This Week in AI: April 7-13

Every week, we bring together a selection of the week's most relevant headlines on AI. Each weekly selection covers startups, market trends, regulation, debates, technology, and other trending topics in the industry. Our selection for this week was dominated by news of data access and security startups securing funding rounds: The data access platform PVML launched with news that it completed a successful seed funding round during the second half of 2023; Onum raised $28 million on a Series A round to ensure that enterprises are not saddled with the costs of storing and analyzing non-essential data; and data security leader Cyera announced the completion of its $300 million Series C funding round. This trend may be somewhat expected, as regulators and lawmakers are slowly setting the industry standards for data privacy, security, and governance.

This week we also saw more advances in the hardware race, with edge computing and embedded systems as the new frontier. AMD announced the next generation of the Versal Series, while Intel and its FPGA company Altera offered a sneak peek at their most recent product lineup geared toward edge computing: the Intel Core Ultra, Core, and Atom processors, the discrete Arc GPU, and Altera's Agilex 5 devices. Intel also boldly released Gaudi 3 as a direct H100 competitor, although, as with all such announcements, the new NVIDIA Blackwell architecture looms on the horizon. Four major model announcements also happened this week: Cohere launched the RAG application enhancer Rerank 3; Stability AI released the multilingual Stable LM 2 12B; Meta announced that the next generation of Llama models will be available very soon; and the team at xAI gave Grok vision with the Grok-1.5V preview. Finally, a variety of applications emerged, as Spotify announced the AI Playlist chat interface beta for Premium users in Australia and the UK, DeepCure raised $24 million to accelerate its small-molecule drug candidates pipeline, and Scavenger AI secured €1.1 million to develop its AI-powered business consultant.

Some other noteworthy stories this week include:

Forbes has released its sixth annual AI 50 list. Carefully curated from a pool of around 1,900 submissions, the list recognizes the top contenders in what is becoming a very competitive industry. Featuring industry leaders like OpenAI, newcomers like LangChain, and an eclectic variety of companies ranging from chipmakers to robotics, and video generation to medical and legal AI, Forbes' AI 50 has something for everyone.

Symbolica AI is developing a toolkit to provide an alternative to conventional AI models: Symbolica AI came out of stealth with a $33 million investment led by Khosla Ventures to harness the power of traditional symbolic AI to help customers build accurate, efficient, and cost-effective models for tasks such as code generation and theorem proving.

AI data labeling company Sapien announces a $5 million funding round: Sapien, a company specializing in the gamification of the data annotation experience for human annotators, recently closed a successful $5 million seed funding round. The company will invest the funding into accelerating its mission and continue developing its gamified labeling infrastructure.

Gilion announced it secured €10 million in equity funds: Gilion secured €10 million in equity after a substantial growth increase during 2023. Gilion's proprietary engine delivers access and insights into tech companies' historical and future performance as a basis for the company to provide non-dilutive loans to growth-stage companies.

Multiverse acquired the AI-powered talent intelligence platform Searchlight: Multiverse, an ed-tech platform helping organizations close their skills gaps by creating an apprenticeship suited to the current job market, acquired Searchlight. Founded by Anna and Kerry Wang, Searchlight built custom data pipelines and ethical AI models to match talent to the right positions.

Leash Biosciences announced a successful funding round and launched an ML competition: Leash Biosciences announced the completion of an oversubscribed $9.3 million seed funding round that will enable scaling its data collection and computing capabilities. In parallel, it announced the inaugural BELKA competition, in which participants will be tasked with analyzing a dataset resulting from testing 133 small molecule candidates against three different protein targets.

Apple is the latest tech giant to strike a deal with Shutterstock: Apple has reportedly negotiated a licensing deal with Shutterstock to access millions of images for AI model training. The agreement follows Apple's previous efforts to negotiate with news organizations, including Condé Nast and NBC News.

Microsoft expands its presence in the UK with a new AI Hub in London: Microsoft AI EVP and CEO Mustafa Suleyman recently announced the creation of the Microsoft AI London hub, which will perform cutting-edge work on language models and their infrastructure in collaboration with Microsoft's other AI teams and partners, including OpenAI.