Daily Digest: More startups, more models

Hello folks, the first post for Ben’s Bites Pro goes live tomorrow. I’ve written 3.5k words (so far) on the story of Mistral, the $2Bn startup that’s less than a year old, with $600M+ in funding.

Here’s what we have today;

PICKS

There’s a trend among the updates. Legends in the field are starting up new companies & raising high rounds, while The Information reported that the money flow is slowing down.

• Jeremy Howard and Eric Ries start Answer AI, a new AI R&D lab to create practical end-user products based on foundational research breakthroughs.

• Essential AI raises $56.5M to build enterprise brain. The founders, Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar were authors of the initial Transformers paper “Attention is all you need”.

• Some AI startups find the money no longer so easy. They compare claims from the past few months and the current numbers in the market. You can dismiss it by saying “correlation is not causation” but it is a nice analysis to check out.

TOP TOOLS

• Unschooler - Video courses you can talk to.

• Hi Santa - Talk to Santa and friends.

• Hydra by Rightsifty - Music generation for all.

• Nunu AI - Building the first multimodal gameplay agents.

• Brickify - Your unique lego avatar.

• Ideaflow notes - A note-taking app that augments your intelligence.

• Solo by Mozilla - An AI website builder for solopreneurs.

• Anyscale adds JSON mode and function calling to its API endpoints. Available in preview for Mistral 7B.

View more →

NEWS

• Legaltech X AI: The Lightspeed view.

• Real-time AI & the future of AI hardware with Gavin Uberti of Etched AI.

• Meta-Rayban glasses can now see - new features are coming faster than expected.

• Microsft releases Phi-2 showing the power of small language models.

• notdiamond-0001 - Automatically determine whether to send queries to GPT-3.5 or GPT-4.

• Mamba-3B-SlimPJ - State space model (different architecture than transformers) by Cartesia AI and Together AI.

View more →

Unclassifieds - short, sponsored links

• Chatmind - Chat-guided mind mapping powered by AI. Organize ideas with speed. Discover a smarter way to strategize, click to explore!

Ben’s Bites Insights

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• All 10k+ links we’ve covered, easily filterable (1 referral)

• 6k+ AI company funding rounds from Jan 2022, including investors, amounts, stage etc (3 referrals)