. . AI: Four Amazing AI Startups (1.9.24)

Author

Marshall Kirkpatrick
January 10, 2024

Friends, today's top stories are four really unusual startups. They are working on building distributed (as opposed to centralized) intelligence, with a compelling user experience!

It's remarkable that they all made the news on the same day. If these or something like these all work, the future could look like you having access to a local, handheld, personalized, co-evolving consortium of AI models and agents selected from a global marketplace of independent developers, all working together to do things for you! Wow.

When WSJ & HBR writer Alexandra Samuel wrote today about how to strategize for a work world transformed by 100X AI, harkening to the changes COVID brought and more, some of these technologies feel like it could be part of that story.

Here they are. If you want to see me walk through all them all in 3 minutes, here’s a video on LinkedIn.

-Marshall Kirkpatrick, Editor

First impacted: AI developers, scientific researchers
Time to impact: Medium

Startup Nous Research, known for its popular, powerful, small, models called Hermes, trained largely on 1M synthetic data points from GPT-4, has raised $5.2 million to build an on-device AI agent creation workstation called Forge.The new company says Forge is a user-friendly, censorship and surveillance free, on-device workstation that allows users to design, launch, and supervise AI agents, fostering innovation and scientific advancement by enabling the sharing of these agents. The 3 minute YouTube teaser video is quite good. [Nousresearch] Explore more of our coverage of: AI Funding, Nous Research, Hermes. Share this story by email

First impacted: Mobile device users, Desktop device users
Time to impact: Medium

Khosla Ventures backed Rabbit Inc. has launched Rabbit OS, an AI-centric operating system that interacts with users through natural language. The cloud-based system uses a "Large Action Model" to interpret and respond to human intentions, observe user interactions, and deliver real-time responses. There's a 25 minute keynote video of the $199 handheld device, which got mixed reviews. [rabbit — Home] Explore more of our coverage of: AI Operating System, Khosla Ventures, Natural Language Processing. Share this story by email

First impacted: AI product developers, Quora platform users
Time to impact: Medium

Quora says it has raised $75M from Andreessen Horowitz to advance the growth of its AI chat platform, Poe, with the majority of the funds being allocated to a creator monetization program. Poe is a cool way to test all kinds of AI models (including on their mobile app), and the bot creation platform seems competitive with OpenAI's CustomGPTs. [New Funding from Andreessen Horowitz] Explore more of our coverage of: Poe, Andreessen Horowitz Investment, Creator Monetization. Share this story by email

Mistral Publishes Paper on Mixture of Experts Model

First impacted: Artificial Intelligence Researchers, Software Developers
Time to impact: Medium

"Mixtral 8x7B", Mistral's Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) system took the world by storm at the end of last year, initially presented as nothing but a Bittorrent link to download a file with no explanation but world-class LLM performance. Now the team has published a paper explaining their Mixture of Experts model on Arxiv. The model, which allows tokens to access 47B parameters using only 13B active parameters during the inference process, matches or surpasses the performance of models such as Llama 2 70B and GPT-3.5 across all evaluated benchmarks. [Mixtral of Experts] Explore more of our coverage of: Mixture of Experts Model, Mistral . Share this story by email

Aren’t those remarkable stories? More coming tomorrow!