Wall Street's New Writing Partner: JPMorgan's LLM Suite
Wall Street's New Writing Partner: JPMorgan's LLM Suite
FoF Specials – Generative AI News Nexus | Edition #7 (July 2024)
Artificial Intelligence has exploded onto the global stage, showcasing the capability of revolutionising industries. July’s breakthroughs have solidified AI's status as a transformative force, demonstrating its uncanny ability to master everything from high fashion to complex financial models. Get ready to be amazed as we unveil AI’s versatility in redefining every facet of our lives! 🤖
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Today’s ‘ÀI’ la carte:
Investing in the Future: Generative AI Attracts Mega-Funding
Algorithm A-List: 10 Must-Know AI Headlines This Month!
Code-undrum decoded, sorted by segment!
AI Alchemy: AI Resources for the Curious Minds
Investing in the Future: Generative AI Attracts Mega-Funding
A wave of massive investments in artificial intelligence companies is making headlines, with some deals reaching nearly $700M! Bigtechs like Alibaba and Cisco are jumping in, showing AI’s influence is as pervasive as it is profound. This technology can do everything from supercharging customer service to helping lawyers work faster.
Here’s the lowdown:
Major Players are Investing: Tech giants like Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Cisco, AMD, and Fujitsu are leading the charge, demonstrating the broad appeal and potential applications of generative AI.
Diverse Applications: The technology is being applied to a wide range of industries, from enhancing customer service experiences (IntelePeer) to revolutionising legal practices (Harvey) and transforming information search and retrieval (Hebbia).
High Valuations: Startups in this space are achieving significant valuations, with some, like Harvey, reaching the $1.5B mark, indicating a high level of investor confidence and anticipation of future growth.
New Funding Benchmarks: Hebbia's funding round highlights a new trend in the AI startup landscape, where 50x annual recurring revenue is becoming the norm, particularly for those demonstrating early profitability.
The recent surge in mega-funding rounds in the generative AI sector is a clear indicator that this technology is rapidly becoming a reality, with the potential to transform industries, create new business models, and deliver substantial value to both businesses and investors. The future of generative AI is bright, and those who embrace this technology are poised to reap significant rewards.
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Edition #7 is here with some GenAI goodness, bringing AI insights directly to you!
🔝 Top 10 AI Updates from July 2024 🔝
AI gets smarter and friendlier:
↳ OpenAI unveiled SearchGPT, an AI-powered search engine with real-time access to information across the internet. It aims to revolutionise online information retrieval by offering fast, accurate, and conversational search results.
↳ Mistral unveiled its latest flagship model, Large 2, which boasts a significant enhancement in response accuracy. This new model is designed to be more discerning, ensuring that it acknowledges when it does not know an answer instead of fabricating a plausible-sounding response.
AI takes the pen:
↳ Privacy app maker Proton launched a new AI-enabled writing assistant that can help users compose emails with simple prompts, redraft them, and even proofread them before they’re sent.
↳ JPMorgan Chase introduced LLM Suite, an AI-based research analyst, to its asset and wealth management division to assist them with writing, idea generation, and document summarisation.
Finance Gets an AI Upgrade:
↳ Amazon Web Services launched AWS App Studio, a generative AI-powered service. This tool allows financial institutions, fintech firms, and other organisations to build applications in minutes that would typically take professional developers days to create from scratch.
↳ Robinhood acquired the AI-powered investment research platform Pluto Capital. The start-up’s purchase is expected to enable Robinhood to provide enhanced data analysis, personalised investment strategies and real-time insights and portfolio optimisation capabilities to traders on its own platform.
Meta in the spotlight:
↳ Meta introduced Llama 3.1405B, a model containing 405 billion parameters. It can perform a range of different tasks, from coding and answering basic math questions to summarising documents in eight languages
↳ Brazil’s Data Protection Authority (ANPD) banned Meta from training its artificial intelligence models on Brazilian personal data, citing the “risks of serious damage and difficulty to users.”
AI Expands Its Skill Set:
↳ Poe, Quora’s subscription-based, cross-platform aggregator for AI-powered chatbots, launched a feature called Previews that lets people create interactive apps directly in chats with chatbots.
↳ BNP Paribas signed a multi-year deal to implement Mistral AI's commercial models across all its business lines. The bank is developing numerous use cases for these models in areas such as customer support, sales, IT, and more.
Now, let's decode the ‘code’-undrum –
OpenAI is shaking things up… again! From boardroom shuffles to new models and partnerships, this AI powerhouse is forging ahead full steam.
Microsoft gave up its observer seat on the OpenAI board amid regulatory scrutiny of generative artificial intelligence in Europe and the US. Microsoft took a nonvoting board seat at OpenAI back in November in a bid to quell some of the questions about Microsoft’s interest in the startup.
OpenAI announced plans to launch GPT-4o mini, a cost-efficient small AI model. With this, the startup aims to make its technology more affordable and less energy-intensive, allowing it to target a broader pool of customers.
OpenAI announced its plan to ship its long-awaited Voice Mode to ChatGPT. The feature will only be available for a small group of users to gather feedback and expand its capabilities.
