Jen Jordan
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AI is a rapidly developing sector that Insight has invested more than $4B since 2014. We’re currently tracking 23,315 AI/ML startups and ScaleUps. Naturally, our team has seen a lot, and the discussions around this topic generate a lot of opinions.
Here’s a look behind the curtain into some of what we’re reading, sharing, and discussing across the team at Insight lately. Think I missed something? Email me and tell me all about it. See the archive of all our AI roundups here.
Why the AI boom is not a dotcom redux
It’s inevitable AI will change society and the way we work — but it could also be transformative with its ability to improve productivity in the global economy.
Via the Financial Times, “First, AI can make current processes more efficient. It is already helping workers make better informed decisions, optimise their processes and remove mundane tasks. The resulting increase in the efficiency of the workforce should boost overall output. And then AI can help workers invent new things, make new discoveries and generate technological progress that can raise future productivity.”
Open Source AI Is Not Winning—Incumbents Are
Open versus closed AI innovation is a big theme discussed every week. But are we too eager to close the book on a race that hasn’t even really started yet?
“The innovator’s dilemma portrays incumbents as beatable: Challengers with a solid will to pursue risky innovation could, under the right circumstances, overthrow them. But let’s be frank here; we’re not living under those ideal conditions: generative AI happens to fit perfectly with the suites of products that Google and Microsoft and Adobe and Nvidia already offer. They create the very substrate on which generative AI is implemented.”
Speaking of incumbents, Zuck is all in on Meta’s open-source innovation. Via the New York Times, “[Zuckerberg] said Meta would work on creating artificial intelligence models that were accessible to more people than those of his company’s competitors and, ultimately, would fit into his plans for the metaverse.
‘Democratizing access to this has a bunch of value,’ Mr. Zuckerberg said, according to the two people who shared remarks with The Times. “But it’s also aligned with the product vision of enabling a lot of different A.I.’s instead of just trying to consolidate this ourselves into one singular A.I. that’s going to try to rule everything.”
Here are the 12 generative AI unicorns to watch in addition to OpenAI
A list of 12 generative AI unicorns to know aside from Open AI, in alphabetical order.
Saving you a click: Adept, Anthropic, Character.ai, Cohere, Glean, Hugging Face, Infection, Jasper, Lightricks, Replit, Runway, Stability AI
With AI minting so many $1 billion+ valued unicorns, and quickly, what are we calling the next class of highly-valued companies? Share your ideas with us.
Insight portfolio highlight
This week over 1,000 people gathered in San Francisco for Fully Connected, where Insight portfolio company Weights & Biase announced W&B Weave and W&B Production Monitoring, which aim to help organizations more easily get AI models running effectively for production workloads. More via VentureBeat.
Bits and bots
So sue me: Adobe is so confident its Firefly generative AI (launched this week) won’t breach copyright that it’ll cover your legal bills.
Dropping knowledge: Google Cloud dropped a new Generative AI course this week.
One more thing: It’s been a minute since we’ve had a truly remarkable “one more thing” announcement at Apple WWDC, and the internet forgot about AI for about an hour to react (and soon enough, meme) the Apple Vision Pro announcement. Via ArsTechnica, how Apple didn’t call out AI by name, but machine learning is baked into its products.
Are we ready to talk about how Matt Groening is a time traveler from the future who got trapped here and is just trolling us because he’s bored, or are we not ready to have this conversation yet… pic.twitter.com/EYTnO9sU3a
— Adam Singer (@AdamSinger) June 7, 2023
(I guess Fry got the LASIK version of the tech.)
Editor’s note: Articles are sourced from an ongoing, internal Insight AI/Data Teams chat discussion and curated, written, and editorialized by Insight’s VP of Content and Thought Leadership, Jen Jordan, a real human. (for now!)
Image credit: Google Deepmind via Unsplash “Large Language Models” Artist: Tim West
