📝 Editorial 

Generative AI has taken the baton as the most exciting area in modern artificial intelligence (AI). Models like DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and Make-A-Video are transcending the boundaries of AI into mainstream pop culture. The reason for this momentum is that generative AI is not only impressive, but it looks really cool. Multimodal models that can generate images, videos and music are using AI to materialize and augment human creativity. The opportunities for transforming industries with generative AI seem endless, and, not surprisingly, this has quickly become part of the investment thesis of many of the top venture capital firms in the world.  

From a VC perspective, the fascinating aspect of generative AI is that tremendous value is being created at both the infrastructure and application levels. Just this week, the space crowned two new unicorns. In the infrastructure area, Stability AI, the company behind the Stable Diffusion models and the LAION datasets, raised $101 million at a $1 billion valuation. Stability AI challenged the many concerns around the safety of large text-to-image synthesis models by open-sourcing Stable Diffusion ahead of AI powerhouses like Google, Meta and OpenAI. In the application area, Jasper AI raised $125 million at a $1.7 billion valuation. The startup has been one the pioneers in applying the generative capabilities of models like GPT-3 across different content creation and marketing areas.  

The fundraising momentum for generative AI is undeniable, and it feels like it is just getting started.    

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🗓 Next week in TheSequence Edge:

Edge#237: we discuss Midjourney, one of the most enigmatic models in the space; explore Microsoft’s LAFITE that can train text-to-image synthesis models without any text data; explain Disco Diffusion, an important open source implementation of diffusion models.  

Edge#238: we deep dive into ImageNet: DeepMind’s new perception benchmark for deep learning models.

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Now, let’s review the most important developments in the AI industry this week

🔎 ML Research

Neural Architecture Search for Diverse Tasks 

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) published a paper discussing DASH, a neural architecture search method for different tasks across several domains →read more

Speech Translation for Unwritten Languages 

Meta AI published a paper detailing a machine translation system for primarily oral languages like Hokkien →read more

Understanding Image Quality and Aesthetics  

Google Research published a paper detailing a multi-scale transformer architecture to understand image quality and aesthetics →read more

🤖 Cool AI Tech Releases

The Future of TensorFlow 

The TensorFlow team outlines their vision and future capabilities they are planning to include in future releases →read more

🛠 Real World ML 

Netflix Maestro 

Netflix unveiled details about Maestro, their data and ML workflow orchestration pipeline →read more

Google Cloud and DeepMind  

DeepMind published some details about how their AI research is being applied across the Google Cloud suite of products →read more

PyTorch Selective Build  

The PyTorch team shared some experiences about reducing the model size to adapt to different runtimes →read more

💸 Money in AI

• AI content platform Jasper raised $125 million in a Series A funding round led by Insight Partners. Hiring in Austin or remote in the US.

• Community-driven open-source AI-company Stability AI raised $101 million in a funding round led by Coatue, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and O’Shaughnessy Ventures LLC.

• AI research company Generally Intelligent is launching out of stealth with $20 million in initial funding (plus over $100 million in options). Hiring in San Francisco and remote.

• Digital twin software company Sensat raised $20.5 million in a Series B funding round led by National Grid Partners. Hiring in Australia.

• Data management tool Makersite raised $18 million in a Series A funding round led by Hitachi Ventures. Hiring in Germany or remote.

• Data learning platform Keebo raised a $15 million Series A financing round led by True Ventures. Hiring in Ann Arbor, Palo Alto, San Francisco or remote in the US.