Huge Microsoft acquisition in healthcare conversational AI + some thematic & year round up content for 2021

MS makes a huge foray into healthcare. Tesla head of AI has some thoughts on architecture convergence. A few interesting threads on AI ethics for language models.

RiD is your weekly round up of whats happening in the world of NL AI first companies where we track funding, partnerships and general commercial progress, as well as collate links on the latest technical, ethical and general happenings impacting and progressing the NL AI space.

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Basic market data tracker:

Slightly down week in the aggregate for public NL AI first companies while the market doesn’t seem moved by the Microsoft purchase of Nuance Communications.

We added 1 new private series D company this week to our tracker, Signal AI, which we had previously missed. See story below on their latest raise.

Happenings this week:

Major new is the MS acquisition however some interesting reading from Tesla AI lead, 2021 LM paper of interest as well as various ethical areas of interest.

Commercial:

• Signal AI, a ‘decision augmentation’ startup, raises $50M for a platform that extracts insights from the internet and other public content. read

• Tableau completes acquisition of Narrative Science. read

• Microsoft, confirmed in April 2021 that it was buying AI natural language computer software company, Nuance Communications. Microsoft said the acquisition was valued at £14.3billion ($19.7 billion) [slightly buried in this article about Oracle]. read

Technical:

• DeepMind’s RETRO Retrieval-Enhanced Transformer Retrieves from Trillions of Tokens, Achieving Performance Comparable to GPT-3 With 25× Fewer Parameters. read

• Most Popular NLP Papers Of 2021. read

• Andrej Karpathy Believes AI Models Will Consolidate. What Is He Talking About? read

Ethical & other:

• General points of interest:

  1. A view from A.I.’s biggest conference…Some clear themes emerged from this year’s conference: one is that transformers remain hot. Another clear trend is building multimodal models—A.I. systems that don’t just learn either language or images, but rather learn both at the same time, sometimes also along with audio too. read

  2. OpenAI rolls out feature for creating customized versions of GPT-3. read

  3. Language models and the metaverse top AI stories of 2021. read

• Ethics:

  1. The ‘Invisible’, Often Unhappy Workforce That’s Deciding the Future of AI. read

  2. Artificial Intelligence 'Will Never Be Ethical', Said Oxford University Scientists' AI During An Ethical Debate. read

  3. Job Applicant Resumes Are Effectively Impossible to De-Gender, AI Researchers Find. read

  4. Meta AI Introduces A New AI Technology Called ‘Few-Shot Learner (FSL)’ To Tackle Harmful Content. read

Who are the smaller players i.e. raised <$10mm, and what are their capability distributions?

Our list of top 20 early stage, low raise companies in the NL AI first space:

• LitLingo

• Adarga

• Promethium

• Datapeople

• Converseon.AI

• Basis Technology

• Hmcomm

• Crowdynews

• Golem.ai

• Behavioral Signals

• Niki

• LegalSifter

• Icontek

• Hyperlex

• Germin8

• Phrasee

• Fakespot

• Causality Link\

• Relative Insight

• Nextremer

Have a great week!!!