VC dollars shifted from subsidizing your taxi ride and burrito delivery to LLMs and generative AI compute.

Chinese team’s Ethereum Layer 2 network Scroll raised $50 million in new funding at $1.8 billion. Investors included Polychain Capital, Sequoia China, Bain Capital Crypto, Moore Capital Management, Variant Fund, Newman Capital, IOSG Ventures and Qiming Venture Partners.

Prediction: LLMs will play a big role in the 2024 US presidential election. The two major candidates will have ChatGPT-like bots you can talk to and it will seem like a Zoom call with the actual candidate. If just one of the two candidates has such a bot, he wins easily.

Microsoft's latest AI assistant built on OpenAI is meant for its Dynamics products, taking on Oracle, SAP, Salesforce with a tool to help marketers, finance staff and customer service agents.

Dynamics 365 Copilot follows GitHub Copilot and the Bing bot.

Of course, the stakes are different if a business-focused copilot spits out incorrect info or engages in creepy behavior. One other thing Microsoft put into the announcement: its next AI-focused news will relate to productivity software (ie Office) and come March 16.

Stability AI has acquired the industry leader in AI-powered imaging tools Clipdrop App.

Google has launched a new AI model, and it's incredible.

Introducing PaLM-E, a multimodal language model across robotics, vision and text.

This is a pretty massive 562B model and beats all previous ones!

APPLICATIONS

1. Robotics

Instruct a robot to "bring me the rice chips from the drawer". Includes multiple planning steps as well as incorporating visual feedback from the robot's camera.

2. Visual Question Answering.

PaLM-E's a generalist across language, vision robotics.

Trends in AI March 2023 is out

1. LLaMA from MetaAI , an open-source set of GPT-like pretrained models to work upon. Licensed to be used only for research purposes and not academic though.

2. "Consistenty Models" from OpenAI, a generalization of diffusion to model an arbitrary jump in diffusion steps, achieving image generation in 1 step without adversarial training.

3. PaLM-E from Google AI and UMI LAB, an embodied 562B language model that takes actions in the physical world and shows substantial positive transfer learning across modalities.

4. "In-context Instruction Learning" from LG AI Research, showing that instruction learning can be done *in-context*.

5. Evaluating GPT models on machine translation by Microsoft Research showing how chatGPT and davinci models perform on par with many SOTA NMT and commercial translation services, and has complimentary strengths.

6. "Composer: Creative and Controllable Image Synthesis with Composable Conditions" by Alibaba: next level composable controllability for diffusion-based image generation.

7. Prismer from Nvidia AI an efficient modular mixture of experts multimodal language model that can answer and reason about images and text.

8. "Augmented Language Models: a Survey" by MetaAI , everything you need to know about LMs + tools, memories, search.

9. "Symbolic discovery of optimization algorithms" by GoogleAI and UCLA , symbolic program search to learn an optimizer, speeding up training 2x vs Adam.

10. "MarioGPT: Open-Ended Text2Level Generation through Large Language Models" by University of Copenhagen Research. Just that, generating Mario levels by prompting a GPT-2 model + embedding it on a novelty search evolutionary computing loop to generate even cooler worlds

Samsung has hired ex-TSMC exec Lin Jun-cheng as vice president to speed up development of its advanced packaging technology, media report, adding Lin worked at TSMC from 1999 to 2017, laying the groundwork for TSMC's 3D packaging technology.

Animoca Brands and Planet Hollywood launch Club 3 as a physical private club with Web3 perks.

Metaverse may reach $615bn by 2030, Bloomberg report says

A new report from Bloomberg Intelligence (BI) has found that a slowdown in consumer spending and a lack of standards may remain a drag on virtual and augmented reality adoption, but Apple's likely entry into the market with a new headset could be a catalyst for faster growth in the metaverse, which may reach $615 billion by 2030. Advances will likely be driven by virtual 3D for shopping, events, social media and other consumer apps.

AR/VR unit growth pressured in the near term

Slowing unit growth for AR/VR hardware may remain a challenge for the metaverse in the near term amid a pullback in discretionary consumer spending. At the current price point, VR-headset adoption could stay muted with limitations in application as well as use for multiple hours. Innovation will be key to gaining market share, and IDC projects AR/VR spending will climb to over $40 billion by 2030, up from around $4.3 billion in 2022. Companies like Meta Platforms are likely to pare back their operating and capital spending amid pressure to boost profitability, which could be a drag on the metaverse's pace of development.

Brand partnerships and events pave monetisation path

Metaverse offerings could continue expanding beyond gaming with new partnerships, creating new opportunities for shopping, concerts and other virtual events. Platforms like Roblox and Decentraland already have deals with Gucci, Nike and Coca-Cola, among others, creating unique experiences for users to see the brand through a different lens. The sale of high-end luxury items in the metaverse demonstrates the potential for monetization.

Live events also show promise, with platforms like Fortnite hosting concerts for artists such as Ariana Grande, Travis Scott and others. These performances attract millions of users with the lure of experiences that defy the limitations of the physical world. We expect metaverse platforms to boost the pace of partnerships to draw in more to their installed base.

Generative AI can enhance user experience

Generative AI and GPT could revolutionize metaverse engagement by offering users convincingly human interactions in a virtual landscape. GPT's ability to leverage large language models is an enhancement that can provide distinct responses to text, voice and gestures. We believe platforms like Meta's Horizon World or Roblox may shift to GPT to augment and expand into new areas like education. GPT could also improve how users work virtually. Consumer applications have seen better adoption early vs commercial. GPT might boost enterprise use by improving the way employees work.

А major AI labs starting to share their AI Alignment plans. Activity in the last two weeks:

1. Conjecture shared "their primary safety proposal and research direction...Cognitive Emulation (or “CoEm”). The goal of the CoEm agenda is to build predictably boundable systems".

2. Anthropic published "Core Views on AI Safety: When, Why, What, and How".

3. DeepMind's Alignment team published their strategy "this talk represents the views of the alignment team and is not officially endorsed by DeepMind".

4. OpenAI published “Planning for AGI and beyond and state "we are going to operate as if these risks are existential".

5.Jan Leike Alignment team lead at OpenAI and previously 4 years at DeepMind "A proposal for importing society’s values: building towards Coherent Extrapolated Volition with language models".

Sooma Medical Receives FDA breakthrough device designation for Its Innovative at-home depression treatment device

Sooma Medical, a medical device company based in Finland, has been granted Breakthrough Device designation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its portable, patient-administered neuromodulation device to treat depression.

This revolutionary treatment utilises a mild electrical current to stimulate targeted brain areas, significantly improving depressive symptoms. The FDA's breakthrough designation is reserved for novel therapies that show significant potential to provide a substantial improvement over existing options for severe or life-threatening conditions.

Coinbase has lost more than half of its liquidity — measured by 1% market depth — since Feb 9. This is complicated by the fact that their USD orderbooks are merged with USDC.