Welcome back to The Prompt.
Meta is reportedly planning to acquire a 49% stake in data labelling behemoth Scale AI for $14.8 billion, according to The Information. The deal is slated to place Scale AI’s young billionaire CEO Alexandr Wang at a top position inside Meta along with a number of Scale AI employees, who will work in a new AI lab dedicated to developing “superintelligence”— an AI system that outperforms human capabilities. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly closely involved in assembling the team of AI researchers and has gone to great lengths like setting up a WhatsApp group called “Recruiting Party,” personally reaching out to potential recruits and rearranging desks for researchers to sit near him, Bloomberg reported. The new lab is part of Meta’s efforts to keep up in the cutthroat AI race while wrangling a string of internal issues including employee churn, management problems and delayed or disappointing product releases.
Now let’s get into the headlines.
DATA DILEMMAS
Social media network Reddit sued Anthropic for allegedly training its AI models on personal user data without permission, and continuing to do so despite telling Reddit it had stopped, Forbes reported. Reddit was an early mover in capitalizing on its rich reserve of organic human data catalogued in its discussion forums, striking licensing deals with OpenAI and Google. In a lawsuit filed last week, Reddit claimed Anthropic’s bot accessed its servers 100,000 times.
BIG PLAYS
ChatGPT will now be able to connect to a crop of external applications such as Google Drive, DropBox and Sharepoint, allowing enterprise users to glean insights from internal documents through the chatbot. It will also be able to access meeting recordings and transcriptions. The announcement was the latest in a series of feature releases intended to increase ChatGPT’s functionality and keep people engaged. OpenAI has also reached $10 billion in annualized revenue through sales of its consumer products, CNBC reported.
AI DEAL OF THE WEEK
Young AI coding startup Anysphere has become the face of “vibe coding” — a phrase coined by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpthy describing the use of large language models to create applications when the user doesn’t necessarily need to know how to program. The nascent startup has raised $900 million at a $9.9 billion valuation and claims to have about $500 million in annualized revenue. The startup is betting that AI is going to dramatically transform software engineering in the next decade, making it magnitudes easier to program applications while eliminating cumbersome aspects of the process like correcting syntax or or debugging code. All a person has to do is press tab and AI completes the line of code for you and jumps to the next spot.
Also of note: Enterprise AI startup Glean raised $150 million in Series F funding at a $7.2 billion valuation. Employees use the company’s AI tools to search for internal information and build AI agents (software that can carry out specific tasks end-to-end) that can resolve IT tickets, write performance reviews and help prepare for meetings. Glean claimed to have passed $100 million in annualized revenue in February. (Read our 2023 profile of the company here.)
DEEP DIVE
Throngs of excited moviegoers piled into Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center on Thursday night to be a part of Runway’s third annual AI film festival. Cristobal Valenzuela, CEO of the $3.3 billion video and photo generation AI startup, spoke to a crowd of hundreds, asking them to think less about the digital tools and AI software used to make the short films they were about to watch, and instead focus on their human elements.
The winning film, Total Pixel Space by Jacob Adler, is a jumble of both realistic and impossible vivid landscapes like a flying pig, people floating in a city or inside a pool, a bloom of jellyfish and a meerkat donning a bright yellow turtleneck. The 9 minute 28 second film raises the question of how many images could possibly exist in the world. The answer: Every image is composed of thousands of pixels— coordinates of positions and colors, a coalition of numbers. The film was selected from 6000 submissions, up from 300 a year ago, as interest in experimenting with AI models has exploded over the years.
For all the creative benefits of video generation AI software, TV networks and filmmakers are adopting the technology for a more pragmatic reason: to produce and edit both television shows and movies quickly and more cheaply. AMC Network, which has produced popular shows like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, recently announced its plans to use Runway’s AI models to create marketing and TV content. Lionsgate, the studio behind blockbuster hits like The Hunger Games and The Twilight Saga, has a partnership with Runway to use its models with a goal of making films on a fraction of the budget.
But several studios don’t want to openly admit they’re using AI due to fears of backlash from creatives, who have voiced their concerns that these AI models are trained on copyrighted data scraped from the internet without consent and compensation. Runway is also currently facing litigation from a group of artists who claim their data was illicitly used to train its AI models.
WEEKLY DEMO
The Department of Government Efficiency developed a faulty AI tool to review thousands of contracts at the Department of Veteran Affairs that could be cut, labelling them as “munchable,” Propublica reported. The software, developed by a programmer who has no formal experience in AI, was prone to making errors such as hallucinating the size of contracts, misreading them and inflating their value.
MODEL BEHAVIOR
Autonomous vehicles became easy targets during protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests in Los Angeles over the weekend. At least five Waymo driverless vehicles that were in the area were vandalized and set ablaze amid the protests. After the incident, Waymo halted its service in parts of downtown LA.
