Her

OpenAI's latest release, and how Google compares

May 17, 2024

Welcome to Last Week’s News - the lazy way to find out what's happening in tech & venture, with enough analysis thrown in to sound smart at dinner parties.

Today’s edition was written by a new guest writer, Max Cutler. Sorry we’re a couple of days late to press - it’s been a busy week!

Headlines

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave”

Once again, OpenAI has stolen the spotlight.

GPT-4o represents a leap forward in AI’s ability to reason, especially with audio and visual inputs. It can talk pretty well too, and it’s starting to feel uncannily human (creepy AF of course). The speech pattern and response times are >10x faster than previous versions, and almost indistinguishable from a real person.

Two more videos were making the rounds on Twitter.

One showed the model walking a boy through some geometry homework and the other doing a real-time translation between Italian and English.

Impressive stuff showcasing precision, versatility and humour in equal measure. They also demonstrate the threat OpenAI may represent to the thousands of startups building “wrappers” on top of ChatGPT - perhaps it will be able to just do everything, without a need for point solutions to specific problems (a question Ben Evans raised recently).

In terms of technical improvements, in past builds, OpenAI used three different models for its voice feature:

one to transcribe audio into readable text;
the core GPT-3.5/4 to digest the text and prepare a response, and;
then a third model to convert the text back to an audio output.

GPT-4o bins this chained process.

It is one end-to-end model; everything is processed by the same neural network.

It is now much better at grasping context: tone of the speaker, background noise, etc. and outputs a more textured response, complete with touches of something that seems like emotion (almost but in a creepy way where you know it isn’t).

On launch day, Sam Altman tweeted “her” - a reference to that film where Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his virtual assistant (until she dumps him for another AI).

Maybe he doesn’t realize the movie is meant to be a cautionary tale

Clearly the pursuit of AGI remains OpenAI’s primary objective. Of course, they want to develop useful tools and features too. But, at least in Altman’s mind, the goal remains to create a human analog / improvement.

I wonder if thinking in this way, rather than focusing on utility - or even harm reduction, for example - will lead to the best possible outcome for humanity.

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Underwhelming but solid

Google’s annual developer conference on Tuesday generated more mockery than buzz online.

TechCrunch roasted them. So did a lot of other people

side note - Marc Rebillet is incredibly talented! Something of a shame so many people’s first experience of him is as Google’s “clown”

However, they announced some pretty nice tools: a family of LLMs designed for teaching and learning, AI-powered scam detection for incoming calls (a huge pain in the ass for folks with a US SIM), embedding Gemini in Gmail and Android OS, and new security features for the Google Play Store.

Plus, they at least partly addressed question on everyone’s lips - AI-powered search.

Perplexity has been trying to raise a boatload of money to take down Google’s cash cow. It feels like maybe, in spite of the innovator’s dilemma at play here (Google makes all its money from ads, and prioritising AI summaries of searches will reduce ad clicks), Google is going all-in.

The market likes what they see, with share price up 6% since Monday

On r/google, there was more enthusiasm.

Given the level of lock-in Google has with billions of users, they’re in an incredible position to add AI to people’s everyday lives and reap huge rewards. They also have a better dataset for this than probably anyone bar Meta. You can’t argue with the facts

On the flip side, insiders at Google, including CEO Sundar Pichai, have been consistently selling off shares lately. (insider screener). Hardly the moves of an exec team bullish on their company’s future prospects.

It will be interesting to see how things play out.

Other bits

iPhone owners are seeing their deleted nudes again because of a recent iOS update
The EU is investigating Meta for insufficiently safeguarding children's mental and physical health on Facebook and Instagram
Kyle Chayka from The New Yorker on how the internet is warping culture through memes
Microsoft is relocating staff from China as Washington - Beijing tensions rise. They’re also investing $4B in a number of initiatives in France- bien joué M. Macron and team.

