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☆ The hottest AI startups are raising back-to-back funding rounds. Suddenly, it's feeling very 2021 in Silicon Valley for a chosen few.
▼ + stars: | 2024-09-20 | by ( Ben Bergman | Melia Russell | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +11 min

Read previewIn February, Glean announced a $200 million funding round valuing the AI enterprise software startup at $2.2 billion. AdvertisementThe transaction is the latest in a string of dizzying back-to-back funding rounds at ever-higher valuations for a handful of AI startups that stand in stark contrast to the doldrums of the overall market for startups. Earlier this year, Sakana raised $30 million in a seed funding round led by Lux Capital. Slingshot AI, which has built an automated mental health counselor, also raised separate rounds of funding just months apart. Advertisement"VCs are increasingly faced with frequent requests from their hot AI companies to follow on or double down on investments," said Iris Sun, an investor at 500 Global.

Persons: —, Glean, Arvind Jain's inbox, Jain, Steve Brotman, Perplexity, SoftBank, Sakana, Gregg Hill, that's, Matt Murphy, Dario Amodei, Kimberly White, Murphy, I'd, I've, Jenny Chang, Rodriguez, Jai Das, Rajeev Dham, couldn't, Das, Sapphire, Uber, Iris Sun, Chandrasekar Organizations: Service, Business, DST Global, Alpha Partners, Bloomberg, Google, New Enterprise Associates, Khosla Ventures, Lux Capital, Parkway Venture Capital, Menlo Ventures, Getty, Sapphire Ventures, Investments Locations: Tokyo

☆ Multi-agent systems are the next big thing in AI. Here's why VCs at NEA, Mayfield Fund, and Foundation Capital are excited.
▼ + stars: | 2024-07-29 | by ( Sri Muppidi | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

Startups are building AI agents that collaborate to fill out forms, dial customer service reps, and order food delivery. These "multi-agent systems" are the next hot thing, according to investors from NEA, Mayfield Fund, and Foundation Capital. Multi-agent systems are distributed systems of multiple specialized AI agents that work together toward a collective goal. AdvertisementIn contrast, multi-agent systems are built on top of LLMs and are designed to execute a task from start to finish. AdvertisementMayfield Fund's Navin Chaddha is optimistic — AI agents will serve as teammates to workers.

Persons: —, Spike Jonze's, that's, OpenAI's, NEA's Madison Faulkner, Devin, Warren Hui, Nitta, Satya Nitta, Ashpreet Bedi, Faulkner, Mayfield Fund's Navin Chaddha, …, It's Organizations: Service, NEA, Mayfield Fund, Foundation Capital, Business, Soul Ventures, Nvidia Locations: Italy, PitchBook, Japan

“After China's ban on Japanese seafood, we are seeing more customers buying not only Fukushima fish but also Japanese seafood in general to support the industry." Despite the wastewater discharges, auction prices at Fukushima fish markets have remained stable — or even occasionally higher than normal. While individual consumers favor ordering fish by mail and shopping at seafood markets, prefectural government cafeterias have started serving Fukushima seafood for lunch. In Kyoto, a group of world-renowned Japanese “Kaiseki” cuisine chefs, will develop menus that primarily use Fukushima fish starting early next year. “I wish I could sell more local fish,” Haga said.

Persons: Kazuto Harada, “, ”, “ I'm, it’s, Futoshi Kinoshita, Katsuya Goto, ” Goto, Yoshinori Tanaka, ” Tanaka, Haga, ” Haga Organizations: —, International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, Tokyo Electric Power Company, United States Embassy, TEPCO, Tokyo Metropolitan Government, Japanese Culinary Academy Locations: IWAKI, Japan, Onahama, Fukushima, Ibaraki, Tokyo, South Korea, Beijing, China, Kyoto, Toriyone, Asia, asia

☆ Google A.I. researcher says he left to build a startup after encountering 'big company-itis'
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-17 | by ( Jordan Novet | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +4 min

Sakana AI founders Llion Jones, left, and David Ha, meet at a rooftop bar in Tokyo. Jones, a co-author of Google's prominent Transformers research paper, is the generative AI research lab's technology chief, and Ha, a former Google research scientist, is its CEO. He was one of eight authors of the pivotal Transformers research paper, which is central to the latest in generative artificial intelligence. He's joining fellow ex-Google researcher David Ha to build a generative AI research lab in Tokyo called Sakana AI. The T stands for Transformers, an architecture behind much of today's frenetic generative AI activity.

Persons: Llion Jones, David Ha, Jones, He's, Ha, Sakana, OpenAI, they've Organizations: Google, itis, CNBC, University of Birmingham, YouTube, Microsoft Locations: Tokyo, Ha

Aug 17 (Reuters) - Two prominent former Google (GOOGL.O) researchers, one of whom was a co-inventor of the “transformer” artificial intelligence architecture that paved the way for the generative AI boom, announced on Thursday they had started a new AI company based in Tokyo. Sakana AI, founded by David Ha and Llion Jones, declined to disclose funding details. Ha was previously the head of research at Stability AI and a Google Brain researcher. After the famous paper came out, advances in generative AI foundation models have centered around making the “transformer”-based models larger and larger. Instead of doing that, Sakana AI will focus on creating new architectures for foundation models, Jones told Reuters.

Persons: David Ha, Llion Jones, Jones, Ha, “, ”, Noam Shazeer, Aidan Gomez, Anna Tong, Frances Kerry Organizations: Google, Reuters, Thomson Locations: Tokyo, San Francisco

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