OpenAI's skyrocketing valuation has some venture capital firms taking a wait-and-see approach. They're concerned about growing competition, especially from big tech, and high valuations in the AI sector, The Information reports. Specifically, Founders Fund, which acquired a stake in OpenAI in January 2023 at a valuation of $29 billion, will not participate in a planned sale of OpenAI shares at a valuation of $86 billion to increase its stake. Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures are also not participating in the latest round. In addition, OpenAI's unique structure, which prioritizes mission over financial return, has made some investors wary. Still, "plenty of other VC firms have been more than happy to jump into OpenAI," according to The Information. The proposed new round of funding was first reported last September, but has not yet been made official.
BodyArmor, a sports drink brand owned by Coca-Cola, is using AI-generated imagery in its regional Super Bowl ad campaign called "Field of Fake." The spot features AI-generated sports highlights with surreal imagery and a robotic voice. BodyArmor aims to differentiate itself from the competition by emphasizing that it contains no artificial sweeteners, flavors, or colors. The AI-generated content is used in this analogy as a negative contrast to the real footage, making it more about cultural commentary than the use of generative AI for ad production. The 30-second spot will air during the Super Bowl in 20 U.S. markets and Canada, as well as a Spanish-language version during Univision's coverage of the event.
Joseph Semrai shows on X how the small, large Mistral 7B language model runs on an Apple Vision Pro. This is a variant of the model with 4-bit quantization, which reduces the model's memory requirements, but also its accuracy. The performance requirements are reduced enough to run on a Vision Pro M2 with a total of 16 GB of memory. A 4-bit version of Mistral 7B Instruct is available here.
The Hong Kong branch of a multinational company lost HK$200 million (US$25.6 million) to deepfake fraudsters. The fraudsters used publicly available video and audio footage to create convincing digital representations of the company's finance director and other employees. They instructed a finance employee to carry out a transaction totaling HK$200 million. The employee made 15 wire transfers to five Hong Kong bank accounts before realizing it was a scam. Hong Kong police are investigating the case and warning of the growing use of deepfake technology for fraud. Senior Inspector Tyler Chan Chi-wing recommended verifying the authenticity of people in video calls by asking them to move their head or ask questions.
