Welcome to the AI Index 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.
This episode is sponsored by the AI Summit Preconference at Community Summit, taking place October 16th in Charlotte, NC. The full-day preconference is dedicated to providing an understanding of where, why, and how AI should be applied to drive business results.
Highlights
Innovation (00:43)
The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is launching a generative AI Task Force. Task Force Lima, led by the chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, will analyze and integrate generative AI technology across the department. Dr. Craig Martell, DOD CDAO, notes that other parties can leverage new techniques and take advantage of generative AI systems.
The DOD has had much innovation in terms of AI ethics and building frameworks for effective implementation. Because a main objective is to control and harness this technology, implementation is really critical.
Funding (03:19)
Hugging Face has gained another venture round for $200 million, this time led by Salesforce Ventures. With this round, the AI startup is at a valuation of over $4 billion.
The company hosts more than 100,00 open-source AI models that developers have put on the platform to collaborate and share. It has other products and offerings that support developers, including tools that automate the model training process.
This is a strategic investment for Salesforce. It has been building its “Einstein GPT” for several years now, which is what the company calls its suite of AI power tools that automate tasks, drive more personalized experiences, and boost productivity. By investing in Hugging Face, Salesforce can provide customers the option to leverage their own models and datasets as well as access models hosted on Hugging Face.
Hugging Face has the models; Salesforce has the enterprise customers and the data of those customers. Salesforce has been building momentum in terms of enterprise AI. Earlier this summer, it announced that it’s doubling the size of its generative AI venture fund — up to $500 million.
Solution of the Week (06:42)
Lex is an AI-powered writing platform. It provides a lot of use cases of large language models (LLMs) in the writing process with a very simple, clean user interface (UI). The company raised a $2.75 million round, which it’s primarily using to hire new core team members.
With a simple UI, the platform provides many use cases for LLMs in the writing process:
- If you have an essay written, you can upload it and the tool will suggest titles for the piece.
- If you’re halfway through writing a paragraph, there’s an option for it to suggest what line to write next.
- It allows users to define their own scores, such as a confidence score or on-brand score then helps users understand if they’re hitting the right points and using the right tone.
- By highlighting different pieces of text, users can ask Lex for suggestions to reword it with a different tone or different phrasing.
As a startup, Lex is currently building on top of open AI models. The founder and CEO Nathan Bush says he used to run an essay newsletter business and also knows how to write code, so it was a natural jump for him.
