This Week in AI: April 28–May 4

On last week's headline selection, enterprise-grade offerings were overshadowed by news of tiny models developed by tech giants to run on resource-constrained devices, such as mobile devices, or automotive and defense applications. We are pleased to announce that the trend of enterprise offerings coming into the market kept going strong, dominating this week's selection of headlines, with no news of recently released language models, large or small, standing in the way. To wit, consider Lamini announced it raised $25 million to accelerate its Enterprise AI platform, the UK Government launched a grant program for small and medium-sized enterprises looking to upskill their workforces on AI, and even brand protection services provider Ceartas announced it would be using some of its $4.5M seed round funding to expand its services to the enterprise sector.

Additionally, Anthropic has finally launched a Team plan and an iOS app for Claude, the startup Symbe closed a £1.2 million pre-seed funding round to automate the creation of business cases and enable sales teams to drive more winning sales deals, project management, and enterprise software heavyweight Atlassian launched Rovo, an AI-powered contextual search platform which empowers users to take action on data unearthed from a variety of sources by deploying AI-powered agents with specific skills to suit particular tasks. Finally, MongoDB announced its AI Applications Program (MAAP), an end-to-end solution providing hands-on guidance and all the resources necessary for enterprises to build and deploy AI-powered applications quickly.

On a related note to productivity-boosting AI-powered solutions, Github is building on its previous successes with the launch of its Copilot Workspace technical preview. The Copilot Workspace is a Copilot-native environment that sparks collaborative workflows with Copilot-powered agents throughout the full development process while enabling developers to retain control over every step. Moreover, NVIDIA is following up on ChatRTX, its solution bringing chatbot capabilities to RTX-powered Windows PCs and workstations, with an update that introduces new models, including Google's Gemma, in addition to CLIP-based interactions with image data, and Whisper-based voice interactions.

A significant impact of the increase in demand for enterprise-grade AI-powered applications is the corresponding demand for computing resources, whether to train, fine-tune, and host models, or deploy the applications themselves. Among all the excitement about tools, platforms, and solutions for the enterprise setting, CoreWeave announced that it secured an impressive $1.1 billion Series C funding. Interestingly, CoreWeave attributes its success to being built from the ground up with AI applications in mind, unlike legacy cloud providers, who are just now working to optimize their offerings. On the one hand, newer infrastructure providers like CoreWeave are undoubtedly driving the recent growth boost in the cloud infrastructure market. On the other, numbers show that the Big 3 still reign supreme: Amazon currently holds a 31% market share, followed by Azure, with 25%, and Google, with 11%.

The remainder of our selection covers an interesting topic diversity, including OpenAI's most recent licensing deal, updates from Google and Yelp, healthcare applications, the regeneration of Ukraine's farmland, and even cricket.

• Google upgraded Gemini to expand its global accessibility: Google recently upgraded the Gemini chatbot service. The mobile app and Google Assistant opt-in are available in over 100 countries and territories in nine major languages. Gemini can also be prompted from the Chrome address bar, and Extensions works for all the languages supported by the models.
• OpenAI has negotiated a licensing agreement with the Financial Times: The Financial Times has struck a deal with OpenAI. The latter will pay an undisclosed licensing fee to access the FT's archive for training and have ChatGPT provide summaries and links to FT articles. The deal has come through as OpenAI faces increasing legal issues due to data-scraping accusations.
• The US Department of Commerce is taking action to enforce President Biden’s Executive Order on AI: The US Department of Commerce announced several actions to ensure the AI Executive Order is implemented, including four NIST draft publications on identifying, and mitigating risks associated with generative AI, a program for AI evaluation, and a request for comment on AI's impact on patentability.
• Danti secured $5 million to accelerate its AI-powered Earth data analyst: Danti recently raised $5M in seed funding to accelerate the development of its AI-powered Earth Data Analyst. The company currently focuses on its government customers, such as the US Space Force, but is looking to expand into industries such as insurance and utilities.
• Yelp's Spring Product Release improves the service's experience with new AI-powered features: Yelp's Spring Product Release improves the services offered to consumer and business customers. The Yelp Assistant brings conversational AI to the platform, and the new Yelp Fusion AI API enables partners to integrate conversational AI experiences leveraging Yelp's data into their platforms.
• AISAP raised $13M to accelerate its AI-powered ultrasound solution: AISAP raised $13M in seed funding from Harel Insurance Investments and Shoni Health to accelerate the development of its POCAD software platform. The software assigns an urgency score based on the conditions' severity and scan quality scores to provide enough context for non-specialist operators.
• NVIDIA's healthcare-focused AI microservices are now integrated with AWS: NVIDIA recently announced the expanded integration of its healthcare and life sciences focuses NIM microservices. Simplified access to NIM will enable healthcare and life sciences companies already using AWS to deploy generative AI solutions faster, and developers to multimodal AI-based workflows.
• The England Women's Cricket team is using AI to gain competitive advantage: Head coach for the England Women's Cricket team Jon Lewis recently revealed his approach to using AI as a selection tool to provide feedback on tough decisions about squad make-up, team balance, and in-game match-ups.
• HeavyFinance spearheads the regeneration of 300,000 farmland hectares in Ukraine: Lithuanian startup HeavyFinance announced this week that it signed 300,000 hectares of Ukrainian farmland to its carbon farming program in collaboration with Ukraine's Agsolco. The partnership plans to enroll 500,000 ha of farmland by the end of 2024 and to issue the first credits in Q3, 2025.