Big Bets on Generative AI
Startups operating in the area of generative AI have never had it so good as more and more dollars are chasing this dream
Generative AI seems to be the flavor of the season, ever since OpenAI-led ChatGPT4 showed us some magic when it launched in November. Whether one considers it a breakthrough or just a passing fancy, the fact remains that the big dollars appear to be chasing anything that has the two letters – AI – attached to the first slide of their elevator pitch.
Not true actually! Companies dabbling around with this technology seem to have suddenly caught the fancy of investors who seem to have enough and more dollars to spare for generative AI. The big bucks (around $1.3 billion) have gone to Inflection AI, a startup that aims to create a personal AI for everyone.
Inflection AI: It’s time for some personalized AI
Because Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, and Reid Hoffman alongside Microsoft, and Nvidia think that human intelligence isn’t gonna cut it anymore. Just kidding! Company CEO Mustafa Suleyman, the mind behind Google’s DeepMind AI Lab, plans to build and design an AI-powered personal assistant called Pi.
Based on the latest investment tranche, Inflection is now valued at $4 billion. The Palo Alto-based start-up, which has a small 35-member team, launched Pi in May to provide information based on a person’s interests and needs. It is currently available via a messaging app as well as on a web interface and functions as an AI-led “assistant”.
Runway AI: Creating generative AI tools for content creators
Suffice to say that Inflection could potentially create an inflection point for assistants. However, on another page, Runway, a startup creating generative AI tools for multimedia content creators, raised $141 million in a Series C funding from Google, Salesforce and Nvidia, once again. The funds would be used to scale in-house research and expand headcount.
Founded in 2018, the team started building a suite of AI-powered tools for moviemakers, photographers and cinematographers. Currently, it markets Gen-2, an AI model that creates videos from text prompts or via an existing image. The company set up Runway Studios that partners for video production for enterprise clients.
Speakeasy: Simplifying creation and use of APIs
A third venture relates to a startup that seeks to use generative AI to automate API creation and distribution. Speakeasy CEO Sagar Batchu says his company is building a set of tools to make this process easier. Developers are keen to create APIs to help other companies connect to their services more easily, says Batchu.
Since creating and documenting an API is time consuming, the startup hopes to make it easier with lots of automation thrown into the activities. The company has received $7.6 million seed investment which would be used to build tools that make it easier to create and distribute APIs. The eventual goal is to create a platform though currently they’re starting with two tools. One that helps create APIs and another helps users implement them more easily.
Scriptic: Generative AI in story-telling and gaming
Another interesting venture in the AI space relates to Scriptic, an immersive storytelling platform that is looking to extend its phone-first interactive games library. It secured $5.7 million in funding to bring in external writers who will use AI-enabled creator tools to share and monetize their own phone-first stories on the platform.
The London-based studio, founded in 2018 by Nihal Tharoor and Benedict Tatham, were early adopters of generative AI tools in story production with ChatGPT and DALL-E in 2021. The company has secured $8.2 million thus far and indicates a growing trend of generative AI use in the mobile gaming space. The company created Crime Stories that was released on Netflix.
And finally, there’s news about China’s AI startup Guangnian Zhi Wai (Light Years Beyond) being acquired by shopping platform Meituan for $233.7 million in an all-cash deal. The irony is that the company still has no product on the shelf as yet though investors were confident of founder Wang Huiwen (also a founder with Meituan) and his ingenuity. For now, it looks as if the digital retailer has paid the money to acquire the latter’s AI knowledge base.
