Amazon pledges $230 million to boost generative AI startups

Cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services has announced a $230 million commitment aimed at accelerating the development of generative artificial intelligence applications by startups worldwide.

The initiative will provide early stage companies with AWS cloud computing credits, mentorship, and education to further their utilisation of AI and machine learning technologies, the company said. Participating startups will have access to AWS computing, storage, database, and custom AI chip offerings through the provided credits.

Elon Musk withdraws lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman


Elon Musk withdrew his lawsuit against OpenAI, the maker of the online chatbot ChatGPT. The suit, filed in February, had accused the artificial intelligence startup and two of its founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, of breaching OpenAI’s founding contract by
prioritizing commercial interests over the public good.

A multibillion-dollar partnership that OpenAI signed with Microsoft, Musk’s suit claimed, represented an abandonment of the company’s pledge to carefully develop AI and make the technology publicly available. Musk had argued that the founding contract said that the organisation should instead be focused on building artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a machine that can do anything the brain can do, for the benefit of humanity.

Meta seeks to train AI model on European data

Meta wants to use data from users in privacy-conscious Europe to train its artificial intelligence models, the social media giant said, as it faces concerns about data protection.

The company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said that in order to better reflect the “languages, geography and cultural references” of its users in Europe, it needs to use public data from those users to teach its Llama AI large language model. Meta’s AI training efforts are hampered by stringent European Union data privacy laws, which give people control over how their personal information is used.

“If we don’t train our models on the public content that Europeans share on our services and others, such as public posts or comments, then models and the AI features they power won’t accurately understand important regional languages, cultures or trending
topics on social media,” Stefano Fratta, global engagement director of Meta’s privacy policy, said in a blog post.

OpenAI hires new CFO, chief product officer

OpenAI has hired Sarah Friar, the former chief executive of neighbourhood social networking service Nextdoor Holdings, to serve as its chief financial officer, a role that has gone unfilled at the fast-growing artificial intelligence startup for two years.

The ChatGPT maker has also named Kevin Weil as its new chief product officer. Weil previously steered product development at Instagram and Twitter as an executive at those companies.

The expanded C-Suite comes at an important moment for OpenAI. The company is working to boost revenue from its artificial intelligence products by selling services to enterprise customers while also adding features like enhanced voice capabilities to its consumer chatbot app.

French AI startup Mistral is valued at $6.2 billion

Mistral, a French artificial intelligence startup, said that it had raised 600 million euros, or about $640 million, from investors. Mistral is now valued at 5.8 billion euros, according to a person familiar with the investment, an eye-popping sum for a company founded just one year ago by alumni from Meta and Google.

The company’s valuation has roughly tripled since December, when it raised 385 million euros. Investors in the latest round included venture capital firms General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners, as well as Nvidia, Samsung, Salesforce, Cisco, IBM and BNP Paribas. Mistral has positioned itself as a European alternative to the larger American tech giants and boasts that its products like the chatbot, Le Chat, are strong in a wider range of languages, including English.

Compiled by Divya Verma