Happy New Year and welcome to the newest edition of FindBiometrics’ AI update. Here’s the latest big news on the shifting landscape of AI and identity technology:
Perplexity has raised $73.6 million from investors including Jeff Bezos and Nvidia, among others, bringing its valuation to $520 million. The startup is working on an AI-powered search tool to rival Google. At present, it has just 38 employees. It’s hoping to bring that number to 60 by the end of 2024.
The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its major investor Microsoft, seeking billions in damages for copyright infringement, commercial exploitation, and “misappropriation” of the paper’s intellectual property. OpenAI’s tech was trained on publicly available content from a range of sources, including the Times.
OpenAI rival Antropic expects to be making over $850 million annually by the end of this year, according to unnamed sources said to be familiar with its “financial picture.” That’s a big jump from Anthropic’s projected $500 million in 2024 revenues, communicated to investors just a few months ago.
OpenAI, meanwhile, is now raking in $1.6 billion in annualized revenue, up from $1.3 billion in mid-October. Some of its users will soon have the opportunity to monetize their work, too, with OpenAI planning to launch its previously delayed “GPT Store” for custom AI bots next week.
Intel is spinning off its own AI business into a separate entity called “Articul8 AI”. It will be headed by data center and AI VP Arun Subramaniyan, and will receive financial backing from DigitalBridge Group, as well as Fin Capital, Mindset Ventures, Communitas Capital, GiantLeap Capital, GS Futures and Zain Group.
Elon Musk has registered his AI company, xAI, as a for-profit benefit corporation, establishing a corporate framework that will allow it to focus on benefitting society over shareholders. It’s a similar structure to the one in place at OpenAI, which infamously enabled a board revolt that temporarily sacked Sam Altman.
A new robot for the family home from LG features voice and image recognition capabilities. The diminutive bot is designed to motor around on two wheels, and can interact with members of the household thanks to natural language processing capabilities. It will be showcased at this month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Himax Technologies, meanwhile, will unveil the next-generation version of its WiseEye AI processor for battery-powered tinyML products and reference designs at CES. The company says that its WE2 processor delivers 32 times faster inference speed for AI, and more efficient power consumption compared to its predecessor.
The chatbot’s take: We asked ChatGPT to look into its crystal ball for 2024.
–
January 4, 2024 – by Alex Perala
Follow Us