Welcome to our weekly roundup of the top stories & startups to watch in AI. This week in AI we have stories on:
- Meta's plan to build open source AGI
- AI startups raised $370M last week
Meta's Plan to Build Open Source AGI
In an Instagram Reel posted yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta's plan to build artificial general intelligence and open source it responsibly.
Our long term vision is to build general intelligence, open source it responsibly, and make it widely available so everyone can benefit.
This move to open source its AGI efforts sets it apart from its contemporaries in the tech industry. In order to accomplish this, Mark announced his plans to integrate its Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and GenAI research teams towards this goal.
We're bringing our two major AI research efforts (FAIR and GenAI) closer together to support this.
Meta's Llama 3 and GPT Infrastructure
As Zuckerberg stated, the company is currently training Llama 3, a large language model, and is building a massive compute infrastructure, including 350,000 Nvidia H100s by year's end.
We're currently training our next-gen model Llama 3, and we're building massive compute infrastructure to support our future roadmap, including 350k H100s by the end of this year – and overall almost 600k H100s equivalents of compute if you include other GPUs.
This announcement comes in the wake of comments from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at Davos and skepticism from Meta's own chief scientist, Yann LeCun, about the near-term feasibility of AGI. As Sam Altman said at Davos:
AGI is reasonably close-ish future.
Meta isn't the only player in the open source LLM camp, although they definitely have the most resources and talent to actually pull it out. Let's hope this move towards open source AGI puts the pressure on other tech giants to follow suit.
AI Startups Raised $370M Last Week 🚀
Last week in AI was another big week for venture capital funding, with startups raising over $370M in funding. Here are a few of our favourite startups to watch.
1X
1X designs and develops humanoid robots to operate in the physical world. Its robots enable security, retail, logistics, and healthcare companies to deploy safe, capable, and affordable robots to work alongside their employees.
- Funding: Raised a $100M Series B round
- Location: Moss, Norway
Leap AI
Leap AI builds, tests and iterates with chains to create sophisticated workflows to monitor them, enabling clients to gain complete control and flexibility while managing workflow infrastructure.
- Funding: Raised a $1.4M Seed round
- Location: San Francisco, USA
Ask-AI
Ask-AI is the developer of an AI-powered platform designed to streamline the customer relationship management process. The company's technology combines text-heavy company knowledge and consumer communications to answer queries using natural language processing and gives actionable product insights.
- Funding: Raised an $11M Series A round
- Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
Recently Funded AI Startups
Access 2000+ recently funded AI startups in the MLQ app, including funding data, founder details, and more.
That's it for this edition of This Week in AI, if you were forwarded this newsletter and would like to receive it you can sign up below.
