The ChatGPT Challengers

Sundays, The Sequence Scope brings a summary of the most important research papers, technology releases and VC funding deals in the artificial intelligence space.

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📝 Editorial 

Last week, in this editorial, we presented the thesis that, with the release of ChatGPT and the upcoming GPT-4, OpenAI has hit “escape velocity” relative to the rest of the AI market. We try our best to keep these editorials short and not annoying, so I didn’t have enough space to present the other side of the argument related to the most imminent competition to OpenAI and ChatGPT and GPT-4.  While ChatGPT has become the most popular release in the history of AI and GPT-4 is already positioned to get massive distribution via Microsoft products, there are some interesting alternatives to keep an eye on. Most of these models are likely to be released in the next few months so we still don’t have a lot of empirical evidence of their capabilities and limitations, but they look promising on the surface.

1)      Claude: Anthropic has become one of the hottest AI startups at the moment with the promise of Claude, a language agent that follows similar design practices as ChatGPT and GPT-4. Claude is still in very limited beta but Anthropic has managed to attract over $1 billion in venture funding.

2)      LaMDA: Google’s anticipated ChatGPT alternative should become available at some point this year. LaMDA incorporates interesting ideas such as chain of thought reasoning that could enable novel capabilities relative to ChatGPT or GPT-4.

3)      Sparrow: DeepMind also seems to be working on a ChatGPT alternative called Sparrow which should be released on private beta this year. Given DeepMind’s expertise in reinforcement learning can be a strong differentiator as these techniques have proven paramount in the creation of InstructGPT and ChatGPT.

4)      Stability AI: The creators of Stable Diffusion have publicly said they are working on an open-source version of ChatGPT.

There are interesting expectations around what AI powerhouses like Meta and startups such as Chatsonic will do in the space. For now, it seems that Anthropic and Google-DeepMind are closer to provide a viable alternative to ChatGPT. It is also interesting to think about the impact that Stability AI could have in the market with an open-source release similar to Stable Diffusion. Picking winners this early in the generative AI space might be a fool’s errand. The frantic pace of innovation might still allow new startups to emerge and compete at scale with the big AI labs. Not easy, but certainly possible with the amount of capital chasing this market.

🔎 ML Research

Instruction Tuning and LLMs

Google Research published a paper introducing FLAN, a collection of tasks, methods and templates for instruction tuning in large language models —> Read more.

CausalAI

Salesforce Research published a paper detailing CausalAI, a library for determining causal relationships in time series and tabular data —> Read more.

ML Systems and Infrastructure

Google Research published a comprehensive summary of their research in large scale ML infrastructure, , hardware, programming and sustainability —> Read more.

🤖 Cool AI Tech Releases

ChatGPT Plus

OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a commercial version of the popular chatbot that enables improved performance, reliability and access to new features —> Read more.

AI Generated Text Classifier      

OpenAI launched a classifier that can differentiate between human and AI generated text —> Read more.

 Computer Vision at Hugging Face

The Hugging Face team discusses the current libraries and capabilities in their platform for computer vision models —> Read more.

Vizier

Google Research open sourced Vizier, a framework for black box, large scale hyperparemter optimization —> Read more.

Ray 2.2

Ray, the popular ML scalability platform, unveiled its 2.2 release with new features around observability, high performance and reproducibility —> Read more.

🛠 Real World ML 

Real Time Predictions at Lyft

Lyft discusses the architecture to serve models for real time predictions —> Read more.  

💸 Money in AI

• OpenAI competitor Anthropic raised an astronomical $300 million round for their upcoming chatbot, Claude.

• Data Discovery solution Select Star raised $15 million series A.

• Property valuation startup ValueBase raised $1.6 million seed round from a group of investors that includes OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman à Read more.

• AI powered email marketing platform Lavender raised $12.2 million series A.

• BloomX announced an $8 million seed round for it AI-drive mechanical pollination technology.

• Phantom AI raised $36 million for its autonomous driving platform.

• AI retail platform Standard AI acquired self-check out platform Skip.

• BridgeWise raised $13 million seed round for its generative AI tools.