A Groundbreaking Week of AI Collaboration

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Sunday, Jul 2, 2023 | Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here An emerging trend is shaping the AI landscape with this week being marked by a flurry of acquisitions and partnerships. From NVIDIA to Databricks, and ThoughtSpot to Tech Mahindra, they are all actively bolstering their AI and analytics capabilities, reinforcing their position in the field. Rumour has it that NVIDIA, in February this year, acquired OmniML, a two-year-old AI startup that is developing smaller and faster machine learning models and training platforms. With this acquisition, the duo is likely to focus on developing edge-AI use cases, developing AI chips for cars, industrial robots and drones, alongside AI models that can help in powering AI chatbots on devices. The deal size is yet to be determined.  Another AI-powered analytics company ThoughtSpot acquired Mode Analytics for $200 million. The company believes that this acquisition will empower data teams to redefine business intelligence with trusted generative AI. With this acquisition, ThoughtSpot now expands its presence to Kolkata, India. Last year, the company announced a $150 million investment in India between 2022 and 2027, which included a 30% headcount growth in the market, alongside the opening of its third R&D teams in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Trivandrum.  Chinese e-commerce giant Meituan recently announced that it will be acquiring Light Years Beyond for $233.7 million in cash, besides taking on the company’s $50.66 million debt. Touted as the ‘OpenAI of China’, this new startup was started merely four months ago by Wang Huiwen, a co-founder of Meituan, and is now getting bought out.  Moving on, Thomson Reuters acquired a Y-Combinator-backed legal AI startup Casetext for $650 million. This AI startup is known for developing AI legal assistants, including CoCounsel and others. With this acquisition, the company looks to embed generative AI into its major business verticals, including legal, tax, accounting and news. Recently, the company also announced its plans to spend about $100 million a year on AI and incorporate generative AI into its products in the second half of the year, besides setting aside $10 billion for M&As – mostly AI-focused – from now until 2025.  Lastly, in one of the biggest acquisitions of the week, Databricks entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MosaicML for approximately $1.3 billion. With this, Databricks and MosaicML – known for their MPT large language models (LLMs) – will work together to make generative AI more accessible for every organisation, enabling them to build, own, and secure models with their own data. Some of its customers include Replit, A12 (Allen Institute for AI), Hippocratic AI and others.  Also Read: Top 8 Generative AI Startups in India Generative AI Partnerships Galore  This week witnessed some of the most extensive generative AI partnerships ever. Tech Mahindra announced its partnership with Microsoft to enable generative AI-powered enterprise search. Leveraging Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Azure Cognitive Search, and Azure Language Understanding, the company looks to help enterprises unleash knowledge accessibility in a unique way.  Besides Tech Mahindra, HCL Tech is another Indian IT player to have partnered with Microsoft to unleash generative AI capabilities.  Interestingly, all the other leading IT companies, including Infosys, TCS, Wipro, Cognizant and Genpact, have partnered with Google Cloud for generative AI initiatives. Accenture is perhaps the only IT player to have partnered with Google Cloud, Microsoft and AWS to offer generative AI solutions and services for its customers following a multi-cloud generative AI strategy.  While IT remains a sweet spot for generative AI adoption, other companies are also actively partnering with leading tech enablers. Some of the interesting partnerships in AI and analytics that happened this week include NVIDIA and Snowflake, Sequoia and Dust, GrandThortan and Ataccama, Rackspace Technology and Google Cloud, Cognizant and ServiceNow, and others.  Top Stories of the Week >> NVIDIA Sees GPUs Everywhere  NVIDIA has been on a funding spree. This week alone, the tech giant, along with other investors, pumped in close to $1.3 billion and $141 million, in Inflection AI and RunwayML, respectively. There is no stopping NVIDIA, for it wants a piece of every startup. Just a few weeks ago, the company invested in a video generation platform, Synthesia.  But here’s a twist — most of the funds raised by these startups would be used in buying NVIDIA GPUs. Read the complete story here.  Killing ‘Project Iris’ can be a Blessing in Disguise for Google  Google has scrapped its latest augmented reality (AR) headset. It is said that the project was shelved earlier this year following layoffs, reshuffles, and the departure of Google’s AR/VR chief Clay Bavor. But, on the bright side, the decision to scrap ‘Project Iris’ can be a blessing in disguise for Google. Here’s why?  The Truth Behind OpenAI’s Silence On GPT-4 AI researcher George Hotz recently speculated on the inner workings of GPT-4, revealing why OpenAI chose to hide crucial information. He said that the model might be a set of eight distinct models, each featuring 220 billion parameters, putting the parameter size of GPT-4 at 1.76 trillion. The notable part is that all of these models don’t work at the same time. Instead, they are deployed as a mixture of expert architecture. Read more here. AIM Videos >> The 4th edition of MachineCon was a roaring success with insightful sessions and presentations led by AI and analytics professionals, alongside former Indian cricketer Venkatesh Prasad, and founder of Thyrocare Dr A Velumani, awarding the top leaders in AI.  Here’s an after-movie (in case you’ve missed it): AIM Shots >> Microsoft recently announced the launch of a new AI Skills Initiative to help people and communities around the world harness the power of AI. Learn more here.  Google launched a competition called Machine Unlearning Challenge to make their algorithms safer and more responsible with user data. Check out more details about the challenge here.  Vedanta, led by billionaire Anil Agarwal, which is struggling to make an impact in the semiconductor landscape, announced the launch of a $4 billion display factory in western India. Read more here.  Salesforce has recently introduced an XGen-7B, a series of 7B large language models (LLMs) trained on 8K input sequence length.  Google Sheets is now equipped with generative AI features designed to assist with tasks that involve complex tracking and organisation, potentially suggesting factors not initially considered. Read more here.  Oracle recently introduced generative AI-powered capabilities to its Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management platform. Check it out here.  Andrew Ng’s DeepLearning.AI, in partnership with AWS, launched a new course on Coursera called ‘Generative AI with Large Language Models’ to address the growing demand for expertise in this field. Learn more about the course here. 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