Billions in AI Acquisitions Announced Yesterday

Plus AI is decoding whale songs

Author

Nathaniel Whittemore
June 27, 2023

The AI Breakdown First Five - Tuesday June 27, 2023

Today on the First Five:

  • 5. AI Decoding the Meaning of Whale Songs

  • 4. Verge Study Shows How People Are Really Using AI

  • 3. MerlynMind’s Trustworthy LLM for Education

  • 2. DragGAN Mind-Blowing Image Editing Releases Source Code

  • 1. MosaicML Acquired for $1.3B + 2 Major AI Acquisitions

Hello from Paris! Prompt: grainy old photograph of the Eiffel Tower being built in Paris in 1888 --ar 16:9

5. AI Decoding the Meaning of Whale Songs

Put this one in the “straight up cool” column. A forthcoming documentary tells the story of a team that is trying to use AI to decode whale songs. Yes, whale songs, the thing your weird “uncle” family friend gave you a tape of in the early 1990s.

4. Verge Study Shows How People Are Really Using AI

The Verge recently polled 2000 people about AI to get more information about what people actually know, and how people actually use it. Banner headlines including 57% of people having heard of ChatGPT; Millennials and Gen Z dominating actual AI use; and this really interesting diversity of use cases:

3. MerlynMind’s Trustworthy LLM for Education

LLMs could be incredibly useful for learning — except for, you know, the whole hallucinating made-up information thing. MerlynMind has just announced a set of new models that are specifically designed to solve those problems in an educational context. Strikes us as part of a trend towards more customized, specific purpose LLMs built on shared foundations.

2. DragGAN Mind-Blowing Image Editing Releases Source Code

Back again to the “straight up cool” column, DragGAN got people’s attention a few weeks ago when it demo’d its drag-to-edit photo AI. Now the project has released its source code and there is even a HuggingFace demo where you can try it out.

1. MosaicML Acquired for $1.3B + 2 Major AI Acquisitions

A couple days ago, MosaicML made news when its new open source model performed at GPT-3 levels. Then just yesterday it was announced that the company is being acquired by DataBricks for $1.3B. Fintech automation platform Ramp also acquired customer support AI tool Cohere and Thomson Reuters shelled out $650M in cash to buy legal AI firm CaseText.

BONUS: Waldo 2.0 Drone Identification

Equal parts impressive and terrifying is this open source tool to allow drones to more easily identify objects they’re flying over. Wow, but also, yikes.

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Signing off from the future’s past - NLW