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Lore #60: E/acc Founder Doxxed, Silicon Valley Responds

Author

Nathan Lands
December 06, 2023

Good morning,

This week, Forbes took the low road by doxxing the founder of the E/acc movement, Beff Jezos, revealing him to be Guillaume Verdon. E/acc, short for Effective Accelerationism, is a movement I align with, advocating for the belief that AI and technology will usher in a technological utopia.

Forbes' actions were possibly rooted in fears of AI as an existential threat. While concerns about AI’s impact on jobs and our way of life are legitimate, E/acc argues that accelerating AI development is our best path forward, offering solutions to humanity’s most pressing challenges. A belief I strongly agree with.

In response to the doxxing, many Silicon Valley insiders tweeted to announce they had invested in Beff’s mysterious AI startup, Extropic. Names like Garry Tan(YC), Scott Belsky(Adobe), Chris Prucha(Notion), and many more showed support.

At Lore, we stand with E/acc, and want to do our part to create a future where technological progress is harnessed for humanity's benefit.

  • Extropic raised $14.1M to create self-assembling intelligence from the future (Link)

  • Together raised $102.5M to grow its cloud for training generative AI (Link)

  • Mistral raised $487M to create open-source software for chatbots and generative AI tools (Link)

  • Mine raised $30M for its data privacy platform (Link)

  • Rich Data Co raised $28M for its AI decisioning platform (Link)

  • EnCharge AI raised $22.6M to develop advanced AI chips and full stack solutions (Link)

  • Kognitos raised $20M to automate businesses using generative AI (Link)

  • Syrup raised $17.5M to bring AI to holiday shopping logistics (Link)

  • Rohirrim raised $15M for its text generation platform (Link)

  • Ketryx raised $14M for connected application lifecycle management software for the life sciences industry (Link)

  • HeyGen raised $5.6M to add new features to its AI video platform (Link)

  • Amini raised $4M for its climate tech platform to solve Africa’s environmental data gap (Link)

Meta and IBM have launched the AI Alliance, a coalition of over 50 AI companies and research institutions, to promote an open model of AI in response to the dominance of proprietary systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Members such as Intel, Oracle, Cornell University, and the National Science Foundation are pooling resources to support open-source AI, an approach that encourages collaboration and free technology sharing.

The Alliance, emphasizing diversity and resilience in the AI ecosystem, aims to offer businesses more AI product options and reduce reliance on single vendors. The coalition focuses on areas like regulation, safety, and AI benchmarking tools, with companies like AMD and ServiceNow actively contributing.

Google has postponed (for a second time) its highly anticipated unveiling of the Gemini generative AI tool to January 2024.

According to CEO Sundar Pichai, the delay stems from concerns about Gemini's ability to handle non-English queries reliably. Google plans to integrate Gemini's AI capabilities into its products like Search, Google Assistant, and Google Docs, but these updates are now not expected until early next year.

Sam Altman has resumed his role as CEO of OpenAI, with Mira Murati returning as CTO and Greg Brockman as President, marking a significant leadership reorganization at a crucial time for the AI industry.The newly formed initial board includes Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo.

In an announcement addressing the changes, Altman highlighted the company's immediate priorities: advancing research and safety efforts, improving and deploying products, and working with the new board to enhance governance and conduct an independent review of recent events.

Board chair Bret Taylor emphasized strengthening OpenAI's corporate governance, building a diverse board, stabilizing the organization, and enhancing governance structures to ensure trust among all stakeholders.

Runway is collaborating with Getty Images to launch a new video model designed for enterprise customers. The Runway <> Getty Images Model (RGM) will integrate Getty Images' fully licensed creative content library with Runway's technology.

This means enterprises will be able to create their own custom models for video generation using proprietary datasets, catering to a variety of industries like Hollywood studios, advertising, and media.

Other news

  • One Year of ChatGPT: How AI Changed Silicon Valley Forever (Link)

  • OpenAI COO thinks AI for business is overhyped (Link)

  • Klarna freezes hiring as chief bets AI can do the job instead (Link)

  • Unilever and Accenture Collaborate on Next Generation AI (Link)

AI reconstructs images from brain activity with ~75% accuracy 🤯

A new image-to-video synthesis for character/person animation

A whole new way of drawing

Perplexity’s online LLMs are a crowd-pleaser

  • FocuSee: Create eye-catching product videos (Link)

  • Clippa: Edit videos online and export without a watermark (Link)

  • Briefy: Turn lengthy texts, audios, and videos into structured, easy-to-digest summaries (Link)

  • Unicorn Platform: An AI website builder to create websites without design or development skills (Link)

  • Typedream: Build webflow and framer quality websites in seconds (Link) 👇

Find more tools at FutureTools.io.

  • MLX: An array framework for Apple silicon (Link)

  • 12 days of no-cost training to learn generative AI this December — from Google Cloud (Link)

  • Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces (Link)

  • Magicoder: Source Code Is All You Need (Link)

  • Merlin: Empowering Multimodal LLMs with Foresight Minds (Link)

  • VMC: Video Motion Customization using Temporal Attention Adaption for Text-to-Video Diffusion Models (Link)

  • VideoRF: Rendering Dynamic Radiance Fields as 2D Feature Video Streams (Link)

  • GraphDreamer: Compositional 3D Scene Synthesis from Scene Graphs (Link)

That's it!

See you next week!

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