AI Update: A Dustup in the Chatbot Arena

Welcome to the newest edition of FindBiometrics’ AI update. Here’s the latest big news on the shifting landscape of AI and identity technology:

HeyGen is in talks to raise $60 million through an investment round led by Benchmark that would give it a pre-investment valuation of $440 million. HeyGen specializes in AI that can generate realistic deepfake videos. The valuation would represent a six-fold leap over where it stood four months ago.

Amazon has invested another $2.75 billion in Anthropic, bringing its total investment in the startup to $4 billion. Founded by former OpenAI researchers, Anthropic is the company behind ChatGPT challenger Claude 3. The startup is separately working to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from other VCs.

Speaking of which, Claude 3 has knocked ChatGPT off of first place in the Chatbot Arena leaderboard. The LMSYS Chatbot Arena relies on user votes to determine the rankings; users are given the output of chatbot responses to the same prompt without knowing which model produced them.

Amazon has meanwhile set aside $148 billion to build and expand data centers over the next 15 years. The company wants a computing edge over rivals like Microsoft as AI use continues to scale up. It plans to build new centers in Mississippi, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia.

A new consortium called the UXL Foundation has been formed to develop an open source AI training system that can run on any chip. The consortium, which includes Google, Intel, and Qualcomm, is taking aim at the dominance of Nvidia, which currently dominates the AI chip space.

Researchers at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have come up with an image generation method “that accelerates current diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion and DALLE-3 by 30 times,” according to one of the boffins. It uses a system called distribution matching distillation (DMD), in which a new AI model mimics the behavior of older, more complicated models.

A new research paper details Arc2Face, a method of generating synthetic faces that relies on ArcFace embeddings. ArcFace technology slices up facial features into different angles in space, and then converts these into strings of numbers that can be turned into a kind of embedded code for the face that can be used to generate it in various positions and situations.

The chatbot’s take: This week, we learned that ChatGPT has the heart of a champion. Or it would, if it had a heart.

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March 28, 2024 – by Alex Perala