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a16z-backed AI video generator Irreverent Labs raises funding from Samsung Next

The Most Interesting Analysis of the Generative AI Market to Date Has Arrived

Finding a single document, message, or metric across all these tools can be a challenge. Products like Glean allow teams to search across apps, while Vowel enables users to query records of their video meetings. In prior technology cycles, the conventional wisdom was that to build a large, independent company, you must own the end-customer — whether that meant individual consumers or B2B buyers.

The innovative project, built in collaboration with portfolio company Convex Dev and inspired by a Stanford Generative Agent paper, introduces a virtual town where AI characters live, chat, and socialize. As per a16z’s GitHub details, AI Town is designed to be a customizable and extensible platform, drawing inspiration from research on generative agents. Pentalog Connect is your free pass to a large community of top engineers who excel in developing outstanding and impactful digital products. When joining, you receive access to a wealth of resources that will feed your appetite for quality content and your need for professional growth. ApplePay, NFC-based cards, and other successful examples all took more than 10 years to gain widespread adoption.

How Are Consumers Using Generative AI?

“We’ve observed that infrastructure vendors are likely the biggest winners in this market so far, capturing the majority of dollars flowing through the stack. Generative AI can be used to create original text, images, videos, and audio content, enabling businesses to automate content generation processes and save time and resources. For example, developers might create a traditional AI system programmed to classify images as either cats or dogs based on pre-defined features. In contrast, developers working on generative AI could train a model to create new, realistic images of cats and dogs based on existing examples it has seen during its training process. Generative AI and foundation models have the potential to transform various industries and drive significant economic growth.

And for the most discerning writers, NovelAI enables users to fine-tune Clio on their own body of work or even famous writers like H.P. Another exciting opportunity is leveraging generative AI to tell better, more personalized stories. For more of my thoughts on why now is the time for product pickers and engineering-oriented founders to succeed in generative AI, read my piece on aligning founder superpowers with product cycles. If you’re building in this area, feel free to reach out to zyang at a16z dot com and kristina at a16z dot com.

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Notably, synthesizing numeric content (e.g., your stock portfolio performance) requires a higher degree of accuracy, while the synthesis of written content can have far more variance without sacrificing value. Even code generation is tolerant of variance so long as the code functions as expected. For example, a company building a customer-support application may primarily use a support-centric model that has access to the company’s historical support tickets, but then fall back to GPT for corner cases. To the extent that the fine-tuned models and data sets are proprietary, there’s an opportunity for these components to be moats in the delivery of speed and quality.

This will, in turn, significantly enhance models’ ability to carry out tasks that require a deeper understanding of longer inputs, such as summarizing lengthy articles or generating coherent and contextually accurate responses in extended conversations. We’re already seeing significant improvement with context windows—GPT-4 has both an 8k and 32k token context window, up from 4k and 16k token context windows with GPT-3.5 and ChatGPT, and Claude recently Yakov Livshits expanded its context window to an astounding 100k tokens. Most of these businesses operate entirely online, which makes it easy for them to integrate AI tools into many parts of their workflow. And in a world of rising customer acquisition costs, brands are eager to try products that might help them lower costs, convert more shoppers, and increase retention. The lifeblood of these high quality, AAA games is the work and vision of human artists.

Yakov Livshits
Founder of the DevEducation project
A prolific businessman and investor, and the founder of several large companies in Israel, the USA and the UAE, Yakov’s corporation comprises over 2,000 employees all over the world. He graduated from the University of Oxford in the UK and Technion in Israel, before moving on to study complex systems science at NECSI in the USA. Yakov has a Masters in Software Development.

The round is not the first for Irreverent Labs, which was founded in 2021 and raised $45 million in funding last year, led by Andreessen Horowitz. At the time, Irreverent was described by media outlets as a blockchain company, one that had developed a robot cockfighting game called MechaFightClub that used non-fungible tokens (NFTs). But the company insists now that the game was a way to showcase what is essentially a large machine learning model that, in the case of Irreverant Labs, will allow users to make videos using various inputs, from images to text to audio, later this year. This dynamic interaction and story development are achieved thanks to the advanced tech stack underlying AI Town.

