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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

Aug 15 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence code cleanup startup Grit has raised a $7 million in a seed round, the New York City-based startup said on Tuesday. Founders Fund and Abstract Ventures led the round, with participation from Quiet Capital, 8VC, A* Capital, AME Cloud Ventures, SV Angel, Operator Partners, CoFound Partners, and Uncorrelated Ventures. Grit provides an AI-powered product that automates software maintenance, traditionally a manual and frustrating task for software engineering teams, particularly for large enterprises with antiquated code bases. For example, when new versions of software come out, engineering teams can spend months updating their code to work with the new software version, which Grit uses AI to entirely automate, said the company’s CEO Morgante Pell. In one case, a software project that was supposed to take six months was shortened to one week using Grit, he said.

Persons: Morgante Pell, “, John Luttig, Anna Tong, Tomasz Janowski Organizations: New, Fund, Ventures, Quiet, AME Cloud Ventures, SV Angel, Partners, CoFound Partners, ”, Reuters, “, Thomson Locations: New York City, San Francisco

REUTERS/Heather Somerville/File PhotoAug 3 (Reuters) - Cruise, General Motors' (GM.N) robotaxi unit, said on Thursday it had signed the driverless car industry's first labor union agreements, a significant milestone as unions and robotaxi firms have historically been at odds. The company is partnering with two local San Francisco union chapters that represent electrical workers and janitors, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 6 and Service Employees International Union Local 87. Reuters could not definitively determine if these are the driverless car industry’s first union agreements. Cruise, which offers limited service in San Francisco with a fleet of Chevrolet Bolts fitted with driverless technology, has accumulated over 3 million driverless miles, the company said. Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco; Editing by Leslie AdlerOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Persons: Heather Somerville, ”, John Doherty, Cruise, Anna Tong, Leslie Adler Organizations: General Motors Corp, REUTERS, General Motors, San, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Employees International Union Local, Reuters, United Auto Workers, Detroit Three, GM, Chevrolet Bolts, California’s Public Utilities Commission, Thomson Locations: San Francisco, California, U.S, IBEW

July 24 (Reuters) - Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency project founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, launched on Monday. Blockchains can store the World IDs in a way that preserves privacy and can't be controlled or shut down by any single entity, co-founder Alex Blania told Reuters. The project says World IDs will be necessary in the age of generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, which produce remarkably humanlike language. Altman told Reuters Worldcoin also can help address how the economy will be reshaped by generative AI. Since only real people can have World IDs, it could be used to reduce fraud when deploying UBI.

Persons: Sam Altman, Alex Blania, Altman, Reuters Worldcoin, ”, UBI, Anna Tong, Juby Babu, Elizabeth Howcroft, Kenneth Li, Navaratnam, Philippa Fletcher Organizations: Humanity, Reuters, Thomson Locations: San Francisco, Berlin

"High level, we want this to become something like your personal AI friend," said developer Div Garg, whose company MultiOn is beta-testing an AI agent. The race towards increasingly autonomous AI agents has been supercharged by the March release of GPT-4 by developer OpenAI, a powerful upgrade of the model behind ChatGPT - the chatbot that became a sensation when released last November. GPT-4 facilitates the type of strategic and adaptable thinking required to navigate the unpredictable real world, said Vivian Cheng, an investor at venture capital firm CRV who has a focus on AI agents. OpenAI itself is very interested in AI agent technology, according to four people briefed on its plans. There are at least 100 serious projects working to commercialize agents, said Matt Schlicht, who writes a newsletter on AI.

Persons: Siri, Alexa, Tony Stark's, Kanjun Qiu, Reid Hoffman, Mustafa Suleyman, Qiu, OpenAI, Vivian Cheng, CRV, Aravind Srinivas, Jarvis, Yoshua Bengio, Satya Nadella, Apple's Siri, it's, Google, Edward Grefenstette, Jason Franklin, WVV Capital, Hesam Motlagh, Matt Schlicht, Anna Tong, Jeffrey Dastin, Kenneth Li Organizations: Microsoft, Google, U.S . Federal Trade Commission, Reuters, FTC, OpenAI's, Financial Times, Amazon, Alexa, Investors, WVV, Google Ventures, Entrepreneurs, Thomson Locations: Silicon, Jarvis, GPT, Cognosys, San Francisco, Palo Alto

July 14 (Reuters) - Roblox Chief Business Officer Craig Donato is leaving gaming and metaverse company Roblox (RBLX.N), the company told Reuters on Friday. Donato has been at Roblox nearly seven years and will be departing at the end of the summer, the company said. The company said it promoted Christina Wootton to Chief Partnerships Officer, who will oversee all the company's business relationships, in the wake of Donato's imminent departure. Wootton has been at the company since 2014 and has worked with large brands and corporations including Gucci, Nike, Netflix and Disney to develop a presence in the Roblox metaverse, the company said. "We firmly believe that all brands will eventually have a presence on Roblox," Wootton said in a statement.

