Together AI raised $106M in a round led by Salesforce. Nvidia-backed Together AI said Wednesday it has raised $106 million in a new funding round, doubling its valuation since last fall. The company offers a platform to easily develop and deploy open source models and develop them into enterprise-grade applications. Other investors include Coatue Management and existing investors such as Lux Capital and Emergence Capital.
Former Google software engineer Lin Wei Ding was accused of stealing AI trade secrets from the company.. He was allegedly working secretly with two China-based AI startups. Ding now faces up to 10 years in prison. He had been uploading secret files to his personal Google Cloud for two years. The FBI seized Ding’s electronic devices and uncovered more than 500 unique files of classified information stolen from Google.
Adaptive AI emerged from stealth with $20M. The startup was founded by a team that worked together at the open source AI company Hugging Face. Adaptive seeks to enable LLMs to learn on a regular and ongoing basis from how a company’s employees or customers actually interact. This is called reinforcement learning from human feedback, or RLHF. The seed investment is being led by Index Ventures with participation from ICONIQ Capital, Motier Ventures, Databricks Ventures, HuggingFund by Factorial, and some individual angel investors. Founder
Tavus raises $18M for developer platform GenAI Replica API. They also announced the release of its new developer platform, the Replica API, powered by its new Phoenix model. Phoenix allows creating animated videos from text for industries like sales and education. The Series A funding was led by Scale Ventures, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator, HubSpot, and others.
Open is a metaverse experience that comes from Radiverse, the creator of Ready Player One.. Ernest Cline, the writer behind Ready Player One, is working on a new project called Open, an ambitious “triple-A quality metaverse experience” that aims to be a multi-genre, multi-IP, and multi-mode battle royale experience. To be presented. PC and current generation platforms. It derives its name from the principles of content interoperability and ownership of digital content, and is inspired by the character Parzival from Cline’s books.
OpenAI continues to cut deals with media companies instead of fighting them. This week they signed deals with French newspaper Le Monde and Spanish media group Promotora de Informaciones SA, or Prisa. ChatGPT models are trained on French and Spanish language news content through contracts.
South by Southwest’s XR Competition and Exhibition, one of the world’s largest exhibitions, wrapped up on Wednesday.. The jury awarded. golden key, A room-scale three-screen experiment running a native version of Stable Diffusion. He was automatically prompted to create themed images based on a series of unrelated short fairy tales. Visitors can add their own prompts to see how they appear in stories created and rendered in real-time. It felt like a new medium was emerging before our eyes. Mark Da Costa and Matthew Niederhauser directed the piece. A special jury award went to Spirit. paint, Written by Sarah Ticho, directed by Sarah Ticho and Nicky Schmidt, and produced by Anna Furbank.
Virtuix, creator of the Omni One VR treadmill, has 35 games in its lineup for a wider launch later this year. Omni One, originally slated for a 2020 crowdfunding campaign, is set to launch in Q2 2024. At $2,595, this home version includes a Pico 4 Enterprise headset and a dedicated game store. Notable games that support Omni One include: The Manor, Breachers, Compound, Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord, In Death: Restless, RUINSMAGUS, and Wanderer: The Fragments of Fate, which allow players to experience VR. Allows running, shooting and crouching. .
OpenAI CTO Meera Murthy explains how Sora works.
Storybook Studios Created the world of The SEERESS in cinematic AI by developing a bespoke workflow without using runway or pica animation. The series is currently in production with PANTALEON Films GmbH based on an original story by Tobias M. Huber and Dr. Dominikus Huber.
Dave Clark wrote and directed this horror short. “This is the first film to fuse live-action VFX and generative AI. It’s like a third AI. And even the sfx are basically AI with a light touch of traditional VFX,” Clarke said in an email. . “AI was basically our entire VFX pipeline. Saved a lot of time and money.”
This Week in XR is also a podcast. Hosted by the author of this column, Ted Schilowitz, Futurist, Paramount Global, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap. Our guests this week are Laura Mangel, who will be helping out our coverage of SXSW, and the directors of The Gold Key, Matthew Niederhauser and Mark DeCosta, who won the XR Award at SXSW 2024. We can be found on Spotify, iTunes, and Youtube
What are we studying?
Top 100 AI Apps for Consumers (a16z Blog)
GenAI is a skills amplifier, not a skills democratizer. (Shelley Palmer)
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