Next Week in The Sequence:

• Edge 365: We review a new LLM reasoning method: Reflexion and we dive into the original paper that proposed that technique. We also review Flowise, a visual platform for building LLM apps.

• Edge 366: We discuss Anthropic’s Sleeper Agents research about LLM security vulnerability.

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📝 Editorial: The LLMcorns: 4 New Billion Dollar Gen AI Valuations in One Week

Eye-popping fundraising events are nothing new in the generative AI market, but last week was particularly special. Valuations in the generative AI space have been a hot topic in venture capital circles for the past couple of years. Questions arise: Where will value accrue in the gen AI market? Are we approaching a correction point in gen AI startup valuations? Will LLMs become commoditized? Such questions typically signal a shift towards a more conservative fundraising climate. However, if last week is anything to go by, that shift is not imminent. Last week was incredible from a venture fundraising perspective in gen AI, with four new companies surpassing $1 billion in valuation:

1. Brett Taylor, former Co-CEO of Salesforce, is raising $85 million for Sierra, a new enterprise AI company, at a rumored $1 billion valuation.

2. Kutrim, an Indian AI platform started by Bhavish Aggarwal, founder of Ola, raised $50 million at over a $1 billion valuation.

3. Voice AI startup ElevenLabs raised $80 million at a $1.1 billion valuation.

4. Elon Musk’s xAI is raising $1 billion at a $6 billion valuation. Details about Taylor’s Sierra are not yet public, but the common denominator among these companies is that they are all building their own foundation models. These are capital-intensive problems requiring significant compute and research, and can yield asymmetric results. Whether the area of foundation models in the generative AI stack will become commoditized over time is an intriguing intellectual debate. For now, foundation models are still commanding remarkable valuations relative to their development stage and market adoption. What a remarkable week!"

🔎 ML Research

Transformer for Graph Data

Google Research published a paper detailing Exphormer, a transformer model optimized for graph datasets. The method uses sparse attention and leverages spectral graph theory to achieve strong performance in graph data —> Read more.

Vision Language Models with Multiple Inputs

Amazon Science published a paper proposing a technique for processing multiple inputs in vision-language models. In essence, the method produces an aggregated embedding for multiple input images which leads to a richer representation —> Read more.

Heuristics Performance

Microsoft Research published a paper proposing MetaOpt, a method to evalute the performance of heuristic algorithms. MetaOpt is able to compare different heuristics and evaluate its performance in different settings —> Read more.

LLM Hallucination Detection

Researchers from University of Washington, Allen AI and Carnegie Mellon University published a paper proposing a task and benchmark for detecting hallucinations in LLMs. The benchmark includes human judgments outputs on different LLM outputs across different domains —> Read more.

ChatQA

NVIDIA Research published a paper introducing ChatQA, a series of conversational models that achieve ChatGPT type performance across different QA benchmarks. ChatQA is based on a dense retriever fine-tuned on a multi-turn QA dataset —> Read more.

🤖 Cool AI Tech Releases

Stable LM 2 1.6B

Stability AI open sourced a small language model with 1.6 billion parameters —> Read more.

OpenAI Updates

OpenAI announced new embedding models as well as other updates to its API —> Read more.

🛠 Real World ML

Pinterest Offline-Online Models

Pinterest discusses the architecture used to address the discrepancies between offline and online models for ad serving —> Read more.

CoPilot Use Cases

The GitHub engineering team discusses some unsual patterns observed in developers using CoPilot —> Read more.

📡AI Radar

• Voice AI startup ElevenLabs raised $80 million in new funding.

• Former Salesforce Co-CEO and OpenAI board member Brett Taylor is finalizing a $85 million round for a new enterprise AI startup.

• India’s AI startup Krutrim announced a $50 million round that values the company at $1 billion.

• HuggingFace and Google announced a new partnership.

• Vector database platform Qdrant announced a $28 million Series A.

• Elon Musk’s xAI has reportedly closed $500 million of the $1 billion is intending to raise.

• TypeFace announced a new series of multimodal AI capabilities.

• Two renown AI scientists from DeepMind are in discussions to raise $200 million for a new startup.

• TextQL raised $4.1 million to bring LLMs to business intelligence workflows.

• SAP is working on a 8000 job restructuring program focused on boosting its AI capabilities.

• AI testing platform RagaAI emerged from stealth mode with $4.7 million in funding.

• AI photography app Artisse AI raised $6.7 million in a new round.

• AI document platform Send AI secured $2.4 million from Google Gradient Ventures.

• DZwans raised $4 million for its conversational AI platform for Africa and the Middle East.