Persons: Craig Donato, Donato, Christina Wootton, Wootton, Arvind KC, Anna Tong, Edmund Klamann Organizations: Reuters, Gucci, Nike, Netflix, Disney, People, Systems, Thomson Locations: Roblox, San Francisco

Unlike past tech booms that have touched San Francisco, the generative AI craze brings fewer jobs, because AI firms excel at staying lean and automating work. "I think we should curb our optimism that San Francisco commercial real estate will bounce back because of AI," said Silicon Valley investor Jeremiah Owyang. Eleven of the country's top 20 AI companies are in San Francisco and have raised $15.7 billion collectively between 2008 and 2023. That amount is just 2.3% of the estimated 150,000 daily workers that downtown San Francisco lost during the pandemic. Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh, Anna Driver and Matthew LewisOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Persons: Carlos Barria, San, Jeremiah Owyang, Erin Price, Wright, OpenAI, Matt Schlicht, Mike Grabowski, Grabowski, Owyang, Lee Edwards, Daron Acemoglu, Anna Tong, Sayantani Ghosh, Anna Driver, Matthew Lewis Organizations: Intelligence, REUTERS, FRANCISCO, Reuters, Francisco, San Francisco Mayor London Breed's, San, Microsoft, Octane, Google, Nordstrom, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Thomson Locations: San Francisco, California, U.S, Valley, NFX, Dubai

July 12 (Reuters) - Resemble AI, a San Francisco-based voice artificial intelligence startup, said on Wednesday it had raised $8 million in a funding round led by venture capital firm Javelin Ventures. Comcast Ventures (CMCSA.O) and existing investors Craft Ventures and Ubiquity Ventures also participated in the Series A round, it added. Resemble AI, which applies generative AI to clone voices, says that it has 1 million users, who use the company's product to clone their own voice. More than 200 business clients, ranging from music producers, game studios and voice actors use Resemble AI as well, CEO Zohaib Ahmed told Reuters. As voice cloning has been used for scams and other crimes, the company says it is focused on promoting safe and ethical use cases for voice cloning technology.

Persons: Zohaib Ahmed, Ahmed, Anna Tong, Jamie Freed Organizations: Javelin Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Craft Ventures, Ventures, Reuters, Wednesday, Thomson Locations: San Francisco

"Currently, we don't have a solution for steering or controlling a potentially superintelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue." Superintelligent AI - systems more intelligent than humans - could arrive this decade, the blog post's authors predicted. The team's goal is to create a "human-level" AI alignment researcher, and then scale it through vast amounts of compute power. OpenAI says that means they will train AI systems using human feedback, train AI systems to assistant human evaluation, and then finally train AI systems to actually do the alignment research. AI safety advocate Connor Leahy said the plan was fundamentally flawed because the initial human-level AI could run amok and wreak havoc before it could be compelled to solve AI safety problems.

Persons: OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever, Jan Leike, Connor Leahy, Anna Tong, Kenneth Li, Rosalba O'Brien Organizations: Microsoft, Reuters, Thomson Locations: San Francisco

June 8 - Legal AI company EvenUp has raised an additional $50.5 million in Series B funding from new investors including Bessemer Venture Partners and Bain Capital Ventures, the San Francisco-based company said Thursday, valuing the company at $325 million. EvenUp provides a product to personal injury law firms that automates the workflow for demand letters, using generative AI and a proprietary legal dataset. These have been boom times for the legal AI market, as legal firms have lined up to embrace generative AI. Law is an ideal use case for generative AI because what lawyers do – analyze content and then synthesize it in prose – is exactly what generative AI products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which was trained on reams of text, do best, said Bessemer partner Sameer Dholakia. He estimated there are about 300,000 personal injury attorneys and 20 million personal injury cases per year.

