A $29Bn offer

That's quite a lot innit?

Happy Friday folks! This is Ben's Bites, the daily newsletter that illuminates the world of AI like a futuristic neon sign.

Sorry a little late today. Let's get to it, it's the freaking weekend.

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Let's talk about the $29Bn elephant in the room... OpenAI is raising at an eye-watering valuation. It was valued at a $14Bn in 2021. So 2x in 1 year. Cool, cool, cool.

The deal is being negotiated with Thrive Capital and Founders Fund, and it could total at least $300 million in share sales. (Altman says OpenAI has no plans to be acquired or go public so investors would only be able to cash out through secondary share sales.)

They're calling it a tender offer (no, not a very sweet, loving offer). It means existing shareholders like employees can sell their shares to the investors.

NO deal has been made yet! But I reckon it'll happen any minute now...

A few important things to know/remember:

  • OpenAI was founded as a non-profit but has a for-profit arm, created in 2019

  • Investors returns are capped at ~20x

  • Sam Altman said they'll make $1Bn revenue 'soon'

  • This valuation would make it one of the most valuable startups in the US

Sam Altman has talked about Trillion dollar companies being made in AI. I think OpenAI will be the first. And at this rate it could be in the next 1-2 years.

ChatGPT creator in investor talks at $29B valuation. (link)

I was on the Infinite Loops podcast with Jim O'Shaughnessy to talk about AI. (link)

🛠️ Cool Tools

  • HTTPie AI - Generate API requests using plain language. (link)

  • GitHub Copilot Labs now comes with a test generator to create and refine tests. (link)

  • Asknow AI - Ask famous personalities anything and get an AI summarised answer with references. (link)

  • Buildt: Google for your codebase! AI-powered search to find code by searching for what it does, not just what it is. (link)

  • The Jam Machine - Generative AI composer trained on text transcription of MIDI music. (link)

  • AskThee - Ask a question to a big thinker, artist, or scientist. (link)

  • Text2SQL AI - Translate plain English to SQL for free with AI! (link)

  • Fact GPT - Generate fresh and relevant user-sourced content with citations. (link)

  • Empath - Test your empathy with GPT-3 chatbot. (link)

  • GPTDuck - Question answering against any Github repository. (link)

  • GPTQL - A gpt agent that can adaptively query GraphQL schemas. (link)

  • Widget by ChatBotKit - Allows anyone to easily integrate AI chatbots into their website without coding. (link)

  • Autocommit - AI-Generated Git commit messages, editable before performing the commit. (link)

  • Nostalgia Photo - Bring old photos back to life with AI. (link)

🤓 Miscellaneous

  • Samsung’s 2023 TV lineup bets everything on picture upgrades and AI tricks. (link)

  • Why use your own key apps can make sense for developers? (link)

  • 100+ trends reports for 2023, including Adobe, Accenture, Gartner, and more. (link)

  • Open source highlights 2022 for machine learning & AI. (link)

  • NYC education department blocks ChatGPT on school devices, networks. (link)

  • My predictions for 2023 by Greg Isenberg - AI, internet, and social networks. (link)

  • Top AI conference bans use of ChatGPT and AI language tools to write academic papers. (link)

  • Sketch of an LLM idea maze a la Balaji. (link)

  • Teachers are absolutely loving the student who made a tool that shows if your essay was written by AI. (link)

  • Self-assembling proteins can store cellular “memories.” (link)

🎓 Learn

  • How to translate a website into different languages with GPT-3. (link)

  • How to use Microsoft Bing AI image creator. (link)

👋 Too many links?! I created a database for all links mentioned in these emails. Refer 1 friend using this link and I'll send over the link database.

🔬 Research

  • SODA - First publicly available dataset of social interactions containing 385K conversations labelled with 1.7K unique emotions. (link)

  • GIVL: Improving geographical inclusivity of vision-language models with pre-training methods. (link)

  • Improving robustness of dynamic radiance field reconstruction by joint estimation of camera parameters. (link)

  • HyperReel - New high-fidelity 6-DoF video representation with a small memory footprint that enables high frame rate rendering at high resolutions. (link)

  • Developing agents that learn goal-conditioned policies offline with self-supervised reward shaping. (link)

  • PACO - Dataset and models with parts and attributes of common objects. (link)

  • All in Tokens - General purpose visual task solver made by unifying output space of visual tasks via soft token. (link)

  • CiT: Curation in training for effective vision-language data. (link)

  • VALL-E by Microsoft - A neural codec language model that can be used to synthesise high-quality personalised speech. (link)

🖼 AI images of the day

Had to throw this in too:

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