtral also shows improvements in reducing hallucinations and biases, according to the BBQ benchmark. Among other benefits, Mixtral generates code, handles larger contexts, and interacts in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Brave is already using Mixtral for its newly released Code LLM feature for programming-related queries in Brave Search. Brave Leo also offers Claude Instant from Anthropic as well as Llama 2 13B model from Meta in the free version (with rate limits) and for Premium. Feature Free Leo Leo Premium Models Mixtral 8x7B (strict rate limits) Claude Instant (strict rate limits) Llama 2 13B (higher rate limits) Mixtral 8x7B Claude Instant Llama 2 13B Rate limits Various rate limits Higher rate limits Quality of conversations Very high, dependent on models (upgraded with release 1.62) Very high Privacy Inputs are always submitted anonymously through a reverse-proxy and are not retained. Inputs are always submitted anonymously through a reverse-proxy and are not retained. Subscription Free $15 monthly   Leo helps users with tasks in the context of the page they are on by creating real-time summaries of web pages or videos. It can also answer questions about content, generate new content, translate pages, analyze them, and rewrite them. "Whether you’re looking for information, trying to solve a problem, writing code, or creating content, Leo is integrated in the browser for enhanced productivity," said the company. To access Leo, Brave desktop users can simply ask a question in the address bar and click “Ask Leo”, or click.   🤩@brave announced using @MistralAI as the default large language model in their AI assistant 🧡 Annoucement: https://t.co/8HlE2fka1c pic.twitter.com/QX8PJE6bfJ — Sophia Yang, Ph.D. (@sophiamyang) January 27, 2024

Microsoft Issued a Redesigned Copilot with Image Creation Capabilities

Microsoft issued this week an update to its Copilot chatbot with further image creation capabilities and a new GPT 4-based model, Deucalion. It also released new apps on iOS and Android. The launch was coincident with a Super Bowl ad (see below). It also marked one year since the entry of Microsoft into the consumer AI sphere with Bing Chat. Powered by OpenAI's DALL-E 3, the new Copilot comes with a cleaner, sleeker look UI with a cleaner look, more white space, less text, and a visual carousel of cards. In addition, it includes Microsoft Designer, which allows users to customize the generated images right inside Copilot without leaving the chat. Images can be regenerated between square and landscape, resized, or enhanced with color, blurred background, and different effects like pixel art, resize and regenerate images without leaving chat. Microsoft announced that it will soon roll out a Designer GPT inside Copilot. Here are images of the old Bing Chat and the new Microsoft Copilot design, one after another. .     https://youtu.be/SaCVSUbYpVc?si=YJKEC9EGEVKJXens  

NVIDIA Releases a Demo App that Allows Users to Run an AI Chatbot on Their PC

2U Warns of "Substantial Doubt of Ability to Continue as a Going Concern"

Apple Released ‘MGIE’, an Open Source AI Multimodal Model for Image Editing

Google Rebranded 'Bard' Chatbot as 'Gemini', and Rolled Out a Paid Subscription Model

Google rebranded its Bard chatbot as Gemini — the family of its foundation model —, launched in the U.S. Gemini Ultra 1.0 — priced at $20 per month — and issued a new Gemini app on iOS and Android, as Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, announced today. The API access to the Ultra model will be available in the coming weeks. The paid monthly subscription — the same price as ChatGPT 4 — will be available through a new bundle known as Google One Premium Plan that includes two terabytes of cloud storage — typically costing $9.99 monthly — and access to the Google Workspace apps like Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Meet. For now, users can get a two-month subscription trial at no cost. With that, Google did sunset the Duet AI brand, which became Gemini for Workspace, responding to Microsoft and its partner OpenAI's offerings in this manner. "Gemini Ultra 1.0 is a model that sets the state of the art across a wide range of benchmarks across text, image, audio, and video," Google’s Sissie Hsiao said in a press conference today. "The largest model Ultra 1.0 is the first to outperform human experts on MMLU (massive multitask language understanding), which uses a combination of 57 subjects — including math, physics, history, law, medicine, and ethics — to test knowledge and problem-solving abilities," Sundar Pichai stated. "Gemini Advanced can be a personal tutor, tailored to your learning style, or it can be a creative partner, helping you plan a content strategy or build a business plan, as explained in this post," he added. Many users said Bard provided middling results, making a rebrand almost a necessity, TechCrunch commented today. .

Tech and EdTech Companies Continue Firing Employees In 2024

With 353,000 jobs added in January, the U.S. economy is booming, but tech and edtech companies are firing tens of thousands of workers, despite stabilizing interest rates and a booming job market in other industries. Most of these employees, were hired to meet the pandemic boom in consumer tech spending. Even workers with years of experience or deep technical expertise are having trouble getting hired again. In January, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Discord, Salesforce and eBay all made significant cuts. On Tuesday, PayPal said, in a letter to workers, it would cut another 2,500 employees or about 9 percent of its workforce. In 2023, they laid off over 260,000 people, according to layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi. Last year, the job reduction was mostly due to over-hiring during the pandemic and high interest rates environment — which makes it harder to invest in new business ventures, according to a report in The Washington Post. Experts say that companies are under pressure from investors to improve their bottom lines and focus on increasing profits. "That is the way the American capitalist system works," said Mark Zandi, Chief Economist at Moody’s Analytics. "It’s ruthless when it gets down to striving for profitability and creating wealth. It redirects resources very rapidly from one place to another." It seems to be working. In 2022, the Nasdaq Composite, a stock index dominated by tech companies, lost a full third of its value. In 2023, it grew by 43 percent. It rose another 3 percent in January. "The tech sector may be able to produce a lot and innovate a lot without as many people going forward," Zandi, the Moody’s economist, said. "That is a lesson of AI." . Layoff announcements in 2024: – PayPal cuts 9% of workforce (TODAY!) – UPS cuts +12,000 roles (TODAY!) – Microsoft cuts +1,900 roles – Twitch cuts 35% of workforce – Unity Software 25% – Brex 20% – Discord 17% – Wayfair 13% – Riot Games 11% – Duolingo 10% – Rent the… — Genevieve Roch-Decter, CFA (@GRDecter) January 30, 2024

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