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New Match Found: Open Source + Funding

New Match Found: Open Source + Funding

PLUS: Stanford's Massive report on AI, advanced text to app tools

April 05, 2023

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Investor + Founders | Maker-in-Residence

Hey folks, a big announcement from me today (will post it on my Twitter soon, and link here tomorrow anyway).

Today we’ve got the AI report from Stanford University, LangChain raising $10M, text-to-app and two new AI accelerators have launched.

Let’s get to it.

p.s. we are hosting an AI hackathon with Every’s Dan Shipper 18th April.
Details here.

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Highlights if you've only got 2 minutes

Stanford University have mapped out the state of AI in 385 pages

If you haven’t read Stanford’s AI Index report mapping the state of everything in 2023 then you defo should! Just kidding, it’s 385 goddamn pages, but luckily The Verge has captured the main bits for us, and we’ll capture them even more succinctly here. Firstly, the main conclusion is that AI has well and truly fallen into the hands of corporations over academia and government, a scenario unfamiliar in most science domains. This can lead to the concentration of hazardous, profit-driven behaviour - in fact, ethical misuse in AI has seen a 26x increase since 2012. But… this isn’t normalised for total use, and the number of bills passed involving the word “AI” has increased more than 10-fold, so maybe we’re on the right track?

Check out the link above for more deets, action-packed with pretty visuals.

LangChain raise $10 million in funding to drive language models forward

When open-source coding projects get an injection of funding, you know it’s a big deal. In fact, even if you’re not a coder, it’s been hard to get by over the past few months without hearing the word “LangChain,” so it’s no wonder they’ve just been handed $10 million. (If you don’t know, it’s a Python framework that helps developers to get down and dirty with language models like ChatGPT, and it’s become insanely popular.) They plan to help make it easier for you to integrate language models into front-end development, want to help you prototype apps, and want to bridge the gap between that stage and getting to production. Oh, and they’re hiring…

Imagica AI have produced a very cool-looking generative app tool

In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t tend to focus too much on tools that seem to get churned out every day - a case in point being text-to-app apps… But I’ve either been completely fooled by a super-slick demo video, or this is the best-looking one I’ve seen so far. What’s drawing me in is the fact that it guides the user through: pick your topic, choose what you want it to do, and then give it a nudge with a cheeky bit of detail. I’m yet to give it a proper try though, so let me know!

🛠️ Cool Tools

Product launches, updates and demos

xTuring - Build and control personalised LLMs. (link)
e2b - AI agents to write code based on technical documentation. (link)
Promptr - A CLI tool for operating on your codebase using GPT. (link)
Rask - Localise videos in 60+ languages quickly. (link)
Replit user creates an AI productivity tool that transcribes meetings and converts them into marketing content. (link)
Window - A way to use your own AI models on the web, even local ones. (link)
Making a full-fledged web application with AI with multiple files, just with a single prompt. (link)
Koe Recast - Transform your voice using AI. (link)
Scenario Discord Bot - A tool transforming how gaming communities create stunning art. (link)
Willy - Your AI e-commerce assistant from Triple Whale that will change the way you analyse, forecast and manage your business. (link)
Fry My Deck - Tekken-style simulator for pitch decks. Get in the ring with top investors. (link)
Prompt Storm - Skillfully crafted, engineered prompts at your fingertips with a chrome extension. (link)

🤓 Miscellaneous

News, podcasts, videos, blogs etc

Universities express doubt over tool to detect AI-powered plagiarism. (link, without paywall here)
Why TinyML is still so hard to get excited about. (link)
Ahead of AI #7 - Large language models 3.0. (link)
Our world shaken, not stirred - Synthetic entertainment, hybrid social experiences, syncing ourselves with apps, and more. (link)
Talks from the Cerebral Valley AI summit - Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque & General Catalyst's Deep Nishar. (link)
ChatGPT competes with Japanese prime minister for best responses to National Assembly questions. (link)
LLM-Adapters - An adapter family for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large language models. (link)
Pythia - A suite for analysing large language models across training and scaling. (link)
Newsbridge introduces new MXT-1 AI for generating human-like descriptions of video content. (link)
The first known chatbot associated death. (link)
House Fund, a UC Berkeley-focused outfit, opens its AI accelerator amid a boom of many others. (link)
AWS Gen AI Accelerator - Accelerate your generative AI startup in just 10 weeks. (link)

🎓 Learn

How-to’s and resources

A comprehensive guide to LangChain. (link)
From deep learning foundations to Stable Diffusion - A course from Fast AI. (link)
How to ask natural language questions of current financial data and get back a response with correct/relevant numbers. (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.