Persons: EvenUp, Rami Karabibar, Sameer Dholakia, Karabibar, Anna Tong, David Gregorio Our Organizations: Bessemer Venture Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, NFX, Reuters, Thomson Locations: San Francisco

With the introduction of new AI features, corporate finance teams will have improved oversight, Ramp CEO Eric Glyman told Reuters. For instance, companies will be able to better detect unusual employee spending in real time, said Ramp investor Logan Bartlett of Redpoint Ventures. The new features also include an accounting co-pilot that makes doing manual tasks much faster. Generative AI has the ability to synthesize large amounts of data and interact using humanlike language. Ramp partnered with OpenAI, the AI behind the chatbot sensation ChatGPT, to build the AI enhancements.

May 17 (Reuters) - The swift growth of artificial intelligence technology could put the future of humanity at risk, according to most Americans surveyed in a Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Wednesday. More than two-thirds of Americans are concerned about the negative effects of AI and 61% believe it could threaten civilization. ChatGPT has kicked off an AI arms race, with tech heavyweights like Microsoft (MSFT.O) and Google (GOOGL.O) vying to outdo each other's AI accomplishments. The Reuters/Ipsos poll found that the number of Americans who foresee adverse outcomes from AI is triple the number of those who don't. Those who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 expressed higher levels of concern; 70% of Trump voters compared to 60% of Joe Biden voters agreed that AI could threaten humankind.

Google already has a Bard chatbot that competes with ChatGPT, the chatbot from OpenAI that has generated huge excitement among users with its humanlike responses. The company says that traditional Google search should still be used for finding and seeking information, such as locating something to purchase. WHAT ARE THE UPDATES TO GOOGLE SEARCH? With the enhanced search termed the Search Generative Experience, Google's home page still looks and acts like its familiar search bar. CAN I TRY THE NEW GOOGLE SEARCH NOW?

May 4 (Reuters) - Two prominent former Google (GOOGL.O) researchers who authored the groundbreaking paper that paved the way for the generative AI boom, have raised $8 million for their new startup Essential AI, four sources told Reuters. Thrive Capital had led the round in Essential AI, founded by Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar. Thrive Capital, founded by Joshua Kushner, is also an investor in Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Essential AI aims to build software for enterprises to use large language models, the core software of a new artificial intelligence system that has powered generative AI applications such as ChatGPT, sources said. The raise came after Vaswani and Parmar left Adept AI, a company they also co-founded in 2021 with former Google director David Luan.

Box customers testing the product have already experienced “revolutionary” productivity gains, Box CEO Aaron Levie told Reuters. He cited a Box customer whose employees were reviewing tens and thousands of files manually. The new AI features were able to do it automatically “within a matter of seconds.”Box partnered with OpenAI, the AI startup backed by Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) behind the chatbot sensation ChatGPT, to build the AI enhancements. While Box is initially building its AI offering with OpenAI’s technology, the goal is to allow customers to select among different AI providers, he said. Box said the new AI features include the ability to summarize financial documents, surface insights from customer surveys and tailor onboarding documents to a specific customer's needs.

When Thiel spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention, he had more hope that the party would concentrate on economic issues, his business associate said. Four political sources also told Reuters that Thiel is taking a step back from U.S. politics. In 2012, Thiel backed libertarian lawmaker Ron Paul, and in 2016 he donated some $1.25 million to the campaign efforts of Trump, who is the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination. In the 2022 election cycle, however, Thiel emerged as a potential Republican kingmaker, contributing more than $35 million to 16 federal-level Republican candidates, according to OpenSecrets. The business associate said he was not aware of any special proviso for former employees.

Generative AI gobbles up reams of computing power, amplifying the urgency of Meta's capacity scramble, said five of the sources. Executives also that spring set about reorganizing Meta's AI units, naming two new heads of engineering in the process, including Janardhan, the author of the September memo. According to four of the sources, Meta did not prioritize building generative AI products until after the launch of ChatGPT in November. Zuckerberg announced a new top-level generative AI team in February that he said would "turbocharge" the company's work in the area. Carvill, the Meta spokesperson, said the company has been building generative AI products on different teams for more than a year.

Generative AI, which the tech industry has embraced, has the ability to synthesize large amounts of data and answer complex questions. Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar said because companies use its software to track and document projects, Atlassian is in a unique position to use AI to help knowledge workers dramatically increase their productivity. Starting Wednesday, customers can join a waitlist to access the new features, the company said. Atlassian said the new AI features include the ability to extract action items and decisions from a meeting transcript, and draft Tweets and software testing plans based on product documentation. Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco; Editing by Sonali PaulOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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