No other product has seen quite the same ramp, though companion platform CharacterAI has emerged as a solid #2, with ~21% of the scale of ChatGPT. On mobile in particular, CharacterAI is one of the strongest early players—with DAUs rivaling ChatGPT, and significantly better retention, according to Sensor Tower data. Like ChatGPT, the majority of products on this list didn’t exist a year ago—80% of these websites are new. This suggests that while many legacy companies are augmenting their products with AI, many of the most compelling consumer experiences are completely novel. To begin to answer these questions, we looked at SimilarWeb traffic data (as of June 2023) to rank the top 50 GenAI web products by monthly visits.

Out of 1600+ applicants, only 32 companies were selected for the program, and Zibra AI was the only one from Ukraine and the entire CEE region. Ideogram AI is currently hiring for various roles in engineering, research, design, product, and marketing. The company is also inviting interested users to sign up for early access to its platform on its website. Ideogram AI is developing state-of-the-art AI tools that will make creative expression more accessible, fun, and efficient. The company aims to empower users to generate novel and diverse content across various domains, such as art, music, writing, design, and more.

• But when the economic benefits are as compelling as they are with generative AI, there is ample velocity to build a company around more traditional defensive moats such as scale, the network, the long tail of enterprise distribution, brand, etc.
• Looking at the fundamentals, it’s not hard to see why getting great economics from AI has been tough for startups.
• Find the right companies, identify the right contacts, and connect with decision-makers with an all-in-one prospecting solution.
• We’ve seen this concept executed successfully in a AAA game already – Monolith’s Shadow of Mordor has a nemesis system that dynamically creates interesting backstories for villains based on a player’s actions.

Seeing as Visa was also originally controlled by a consortium of banks, EWS may not want to undergo a similar disruption. This will in turn allow developers to build deeper relationships with their customers, cross-selling them products and driving them to specialized offers and discounts—ultimately driving greater profits. So what happens is the opposite of technology driving centralization of wealth – individual customers of the technology, ultimately including everyone on the planet, are empowered instead, Yakov Livshits and capture most of the generated value. As with prior technologies, the companies that build AI – assuming they have to function in a free market – will compete furiously to make this happen. The flaw in this theory is that, as the owner of a piece of technology, it’s not in your own interest to keep it to yourself – in fact the opposite, it’s in your own interest to sell it to as many customers as possible. The largest market in the world for any product is the entire world, all 8 billion of us.

Artificial intelligence has been a staple in computer science since the 1950s. Over the years, it has also made a lot of money for the businesses able to deploy it effectively. However, as we explained in a recent op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal—which is a good starting point for the more detailed argument we make here—most of those gains have gone to large incumbent vendors (like Google or Meta) rather than to startups. Given that the average consumer now spends 36 minutes more per day on mobile than desktop (4.1 hours vs. 3.5 hours), we expect to see more mobile-first GenAI products emerge as the technology matures. The bottom quartile of these GenAI products saw just 2% of their traffic coming from paid sources.

As we’ve written previously, the generative AI revolution in games will cause the price of content to drop dramatically, going effectively to zero in some cases. This revolution will democratize the industry, enabling smaller teams to release category leading game experiences more rapidly, all without compromising on quality/fidelity, immersion, or feature sets. The nature of cloud computing also creates a symbiotic relationship between infrastructure and applications that will continue as AI infrastructure evolves. Core infrastructure unlocks new opportunities for applications, and scaling application volume increases demand for infrastructure, pulling infrastructure providers toward maturity faster.

First, every country, including the United States, makes at least some content illegal. Second, there are certain kinds of content, like child pornography and incitements to real world violence, that are nearly universally agreed to be off limits – legal or not – by virtually every society. So any technological platform that facilitates or generates content – speech – is going to have some restrictions. These actors are arguing for a variety of bizarre and extreme restrictions on AI ranging from a ban on AI development, all the way up to military airstrikes on datacenters and nuclear war.