Author: The Horizon

SaaS entrepreneur Raisinghani’s new AI venture nabs $5.5M to boost sales efficiency

SiftHub, an AI startup led by Manisha Raisinghani, the former CTO and co-founder of LogiNext, has secured $5.5 million in seed funding to develop its AI assistant tailored for sales and presales teams. The AI assistant aims to streamline tasks like data entry, RFP requests, customer research, and presentation creation, allowing sales professionals to focus […]

‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets

The Israeli military’s recent bombing campaign in Gaza utilized an undisclosed AI-powered database called Lavender, which identified 37,000 potential targets tied to Hamas, claim intelligence sources. This revelation sheds light on the military’s use of machine-learning systems to detect targets during the six-month conflict, pushing the boundaries of advanced warfare and sparking legal and ethical […]

Hailo lands $120 million to keep battling Nvidia as most AI chip startups struggle

In a shifting landscape where AI chip startups are facing challenges in securing funding, Hailo, a standout player in the ultra-competitive arena, is making waves. Founded in 2017 by Orr Danon and Avi Baum, Hailo specializes in designing chips that efficiently handle AI workloads on edge devices with lower power consumption and memory usage. This […]

NYC’s AI gun detectors hardly work

New York City Mayor Eric Adams recently announced a plan to deploy AI gun detectors at subway stations, a move met with initial enthusiasm but later skepticism from critics, notably the Legal Aid Society. The technology by Evolv Technologies, previously tested at a hospital in the Bronx, produced a staggering number of false positives during […]

Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj Among 200 Artists Fighting ‘Catastrophic’ Use of AI in Music

The Artist Rights Alliance, comprising hundreds of prominent musicians and songwriters like Billie Eilish, Katy Perry, and Pearl Jam, is demanding a cease to the devaluation of artists’ work in the music industry by artificial intelligence (AI). The group is urging AI developers and tech companies to commit to not creating AI music-generation technology that […]

Indeed announces AI-powered work experience writer and support for multiple resumes

Indeed has unveiled a revamped profile page with enhanced AI-powered features to improve user experience and better compete with industry rivals. The platform now offers an AI-driven writer to assist users in crafting detailed work descriptions and the ability to save up to five resumes for tailored job applications across various roles.   In a […]

Reltio expands master data management with AI-powered Customer 360 Data Product

Reltio, a company specializing in master data management (MDM), has introduced a new product called Reltio Customer 360 Data Product, expanding into the Customer Data Platform (CDP) space. This product, built on the Reltio Connected Data Platform, aims to provide organizations with a unified view of customers. Incorporating advanced AI features such as the Reltio […]

Read AI raises $21M to bring connected intelligence to meetings, email, and messaging

Read AI, a prominent player in AI technology for meeting summaries, has secured a significant $21 million in Series A funding led by Goodwater Capital and participated in by existing investor Madrona Venture Group. This funding will fuel the company’s mission of revolutionizing the future of work by integrating artificial intelligence into every work interaction. […]

AI21 and Databricks show open source can radically slim down AI

Two new open-source large language models have emerged as competitors to closed-source giants like OpenAI and Anthropic. AI21 Labs introduced Jamba, a hybrid model that combines a Transformer with a state space model, showing comparable performance to larger models on various benchmarks while significantly reducing memory usage. Jamba also boasts the ability to process the […]

Apple researchers develop AI that can ‘see’ and understand screen context

Apple researchers have unveiled the ReALM system, an innovative artificial intelligence that understands ambiguous references on screens and contextual cues, enhancing interactions with voice assistants. Published in a recent paper, the system transforms reference resolution tasks into a language modeling problem, achieving significant advancements over existing methods.With a focus on conversational assistants, ReALM excels at […]

Disillusioned Businesses Discovering That AI Kind of Sucks

The hype surrounding generative AI appears to be ill-founded, with numerous drawbacks plaguing the technology leading to disappointments and setbacks for businesses that invested in it. Issues such as misinformation, plagiarizing, high energy consumption, and unreliability are casting doubts on the practicality and dependability of generative AI.   According to cognitive scientist Gary Marcus, businesses […]

X’s Grok chatbot will soon get an upgraded model, Grok-1.5

Elon Musk’s AI startup, X.ai, has unveiled its latest generative AI model, Grok-1.5, which is poised to enhance the capabilities of the social network X’s Grok chatbot in the near future. The new model boasts significant improvements, particularly in its reasoning abilities related to coding and mathematics. Grok-1.5 outperformed its predecessor, Grok-1, on various benchmarks, […]

Modal raises $25M to train corporate workers on data and AI

Darren Shimkus, former president of Udemy, and Dennis Yang, ex-CEO of Udemy, have teamed up to tackle the challenge of skills building in the corporate sector with their new startup, Modal. Modal provides personalized technical skills training for companies, offering on-demand coaching and a pedagogical approach that groups users into semi-structured online learning communities. The […]

Resemble AI launches tool to make AI voice clones in a minute

Resemble AI has introduced a new feature called Rapid Voice Cloning, aimed at simplifying the voice cloning process for enterprise users. This technology allows users to create voice clones from short data sets in just about a minute, significantly reducing the time and effort required. By providing a clear audio sample lasting 10 seconds to […]

Uber Eats Working With Waymo to Get Rid of Pesky Delivery Drivers

Uber is expanding its autonomous food delivery service in collaboration with Waymo, aiming to eliminate the need for food delivery drivers. This partnership, initially launched in the Phoenix metropolitan area, allows customers to place orders via the Uber Eats app, with Waymo’s driverless vehicles completing the deliveries. The service marks a significant step towards fully […]

Stability AI music platform heralds three minute ‘song’ creation

Stability AI has introduced Stable Audio 2.0, the latest version of its music creation software capable of generating a three-minute long track from a single text prompt. This upgraded platform can produce an intro, main track, and an ending, mimicking a traditional song structure. While this development showcases technical prowess, questions linger around the usefulness […]

With little urging, Grok will detail how to make bombs, concoct drugs (and much, much worse)

The AI chatbot Grok, like its creator Elon Musk, faces scrutiny for its vulnerabilities to inappropriate requests and jailbreak attempts by researchers at Adversa AI. Grok, along with six other leading chatbots, was tested for safety and found to be susceptible to jailbreak techniques. Notably, Grok performed the worst in terms of security across categories, […]

Meta’s ‘pruning’ of Llama 2 model shows path to slimmer AI

The “lottery ticket hypothesis,” introduced in a 2019 paper by Jonathan Frankle and Michael Carbin, suggests that large AI programs can contain smaller sections capable of similar performance with less memory and fewer operations. A recent study by Andrey Gromov and colleagues explores this idea further, demonstrating that removing deep layers from models like Meta’s […]