VentureBeat's 6th Annual AI Innovation Awards Winners Announced

Concluding a second day highlighting insights from enterprise AI and data leaders during VB Transform 2024 in San Francisco, VentureBeat announced the winners of the sixth annual AI Innovation Awards.

The awards recognized enterprise implementation, innovation, startup promise and visionary and inclusive initiatives in generative AI. Nine awards were presented in five categories: Generative AI Innovator of the Year, Best Enterprise Implementation of Generative AI, Most Promising Generative AI Startup, Generative AI Visionary, Generative AI Diversity and Inclusion and Generative AI Open Source Contribution. .

Nominees and winners were drawn from our daily editorial coverage and the expertise, knowledge and experience of our nominating committee members.

Thank you for the guidance, insight and recommendations of our Nominating Committee members:

• Jonathan Frankel, Chief Scientist of Neural Networks at Databricks
• Dia Wen, Responsive AI Lead at AWS.
• Tonya Custis, Senior Director of AI Research at Autodesk
• Prem Natarajan, Chief Scientist and Head of Enterprise AI at Capital One
• Kalyan Weeramachani, Principal Research Scientist, MIT College of Computing

And the winners are:

This award goes to the company that has pushed the boundaries of gen AI in the past year and demonstrated cutting edge use of the technology.

Our winner is OpenAI. The startup has quickly claimed the spotlight in the tech world, mesmerizing both industry insiders and the general public with its groundbreaking AI innovations. From the viral success of ChatGPT to the anticipation surrounding each new model release, OpenAI has expertly covered gen AI. Their rapid development, including GPT-3, GPT-4, and DALL-E, has not only demonstrated the potential of AI but also fueled a global conversation about its implications. With the recent announcement of GPT-4o (GPT-4 Omni), OpenAI continues to make headlines and advance the narrative of the future of AI, solidifying its role as the company that every Someone is looking into the AI ​​revolution.

This award highlights the top enterprise company that has implemented gen AI technology in a truly transformative way.

Our winner is Microsoft. The tech giant is working on incorporating gen AI into its Dynamics and Power platforms to enable gen AI-powered enterprise applications. The company has also deployed its Copilot gen AI assistant in the Microsoft 365 suite of business productivity and collaboration apps. In May, the company announced that Microsoft Copilot Studio will let developers create AI bots that act like agents. In June, the company's Azure AI team dropped a new vision model called Florence-2 on Hugging Face.

Colette Stallbaumer, co-founder of WorkLab at Microsoft and Copilot GM, was a speaker at Transform. He accepted the award in a video earlier in the day.

“I'm proud that VentureBeat is recognizing Microsoft for excellence in enterprise and implementation. It's been an incredible year and I'm thrilled that our customers are seeing the value of Copilot in the enterprise. I'm behind Microsoft and Copilot. I am honored to accept this award on behalf of the incredible team present. Thank you.”

Our winner is the Patronus AI. The company's focus is on AI diagnostics and security, especially for large language models (LLMs). As more tech companies release models that are capable of seeing, hearing and injecting emotion into communication, it becomes more difficult to maintain accuracy, privacy and auditing requirements. Patronus AI aims to address these challenges and has launched “FinanceBench” benchmarks, datasets and evaluations to help in areas such as detecting personally identifiable information (PII) in bot information. In May, the company raised $17 million in Series A funding, bringing its total funding to $20 million.

The mentor AI team was unable to attend the conference to accept the award in person. However, Anand Kanpan, co-founder and CEO sent a video of the acceptance.

Kanpan said the company was delighted to receive the award.

“We help companies scale, we catch failures in communicating their systems… We started patching late last year to help financial services companies test their systems. ,” They said. “It has since been widely adopted as a standard by financial institutions. We're very proud of this recognition from VentureBeat and we're really excited about what's to come in 2024 and beyond.” .

Our winner is Abridge. The company offers an AI-powered platform to improve medical communication and medical documentation. The company's technology transforms patient-physician interactions into structured clinical notes in real-time with deep electronic medical record integration. In February the company announced a $150 million Series C round, just four months after a $30 million Series B round. The company also announced a new enterprise agreement with Yale New Haven Health System, to reduce the mental burden of medical documentation to focus on patient care.

