TheSequence - The Big Bucks in Gen AI Investments
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You can subscribe to The Sequence below:📝 Editorial: The Big Bucks in Gen AI InvestmentsMega financing rounds are the norm in this wave of generative AI, but have you ever wondered where the money comes from? One might assume that venture capital (VC) funds are driving the massive valuations of foundation model startups. After all, firms like Thrive Capital have been active in major rounds at OpenAI. However, that assumption would be misleading. The traditional VC industry is simply too small to sustain regular rounds of tens of billions of dollars. The main source of capital for foundation model makers is coming from strategic investors, specifically the hyperscalers such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and NVIDIA. This phenomenon is unique to this wave of generative AI and is based on three key factors:
Just this week, Microsoft and BlackRock announced a massive $30 billion fund focused on AI infrastructure. The alliance combines Microsoft’s strategic view of the AI market with BlackRock’s global fundraising capabilities. This may be one of the largest tech investment funds ever raised with a single focus. Also this week, Salesforce announced plans to expand its AI venture investments to $1 billion, marking the most ambitious strategic VC initiative among SaaS providers. The trend of strategic capital displacing financial VCs in foundation model markets is likely to accelerate as the scaling laws of these models continue to push forward. Ironically, it seems the VC industry is being disrupted by AI itself. 💎 We recommendWe're excited to share a new FREE eBook by Galileo – Mastering RAG: a comprehensive guide for building enterprise-grade RAG systems! Get your copy today to enjoy 200 pages of in-depth content on chunking, embeddings, reranking, hallucinations, vector databases, RAG architecture, testing, evaluation, and so much more... Download Mastering RAG to learn how to:
🔎 ML ResearchEurekaMicrosoft Research published a paper proposing a framework and methology for evaluating foundation models. Eureka supports both language and multimodal evalaution pipelines —> Read more. NeptuneGoogle Research published a paper introducing Neptue, a new dataset for long-term video understanding. Neptune includes question-answering scenarios for videos up to 15 minutes long —> Read more. GRINMicrosoft Research published a paper detailing GRIN: GRadient-INformed MoE, a new MoE architecture that incorporates expert routing based on sparsed gradient optimizations. With just 6.6B parameters, GRIN outperforms much larger models in reasoning and math evaluations —> Read more. Qwen2.5-CoderAlibaba Research published the technical report for Qwen2.5-Coder. The research covers the details of 1.5B and 7B variarios trained in 5.5 trillion tokens —> Read more. NVLMNVIDIA Research published a paper detailing NVLM, a family of frontier-class multimodal large language models. The model seems to achieve performance comparable to GPT-4o and Llama 3.1 especially on language tasks —> Read more. Self-Correcting LLMsGoogle DeepMind published a paper outlining SCoRe, a technique for developing self-correcting LLMs using reinforcement learning. SCoRe uses data self-generated data that translate into self-correction traces which steer the model into a specific direction —> Read more. 🤖 AI Tech ReleasesOpikComet ML open sourced Opik, a tool for monitoring and evaluating foundation models —> Read more. SQL Console for AI DatasetsHugging Face released a SQL console for its dataset repository —> Read more. Gen AI for YouTubeGoogle DeepMind announced new gneerative AI features for YouTube creators —> Read more. 🛠 Real World AIJupyter Notebooks at MetaMeta discusses the best practices and frameworks for using Jupyter notebooks in their ML infrastructure —> Read more. ML Pipelines at YelpYelp discusses the use of Cassandra and Spark in their ML pipelines —> Read more. 📡AI Radar
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Edge 432: NVIDIA Created Minitron by Distilling Llama 3.1
Thursday, September 19, 2024
The two resulting models of 8B and parameters respectively highlight the potential of distillation. ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
Edge 431: Meet the Multimodal State Space Models
Tuesday, September 17, 2024
Extending SSMs behind language. ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
Some Non-Obvious Points About OpenAI 01
Sunday, September 15, 2024
Plus some major funding rounds by World Labs and Glean , Mistral's new release and more. ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
Edge 430: Learn About The AI Scientist, The Model that can Conduct Long Term Scientific Experimentation
Thursday, September 12, 2024
The framework combines different generative AI models to streamline scientific research from idea to paper. ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
The Sequence Chat: Lewis Tunstall, Hugging Face, On Building the Model that Won the AI Math Olympiad
Thursday, September 12, 2024
Details about NuminaMath, its architecture, training process and even things that didn't work. ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
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