Global Relay, a leading provider of communications compliance solutions for regulated industries, announces its integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This collaboration will enable customers to use OpenAI’s Enterprise Compliance API to meet industry standards for business communications recordkeeping, data archiving, and surveillance.
The Startup Showcase realm was all about new features, big investments, and a reality check on the ethical front >>>
Anthropic in Action:
Anthropic released several new features to enable developers to use Claude 3.5 Sonnet to generate, test and evaluate prompts, using prompt engineering techniques to create better inputs and improve Claude’s answers for specialized tasks.
Anthropic also released its Claude app for Android, which provides users with free access to Anthropic’s best AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, alongside upgraded plans through its Pro and Team subscriptions.
Silicon Valley VC firm Menlo teamed up with Anthropic to set up a $100M initiative dubbed “the Anthology Fund” to invest in pre-seed, seed and Series A artificial intelligence companies.
Other notable acts -
Vimeo updated its terms of service and community guidelines, requiring creators to disclose when content is created with AI. Creators must label AI-generated or manipulated content to prevent viewers from mistaking it for real people, places, or events.
Days after its launch, Figma announced that its new AI-powered Make Designs feature would be temporarily deactivated. This was due to customer feedback that the new feature generated designs that resembled Apple’s Weather app.
BigTechs are stepping up their AI game with smarter shopping assistants, safer AI practices, and even more personalised experiences:
Amazon’s AI-powered shopping assistant, Rufus, went live for all US customers in the Amazon mobile app. The assistant is designed to help customers find products, perform product comparisons, and get recommendations on what to buy.
Apple joined 15 other technology companies—including Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI—in signing the White House’s voluntary commitment to developing safe, secure, and trustworthy AI.
Microsoft announced that it is testing a new AI-powered search experience on Bing. The company revealed an early version of this generative search feature, currently being deployed to a small percentage of user queries.
Meta AI, Meta’s AI-powered assistant across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, launched a new generative AI model called Imagine Yourself to generate selfies based on a photo of a person.
AI X Finance is taking the world by storm, even scoring a spot at the Olympics! From AI-powered investment strategies to cutting-edge fraud prevention, these advancements are setting a new era of precision, efficiency, and accessibility.
Trading and investing platform eToro launched an AI-generated advertising campaign for the Paris Olympics. The campaign will be aired during all 16 days of live coverage of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games on Eurosport and will be streamed on Discovery+ and Max in 45 markets and 19 languages.
Lithuania-based identity verification and fraud prevention software provider iDenfy launched an AI-powered utility bill verification solution to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of the Proof of Address (PoA) process and provide businesses with AML and KYC compliance solutions.
Japan's SoftBank acquired British AI chip designer Graphcore. While Graphcore will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of SoftBank, it will continue to operate under its existing name. Reports estimate the deal's value at between $500M and $600M.
Mizuho Financial Group partnered with IBM to test a new approach to IT outage recovery using generative AI. The collaboration aims to significantly reduce recovery time during incidents in the financial sector.
AI might be the future, but regulators are playing catch-up! From mergers under scrutiny to data demands, AI Regulations are working to ensure AI plays by the rules:
Investigations Heat Up!
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched a “phase 1” merger inquiry into Microsoft after the tech giant hired the core team behind Inflection AI, a US-based OpenAI rival in which Microsoft had previously invested.
The Federal Trade Commission ordered eight companies - Mastercard, Revionics, Bloomreach, JPMorgan Chase, Task Software, PROS, Accenture and McKinsey that offer AI-powered “surveillance service pricing”- to turn over information about the potential impact these products have on privacy, competition and consumer protection.
Other exc’AI’ting updates:
The Monetary Authority of Singapore is to commit $100M in grant funding to support the development of AI and quantum computing technologies in the financial sector.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a non-regulatory federal agency within the US Department of Commerce, released a new open-source software tool for testing the resilience of machine learning (ML) models to various types of attacks.
The world of tech talk and gadgets galore might look like a binary maze, but fear not! We're here to guarantee the techno-lingo won't scramble your neural network. 💭
Come aboard each edition as we decode some AI terms:
And that's a wrap 👋
We hope this AI expedition has sparked your circuits, filled you with wonder, and ignited a hunger for more! Keep your data lines active with our Generative AI News Nexus, because we're committed to serving up a monthly feast of AI marvels!
🔗 As thanks for cruising with us through the AI journey together, grab these awesome resources to supercharge your AI engine and keep the momentum going:
Insights into AI Applications in Financial Services and Housing - US Chamber of Commerce
Enhancing the Impact of LLMs and GenAI Through Web 3.0-pivoted Data Provenance - PWC
Gen AI and Beyond: Where Else to Focus Now - McKinsey
The GenAI Era Unfolds - BCG
Turbocharging Software with Gen AI - Capgemini
AI-powered Technology & the Forces Shaping Professional Work - Thomson Reuters
AI in Retail: Outlook and Trends - Infosys
If you're hungry for more fintech insights, check out some of our other work at WhiteSight.
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