🤖 Hired in AI | 5*5: Pinecone Raises $100M, Microsoft's AI-Powered Design Tool, and a Method to Reduce LLM Costs by 110x!

Hey Hired in AI | 5*5 readers!

I owe you an apology for not writing the past few days. I've been busy with an AI project that's been an absolute whirlwind! With over 350k views, I'm beyond flattered by the reception it has received.

But enough about me, let's dive into the AI world together and see what's been brewing!

What you'll find in your AI booster today;

1. Pinecone Raises $100M

2. Generative AI Growth

3. Microsoft Designer

4. Amazon Pursues Advanced LLM

5. Reduce LLM Costs by 110x

Trending 5 AI Tools 🦿 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

1. Aomni: Find, extract, and process any data from the internet.

2. Hugging Face GPT: Open-sourced rival of ChatGPT.

3. Saga: Digital creative assistant.

4. Descript: A video word processor. Edit video by editing text.

5. Clipdrop: The ultimate ecosystem of apps, plugins & resources.

1️⃣ Pinecone Raises $100M 🚀 Surging Demand for the Vector Database

Pinecone, the creator of a vector database designed for data scientists, has raised $100 million in a Series B funding round, bringing its valuation to $750 million.

The investment round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and also included participation from ICONIQ Growth, Menlo Ventures, and Wing Venture Capital.

Pinecone's vector database is gaining traction as businesses realize the value of semantic search driven by AI and large language models (LLMs).

With this new funding, Pinecone plans to accelerate its growth and expand its team, currently numbering around 100 employees. The vector database market has been heating up, with companies like Qdrant, Zilliz, and Chroma also raising funds recently.

🔍 Understanding Vector Databases and Their Revolutionary Impact

A vector database is a powerful tool that stores and manages numerical representations of complex data, like text, images, or videos, enabling fast and accurate searches based on similarity. Revolutionizing industries, vector databases improve search results, handle unstructured data, power recommendation engines, and assist with deduplication and anomaly detection.

Pinecone, a leading provider, offers an easy-to-use API for developers, making vector databases more accessible and valuable for businesses of all sizes.

Don’t forget to check the other trending investment news here:
“OpenAI closes $300M share sale at $27B-29B valuation”

 2️⃣ Generative AI Growth: Compute Costs' Role in the Industry

Generative AI is booming, with access to affordable compute resources driving success. Models like GPT-3.5 Turbo or 4 demand extensive computing power, but the trend of exponential growth in model parameters and GPU power may not continue indefinitely.

🚧 Limiting factors, such as power and I/O, alongside the exhaustion of easy optimization opportunities, suggest potential slowdowns. However, the AI industry's growth and increased number of developers will keep fueling demand for GPUs.

The high cost of AI infrastructure might look like a barrier to new entrants, but the market's continuous evolution could lead to a vibrant, innovative ecosystem with abundant opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Read the full analyses here.

3️⃣ Microsoft Designer: AI-Powered Design Tool Now in Public Preview

Microsoft Designer, an AI-powered design tool, has launched its public preview with new features. This Canva-like web app creates designs for presentations, posters, social media graphics, and more, utilizing user-created content and OpenAI's DALL-E 2. The tool now generates AI captions and hashtags for social media posts and can create animated visuals with backgrounds and text transitions.

Microsoft plans to add more editing features in the future, such as object placement, background replacement, and erasing capabilities. During the preview period, Designer remains free and will be included in Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions once generally available, with some functionality for non-subscribers.

4️⃣ Amazon Pursues Advanced LLM to Enhance Alexa

Amazon is working on a more capable large language model (LLM) to improve Alexa, aiming to create "the world's best personal assistant," according to CEO Andy Jassy. Advancements in LLMs and generative AI are expected to accelerate this development.

Amazon's recent launch of Bedrock assists small companies in building AI-powered apps using pretrained models and offers access to in-house trained Titan FMs. With ChatGPT's popularity, other tech giants are also exploring LLM-based improvements for their voice assistants.

5️⃣ EVAPORATE: Reducing LLM Inference Costs by 110x

Researchers from Stanford and Cornell have developed EVAPORATE, a method that reduces inference costs of large language models (LLMs) by 110x while improving results.

By identifying redundancies and using strategies such as direct extraction and code synthesis, the team's EVAPORATE-CODE+ implementation outperforms state-of-the-art systems and advances data management.