The AI Breakdown First Five - Saturday September 18, 2023

5. $100m for Writer

The latest 9-figure AI financing goes to Writer, another contender in the heavily contested enterprise AI space. The company tries to differentiate by pointing to their proprietary models, which they say weren’t trained on copyrighted data. If nothing else, the takeaway is that the VC world is convinced that the TAM of enterprise AI is massive.

4. Microsoft AI Researchers Accidentally Expose Data

Data privacy ain’t easy. Microsoft AI researchers accidentally published tens of terabytes of sensitive data to a GitHub repository including private keys, passwords, and even backups of some Microsoft employees’ personal computers. The exposure was reported to Microsoft and fixed over this summer.

3. Elon Musk and Israel’s PM Talk AI on Spaces

Just the Muskman over here talking to Prime Ministers in his social sandbox. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu joined Elon for a conversation that, while billed to be about AI, quickly turned into a conversation about antisemitism and censorship. Worth a listen.

2. Softbank Exploring OpenAI Investment

Softbank is rolling in dough again after last week’s Arm IPO and it appears that AI startups might be the beneficiaries. The Financial Times reports that the company is looking to deploy tens of billions into the sector, including a potential investment in or partnership with OpenAI.

1. OpenAI Racing Towards Multimodal

Speaking of OpenAI, while Google’s forthcoming Gemini has been dominating the rumor mill, Sam Altman and co have been racing behind the scenes to prep a multimodal ChatGPT called GPT-Vision. There are also reports of an even more advanced model Gobi in the works.

BONUS: 3D scanning tech advancing rapidly

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