Welcome to the AI Ecosystem Report, featuring practitioner analyst and entrepreneur Toni Witt. This series is intended to deliver the timely intelligence about artificial intelligence (AI) you need to get up to speed for an upcoming client engagement or board meeting.
Highlights
Innovation (00:37)
There has been a trend in the GenAI industry showing signs of consolidation through licensing deals:
- Character AI, a GenAI startup that trains custom LLMs, announced a licensing deal with Google. This deal will allow Google to use Character AI’s technology and hire many of their researchers and employees at a $2 billion licensing fee.
- Adept AI, another GenAI startup, had a $330 million licensing deal with Amazon. This enables Amazon to hire Adept employees and use their tech.
- Inflection AI had a similar deal with Microsoft for $650 million.
There are a couple of key factors contributing to this explosion of startup investments:
- The launch of ChatGPT created a hype cycle around GenAI.
- Large language models can have extreme training costs to train, as they require the right talent and researchers to have cutting-edge models.
Startups still have a long way to go to sustainable profitability. Investments in this market are starting to slow, so these startups are increasingly opting to get bailed out by big tech companies. Essentially, they are acqui-hiring (acquisition-hiring). The big companies clearly want the tech but they also want the talent.
Funding (04:43)
AI startup Glean is in the final stages of raising $250 million, bringing its valuation to $4.5 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. Glean was founded in 2019 by Arvind Jain, a former search engineer at Google. The company focuses on providing AI search for internal use within large enterprises. It has reached over $55 million in annual revenue and is expected to reach $100 million by the end of 2024.
Glean pulls data from across your organization to compile an enterprise knowledge graph. It enables employees across the organization to understand what’s going on in different ways. Glean built an AI assistant meant for internal use by employees trained on the real-time knowledge graph of the organization.
Solution of the Week (07:56)
Two AI systems developed by Google, AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2, have collaborated to correctly solve four of six complex math problems presented in the International Mathematical Olympiad. This is the world’s most famous math competition worldwide designed for high school students. These two AI systems, had they been human, would have received a silver medal in the competition.
Up to this point, AI has been great at reading and writing text but not so good at reasoning, which is required in solving math problems. Even ChatGPT, when it first came out, had trouble solving simple math problems. As math problems increase in complexity, they require advanced thinking methods.
Google leveraged a version of Gemini — developed by DeepMind, Google’s AI department — and fine-tuned it to translate math problems written in informal language. This is the first time AI has been able to solve problems of this difficulty, representing a huge step forward.
The AI Ecosystem Q2 2024 Report compiles the innovations, funding, and products highlighted in AI Ecosystem Reports from the second quarter of 2024. Download now for perspectives on the companies, innovations, and solutions shaping the future of AI.