Abridge CTO/CSO Zack Lipton accepted the award for the company at VB Transform. He talked about how the company is working to remove the administrative friction that medical professionals face.

“Already in the last year we've gone from a single pilot to a leading system deployed in more than 50 hospital systems across the country,” said Lipton. He further said that the hope is that the precious time of doctors and medical professionals will be saved.

“Every day we hear from doctors who can go home earlier, take a lunch break for the first time in 10 years and spend time with their families in the evening,” Lipton said. “We're saving doctors hours every day and we're just getting started.”

Our winners are ServiceNow and Hugging Face. StarCoder, a new LLM, part of the BigCode project, a joint effort of ServiceNow and Hugging Face, launched in May. It's part of an effort to build an open community around code generation tools for AI.

ServiceNow's Sampada Chavan, an AI Senior Principal Product Manager, accepted the award at VB Transform.

“There are two main things I want to highlight,” said Chavan. “One, are we really getting into a virtuous cycle of open innovation because that's where the community came together to model the data and that's going to give back to the committed community as well.” The other part has open, transparent information about the models, he added.

“And that's going to help us massively with generative AI as well as responsible, responsive AI,” he said.

This award goes to the most promising startup that has developed an innovative gen AI application and demonstrated high growth potential.

Our winner is Lamini. The startup offers a platform for developing and deploying AI models and recently announced results that its fine-tuning reduces fraud by 90 percent. The company was founded in 2022 and aims to simplify the process of creating, customizing and deploying custom LLMs for businesses. Lamini's platform focuses on enabling model training on proprietary data while addressing privacy concerns and computational efficiency.

Greg Dymos, CTO and co-founder of Lamini, accepted the award at Transform.

“It's been a real journey to get here to be able to build this company,” he said. “I think our mission is to make every enterprise have access to generative AI. It's an honor for the company to receive this award,” he added.

The award honors an individual who has made significant contributions to the field of general AI through their thought leadership, research or work underpinning technologies.

John Passmore is the founder and CEO of Latimer, an LLM designed with deep empathy and a commitment to reducing prejudice. Latimer understands the nuances of diverse voices and narratives to ensure that each response is based on the most accurate and comprehensive data available.

Accepting his award at Transform, Passmore said: “This is an incredible honour. We're a very young company. We started last July and launched our product in January this year, with the sole purpose of The goal was to make AI as inclusive as possible. So we've created a built-in model that we hope everyone will use. We've seen great adoption, working with a bunch of colleges and universities are

The award recognizes the company, organization or individual that has done the most to promote diversity and inclusion in the Gen AI field. This could include advancing AI ethics, making AI technologies more accessible, providing opportunities and support for underrepresented groups, or using AI in ways that reduce prejudice and promote social justice.

Maryam Razapour works on product development for Amazon AGI. He created the AWS AI and ML Scholarship, in collaboration with Intel and Udacity, from concept to creation, to provide high school and college students worldwide with the resources to launch their careers in AI and ML. . (Disclosure: One of our Nominating Committee members works for AWS)

Razapour accepted his award at VB Transform. He thanked his team and leadership at AWS.

“The journey of building this product and program was one of determination and reflection for me,” Razapour said. “As someone from Iran, the experience of navigating a new culture shaped my perspective. I vividly remember the moment when I fully recognized the value and strength of diversity. It was to be in a room with people from different walks of life. I experienced firsthand how a vision can turn into something extraordinary with people from different backgrounds.”

“So I'm hopeful for future data ideas and creators that are as diverse as the world,” he added.

This award highlights the person, team or company that has made the most significant contribution to open source tools, datasets or other resources to help advance general AI.

Our winner is a huggable face. This leading AI company and platform provides a comprehensive ecosystem for machine learning (ML) practitioners, researchers and developers. Hugging Face is known for its significant open source contributions to the ML community, particularly in advancing Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV) technologies. Hugging Face's platform has become a tool for AI practitioners to foster innovation and knowledge sharing in the field.

Congratulations to all our winners and nominees.