Next Week in The Sequence

• Edge #273 Our series about federated learning(FL) continues by exploring horizontal FL, Google’s research on personalized FL and the Syft framework

• The Sequence Chat will published an interview with S. Somasegar, managing director at Madrona Ventures and former Sr. VP of Microsoft’s Developer Division. We had a great chat about generative AI.

• Edge #274 will explore Sparrow, the model behind DeepMind’s ChatGPT alternative.

📝 Editorial 

We are accustomed to be inundated by news about generative AI but this week was remarkable even by those high standards. The number of announcements by large companies incorporating generative AI initiatives has been remarkable. One of the highlights of the week was Salesforce.com with the announcements of a new $250 million venture fund dedicated to generative AI with an impressive initial set of portfolio companies such as Anthropic and Cohere. Complementing this release, Salesforce also unveiled Einstein GPT, an OpenAI powered agents that enables conversational capabilities across different products in the Salesforce platform.

Similarly to Salesforce, HubSpot announced its plans to work on an OpenAI powered chat experience for its marketing platform. Discord also joined the ChatGPT party by announcing a series of tools powered by ChatGPT. . Google also distributed an internal directive instructing to all teams to explore how to incorporate generative AI capabilities powered by their internal models. Following a mega round, OpenAI competitor Antropic seems to be raising again at $4B valuation. On an final an interesting twist, Microsoft Germany CTO Andreas Braun drop some rumors about the imminent release of GPT-$ which, among other things, includes video features.

This all happened in a week. Amazing times!

🔎 ML Research

100+ Language Speech Model

Google Research published a paper unveiling a Universal Speech Model(USM), a state of the art speech model that works with over 100 languages —> Read more.

Learning to Rank

Amazon Science published a blog post detailing several reinforcement learning techniques to improve search and recommender systems —> Read more.

Reward Design with LLMs

Researchers from DeepMind and Stanford University published a paper outlining a LLM technique to improve reward functions in reinforcement learning models —> Read more.

🤖 Cool AI Tech Releases

Einstein GPT

Salesforce.com unveiled a version of its Einstein platform powered by generative AI capabilities —> Read more.

DuckDuckGo Assist

Privacy search engine DuckDuckGo launched a new feature that generates answers to natural language questions based on Wikipedia —> Read more.

Databricks Model Serving

Datalakehouse platform Databricks announced the general availability of its model serving platform for real time production deployment of ML models —> Read more.

ControlNet and HuggingFace

HuggingFace explains the use of the famous ControlNet model to its Diffusers library —> Read more.

Discord Generative AI

Discord announced a new series of tools powered by AI including a new version of its AI chatbot —> Read more.

🛠 Real World ML 

AI at LinkedIn

The LinkedIn engineering team discusses some general principles about the responsible use of AI in their platform —> Read more.

📡AI Radar

• Anthropic is raising another $300 million at a reported $4.1 billion valuation.

• Google announced that is planning to integrate generative AI into all its products.

• Y-Combinator backed AI platform Patterns announced a $2.5 million pre-seed round.

• AI-driven loan provider Abround raised $601 million to expand its affordable loan platform.

• Autonomous trucking company Upstart, once valued at $5 billions, it is likely to wind down operations.

• Salesforce Ventures announced a $250 million fund for generative AI startups.

• AI marketing platform Soci raised $120 million to expand its Genius platform.

• Fintech AI startup Monnai announced a $6.5 million series A.

• AI chip startup Mythic raised $13 million to resume operations.

• Overhaul, an AI supply chain  security company, raised $73 million.