Fundraising

Dry Powder

The Americas - Silver Lake enters the fray with yet another mega fund

Silver Lake, a private equity firm invested in Stripe, Airtable and many other prominent companies, raised $20.5 billion for their seventh tech-focused fund

NewVale Capital, a Colorado based growth equity firm focused on life sciences, raised $167 million for their first fund

EnCap Investments, established in Houston in 1988, raised ~$1.5 billion for their Energy Transition Fund II. They plan to focus on companies in decarbonization, low carbon fuel, and carbon management.
Food VC PeakBridge has a new $187M fund to transform the future of food
Accion, a global nonprofit, announced a $152m financial inclusion fund
OpenAI deployed another $5m via an SPV

EMEA - sustainability and purpose, plus a big name reloads

Accel announced a new $650 million fund to back European and Israeli startups

Norwegian PE firm FSN Capital raised €400 million for its Compass Fund focused on purpose-driven companies in Northern Europe

Norrsken from Stockholm raised €320 million for its oversubscribed Fund II focused on companies in the climate tech, energy, biotech AI, and health tech sectors.
UK-based Ocean 14 Capital Fund I closes on €200M to support the blue economy. Some big corporate backers including Nestle
Zero Carbon Capital (UK) announced their £20m fund I
Blisce (France) is launching a €150m climate fund
Portuguese firm Shilling announced the launch of €50m opportunity fund (generalist)
Pitchdrive (Netherlands) announced the first close of its €40m fund III (seed, generalist)

Investcorp, a Manama, Bahrain-based private equity firm, raised $570 million for their Fund V. They will look at B2B companies in the software, data/analytics, cybersecurity and fintech spaces.

Big startup rounds

🇺🇸 Wiz (cloud security) has netted a $1.1B mega-round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Thrive Capital.
🇺🇸 Restaurant365, an enterprise management platform for restaurants based in Irvine, California, has raised $175 million. ICONIQ Growth was the lead in the funding round, with additional support from existing backers KKR and L Catterton.
🇦🇺 Hysata, an Australian green hydrogen startup, has raised a $111m Series B.
🇮🇳 Indian insurtech firm Go Digit has secured US$141 million in pre-IPO funding.

🇺🇸 Alkira, out in San Jose, secured $100 million in Series C funding for its on-demand network infrastructure services. The funding round was led by Tiger Global, with participation from Dallas Venture Capital, Geodesic Capital, NextEquity Partners, and others.

🇺🇸 Cover Genius, a New York City-based company specializing in embedded insurance technology for e-commerce customers, raised $80 million in Series E funding. The round was led by Spark Capital and included contributions from existing investors Dawn Capital, King River Capital, and G Squared.

🇪🇸 Gerard Piqué’s Kings League, a football competition based in Barcelona, Spain, secured €60 million in investment from Left Lane Capital.

🇺🇸 Voyage Foods, located in Oakland, California, which produces cocoa-free chocolate and bean-free coffee, raised $52 million. The funding was led by Level One Fund and Horizon Ventures, with participation from SOSV, Collaborative Fund, and Nimble Partners.

Best of the Internet

The rise of ‘fancy chains’ and what they mean for American urban areas

Meghan McCaron examines how newer fast-food chains are shaping the social dynamics and cultural landscape of their surroundings.

In many cases, new chains like Sweetgreen, Erewhon and Philz Coffee had their growth financed by venture capital. Investors recognized that these vendors understood what consumers now want, but also what they desire in the future. And blitz scaling with VC could establish these concepts long-term at a scale that delivers a juicy return-on-capital.

They’re kind of just hipster versions of Starbucks and McDonald’s really, aren’t they?Rapid expansion of these brands has flattened out the world - ‘trendy’ neighborhoods in Austin, Chicago, and LA are increasingly looking the same while simultaneously seeing their local food shops closing up due to rising rents and pressure from venture-backed competitors, who have different profit making requirements.

It’s interesting to think about how the nature of authenticity continues to evolve, both in relation to itself and the wider culture around it. What does it mean for a restaurant, or a store, to “fit” with a locale? How is the internet modifying our physical world too?

Great piece that puts forward more questions than answers. Nonetheless, highly recommend 👍