More massive model drops (DeepMind & Baidu) but quiet(ish) week for start up activity as NL AI equities rebounded

While the private sector drops more large language models, researches remind us of the limitations of scale + a some large and small developments in ethics and education

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:

All 8 of our public NL AI first companies had a positive week in the market as equities generally rose. Suki, a start-up working on a voice-based digital assistant for doctors raised $55mm in a series C round, more than doubling their total funds raised. This continues to validate our conviction that while generalist conversational AI companies, like SoundHound, Unisound and others are (rightfully) raising huge amounts as they scale, there is plenty of room for domain specific NL AI solutions also as they continue to show strong value creation and traction in their areas of choice.

Happenings this week:

While Suki was the only start up we track that had a funding event this week, a couple of others made some significant progress, announcing meaningful partnerships with FAANG companies.

Commercial:

• Voice-based clinical assistant Suki picks up $55M to fuel tech development, expand health system partnerships. read

• Cohere and Google Cloud Partnering on AI. read

• Causality Link Works with AWS on AI for Data Analytics (AIDA) Solution. read

Technical:

• Purdue University Researchers Introduce A Compositional Reader Model That Composes Multiple Documents In One Shot To Form A Unified Political Entity Representation. read

• AI Researchers Fight Noise by Turning to Biology. read

• DeepMind debuts massive language A.I. that approaches human-level reading comprehension. read

• Peng Cheng Laboratory & Baidu Release PCL-BAIDU Wenxin: The World’s First Knowledge-Enhanced 100-Billion-Scale Pretrained Language Model. read

• The limitations of scaling up AI language models. read

Ethical & other:

• General points of interest:

  1. The therapists using AI to make therapy better. read

  2. New [Harvard] University-wide institute to integrate natural, artificial intelligence. read

• Ethics:

  1. Introducing the 🤗 Data Measurements Tool: an Interactive Tool for Looking at Datasets. - The Data Measurements Tool (DMT) is an interactive interface and open-source library that lets dataset creators and users automatically calculate metrics that are meaningful and useful for responsible data development. read

  2. A Cartel of Influential Datasets Is Dominating Machine Learning Research, New Study Suggests. read

  3. Reddit-trained artificial intelligence warns researchers about... itself. read

Who do we follow and read for latest NLU technical insights?

Here’s a list of various sources we follow periodically to try and stay up to speed with what’s happening in the NL AI space.

• Monthly:

  • https://newsletter.ruder.io/ [simply the best really]

  • https://www.lexalytics.com/lexablog/ 

  • https://kavita-ganesan.com/

  • https://blog.bitext.com/

  • https://www.pragnakalp.com/blog/ 

• Weekly / daily:

  • Medium

  • Knuggets 

  • https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/category/nlp/ 

  • https://www.linguamatics.com/blog 

  • Twitter a/c’s: umm…maybe we’ll list this another day. A lot!!

  • Podcasts: 

    • NLP highlights

    • Azeem Azar’s Exponential View

Have a great week!!!