Toronto-based AI startup Cohere has raised $500 million in a Series D funding round led by PSP Investments, valuing the company at $5.5 billion and highlighting its rapid growth in providing customized large language models for enterprise customers.
DataChain, an open-source Python library designed to address the complex data requirements of multimodal generative AI, offers scalable unstructured data processing and AI-driven curation capabilities, including cloud integration, efficient performance, and embedded databases.
(Really) small language models are all the rage; Legalfly and Leya raised funds for their legal tech solutions; game developers Grand Games and Echo Chunk closed pre-seed rounds; Meta faces more regulatory roadblocks; The Microsoft-Inflection deal is under formal investigation; and more.
Meta faces significant regulatory challenges in its AI initiatives, suspending its AI assistant in Brazil due to data protection concerns and deciding not to release its advanced multimodal Llama model in the EU because of an unpredictable regulatory environment.
Groq has launched specialized Llama-3 Tool Use models designed for superior function calling and tool use tasks, trained entirely on synthetic data. The models outperform leading offerings such as Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o in function calling benchmarks.
Samsung Electronics has acquired Oxford Semantic Technologies, a UK-based startup specializing in knowledge graph technology, to enhance its AI capabilities and deliver more personalized experiences across its product range while maintaining data security.
OpenAI has launched GPT-4o mini, a highly cost-efficient and capable small language model that outperforms comparably-sized models on various benchmarks, offers significantly reduced pricing, and aims to democratize AI by making advanced intelligence more accessible.
Mistral AI and NVIDIA released Mistral NeMo 12B, a state-of-the-art 12B-parameter language model for enterprise applications, featuring a 128K context length, FP8 data format, and optimized performance across various tasks, packaged as an NVIDIA NIM inference microservice for easy deployment.
Briefly Bio has developed a platform that streamlines scientific protocol creation and sharing, aiming to revolutionize research collaboration and lab automation by addressing the time-consuming challenge of experimental troubleshooting.
Swedish legal tech startup Leya has secured $25 million in Series A funding to develop its AI platform, which aims to dramatically boost lawyer productivity by automating routine tasks and integrating existing legal resources.
Microsoft has made its AI-powered Designer app generally available, offering users across various platforms the ability to create and edit designs instantly using AI, with new features including integration with Microsoft 365 apps, custom content creation, and image editing capabilities.
Cohere and Fujitsu have formed a strategic partnership to develop and deploy advanced, secure Japanese language AI models for enterprise use, with plans to launch them in September 2024, and to combine Cohere's LLM expertise with Fujitsu's technologies to accelerate enterprise AI adoption.