Together AI raises $106 million in round led by Salesforce. Nvidia-backed Together AI announced Wednesday it has raised $106 million in a new funding round, doubling its valuation since last fall. The company provides a platform that uses an open source model to easily develop, deploy, and go into production with enterprise-grade applications. Other investors include Coatue Management and existing investors such as Lux Capital and Emergence Capital.
Former Google software engineer Linwei Ding was charged with stealing AI trade secrets from the company.. He is said to have been secretly collaborating with two China-based AI startups. Ding currently faces up to 10 years in prison. He had been uploading sensitive files to his personal Google Cloud for over two years. The FBI seized Mr. Ding’s electronic devices and discovered over 500 proprietary files of his confidential information stolen from Google.
Adaptive AI emerges from stealth with $20 million. The startup was founded by a team that worked together at open source AI company Hugging Face. Adaptive wants LLMs to be able to regularly and continuously learn from how their own employees and customers actually interact. This is called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). The seed investment was led by Index Ventures with participation from ICONIQ Capital, Motier Ventures, Databricks Ventures, Factorial’s HuggingFund, and select private angel investors.Founder
Tavus developer platform raises $18 million for GenAI Replica API. We also announced the launch of a new developer platform, Replica API, powered by the new Phoenix model. Phoenix lets you create lifelike 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 born from the Readyverse from the creators of Ready Player One. Ready Player One author Ernest Cline is working on a new project called Open. This is an ambitious “Triple-A quality Metaverse experience” that aims to deliver a multi-genre, multi-IP, multi-mode battle royale experience. PC and current generation platforms. Its name comes from the principles of content interoperability and digital content ownership, and is inspired by the character Parzival in Klein’s book.
Rather than compete with media companies, OpenAI continues to cut deals with them. This week they signed a deal with French newspaper Le Monde and Spanish media conglomerate Promotora de Informaciones SA (Prisa). The agreement will see news content in French and Spanish trained into his ChatGPT model.
The world’s largest South by Southwest XR competition and exhibition concluded on Wednesday.. The jury award winner was golden key, A room-scale, three-screen experience running a local version of Stable Diffusion. I was automatically prompted to create a themed image based on a series of short, unrelated fairy tales. Guests can add their own prompts and see how they are reflected in the stories generated and projected in real-time. I felt like a new medium was unfolding before my eyes. The film was directed by Marc da Costa and Matthew Niederhauser.Seoul wins special jury award paint, Written by Sara Tico, directed by Sara Tico and Niki Smit, and produced by Anna Firbank.
Virtuix, developer of the Omni One VR treadmill, has 35 games in its lineup A broader release is planned for later this year. Omni One was originally pitched in a crowd-based investment campaign in 2020 and is expected to arrive in Q2 2024. The $2,595 home version includes a Pico 4 Enterprise headset and a dedicated game store. Notable games that support Omni One are affected: The Manor, Breachers, Compound, Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord, In Death: Unchained, RUINSMAGUS, and Wanderer: The Fragments of Fate, which allow players to run in VR. You can move, shoot, and crouch. .
OpenAI CTO Mira Murati explains how Sora works.
storybook studio We created the world of THE SEERESS with Cinematic AI by developing a bespoke workflow without using Runway or Pika animations. The series is currently in development in collaboration with PANTALEON Films GmbH, based on an original story by Tobias M. Huber and Dr. Dominick Huber.
Dave Clark wrote and directed this horror short. “This is the first movie to combine live-action VFX with generative AI. It’s like the third AI. And even the sound effects are essentially AI with a light touch of traditional VFX.” Clark said in an email. “AI was essentially our entire VFX pipeline. It saves us a lot of time and money.”
This week’s XR is also a podcast Hosted by this column’s authors, Paramount Global futurist Ted Shirowicz and Magic Leap founder Ronnie Abowitz. This week’s guests are my girlfriend Laura Mingail, who is helping me cover SXSW, and my girlfriends Matthew Neiderhauser and Marc DeCosta, the directors of The Gold Key, which won her an XR Award at SXSW 2024. We are Spotify, iTunes, YouTube.
what we are reading
Top 100 Consumer AI Apps (a16z blog)
GenAI is about skill amplification, not skill democratization (Sherry Palmer)
follow me twitter Or LinkedIn. check out My website and other works can be found here.
