Venturized. April 4th, 2023
1,100 tech professionals signed letter to halt AI development, Italy bans ChatGPT, Google is going for GitHub, and other
Interesting news
📢 Tech elites asked to halt AI development. Last week, 1,100+ notable signatories signed an open letter asking ‘all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months’. Among people voting for this are Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology, and employees from Meta, Google, and even Stability AI. As TechCrunch notes, the letter argues that there is a “level of planning and management” that is “not happening” and that instead, in recent months, unnamed “AI labs” have been “locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.”
📢 Italy temporarily bans ChatGPT. The Italian DPA said it’s concerned that the ChatGPT maker is breaching the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and is opening an investigation. TechCrunch notes that since OpenAI does not have a legal entity established in the EU, any data protection authority can intervene under the GDPR if it sees risks to local users, meaning others may follow Italy’s example.
📢 Alibaba unbundling. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group said it plans to split itself into six independently run companies that could seek separate IPOs, effectively dismantling a business empire built over two decades, WSJ notes.
📢 Zoom adds features you waited for. The company is introducing new features to compete with numerous companies including Slack, Calendly, Google, and Microsoft. These features include AI-powered meeting summaries, prompt-based email responses, and whiteboard generation along with video “Huddles” and a meeting scheduler. The company said it is partnering with OpenAI for the AI features, but it didn’t specify if the partnership includes just API usage or more.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Perplexity AI, a startup that has built a conversational answer engine that is available as an app and a browser extension, raised a $25.6M Series A round led by NEA, with Databricks Ventures also chipping in. Perplexity is part of a growing wave of startups seeking to use AI to loosen Google’s hold on online search. The startup offers up a new model of search: users type simple queries on its website — one recently popular example: “Why can’t we digest grass?” — and Perplexity responds with short answers generated by its AI systems.
🚀 Fixie, a startup that aims to help companies fuse large language models into their own software stacks, raised a $17M seed round led by Redpoint, with Madrona Venture Group, Zetta Venture Partners, SignalFire, Bloomberg Beta, and Kearny Jackson also piling on. The startup was founded by former engineering heads at Apple and Google and aimed to connect text-generating models similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT to an enterprise’s data, systems, and workflows. Co-founder and CEO Matt Welsh describes it as the first enterprise-focused platform-as-a-service for building experiences with large language models (LLMs).
🚀 Conduit, a startup that offers a managed service that helps developers deploy their applications to the Optimism blockchain, raised a $7M seed round. Paradigm led the investment. Conduit’s first product was created in conjunction with Optimism (OP), a layer 2 blockchain network that offers optimistic rollups - a way of bundling transactions to reduce fees and traffic congestion while maintaining the underlying security of Ethereum. Conduit offers a managed service that helps developers easily and quickly deploy their applications to Optimism.
🚀 Cega, a DeFi derivatives protocol focused on exotic options, raised $5M in a new funding round led by Dragonfly Capital, which was joined by Pantera Capital and Robot Ventures. The main reason for the fundraising was to expand its protocol on Ethereum, CEO Arisa Toyosaki said, adding it will launch new products there, including leveraged options. The launch on Ethereum is scheduled for this week.
🚀 Neptyne, a startup whose mission is to make spreadsheets programmable by leveraging the power of Python and AI, raised a $2M pre-seed round led by Y Combinator. TechCrunch noted that Co-Founders Douwe Osinga and Jack Amadeo were working together at Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet’s venture to build tech-forward cities when they arrived at the conclusion that most spreadsheet software doesn’t scale up to today’s data challenges. Data science tools like Pandas and Jupyter Notebooks do, but they tend to be too inaccessible to the layperson.
Exits:
🔥 Apple has quietly acquired WaveOne, a startup developing AI algorithms for compressing video. Apple wouldn’t confirm the sale to TechCrunch, but WaveOne’s website was shut down around January, and several former employees, including one of WaveOne’s co-founders, now work within Apple’s various machine learning groups, notes TC.
🔥 Mastercard and Visa are among the firms negotiating to acquire Pismo, which provides cloud-based payment and banking platforms. Pismo’s platforms allow banks and financial technology companies to rapidly launch products for cards and payments, digital banking, digital wallets, and marketplaces. The company was previously backed by SoftBank, Amazon.com, and Redpoint.
Promising technology
👾 NVIDIA's big AI moment is here. This year, following the hype around OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's revamped Bing, and a slew of other competitors, NVIDIA's AI push finally seems to be leading somewhere. NVIDIA's new DGX Cloud comes in, an (obviously) online way to tap into the power of its AI supercomputers. Starting at a mere $36,999 a month for a single node, it’s meant to be a more flexible way for companies to scale up their AI needs. Simply speaking, NVIDIA streamlines the process of creating new AI to any startup coming to the market
👾 Google partners with AI startup Replit to take on Microsoft’s GitHub. Google is partnering to combine its artificial intelligence language models with software from startup Replit that helps computer programmers write code. Replit, which has 20M users, said its Ghostwriter app would rely on Google’s language-generation AI to improve its ability to suggest blocks of code, complete programs, and answer developer questions.
Insightful data
Founders’ relationships with investors in the downturn. In a recent survey conducted by Sifted, 51% of respondents reported a worsening relationship with their backers since the downturn hit. 53% of them say investors haven't offered them good advice.
