Nordic Data & AI Weekly: A tumultuous week at OpenAI, announcements from other US big tech & European challengers, recent Nordic investment rounds, and a data-driven look at the AI space
Recent funding, news, and resources for builders
Quick reads on value creation
Things to know, whether you are building 🛠 or investing 💰
💡 Thoughts on how to build a defensible AI startup, from Dharmesh Shah (founder & CTO at Hubspot).
🗺 The emerging vertical AI landscape, and vertical AI market map, from Cowboy Ventures.
📊 This report from Coatue - “AI: The Coming Revolution” provides an excellent data-driven look at AI today and what may lie ahead. A shorter article extracting some of the insights from the report can be viewed here.
🤔 How much does it cost to use an LLM?
Recent AI funding in the Nordics & Baltics
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🇸🇪 Eliq: Energy efficiency platform that empowers utilities, banks, and smart home providers to provide customers with energy data to make smarter, more sustainable decisions in household energy usage. Raised $10.6m from Inven Capital, Axpo group, and Valkea Growth Club (link).
🇸🇪 Vectorview: Analytics to improve RAG powered LLM products - providing insights into user queries, model answers and embedded data - enabling companies to improve their product, optimise their vector database and prevent hallucinations. Raised $500k from Y Combinator (link).
🇩🇰 Frugal Technologies: AI-based propulsion solution - providing a cost, fuel and emissions saving system for large shipping vessels. Raised an undisclosed amount from Emerson (link).
If there is some relevant Nordic AI news or funding that is missing from this newsletter, feel free to share by replying directly or emailing nordicaiweekly@substack.com and I’ll look to spread the word next week. Thanks!
News from the wider world 🌍 🌎 🌏
🤷♂️ What’s been going on at OpenAI?
This surely isn’t news to you, and you’re likely fed up of it, but here follows a recap of the tumultuous past week at OpenAI…
On Friday 17th November, Sam Altman was fired by the OpenAI board who cited a lack of transparency. The decision followed “a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities”. OpenAI President Greg Brockman resigned in protest, and CTO Mira Murati was installed as interim CEO. TechCrunch’s coverage here.
The following days were full of uncertainty, theories, and suggestions (here and here) that OpenAI may have created something so powerful that disagreement arose about what to do with it. As well as analysis of the board structure (here and here) and governance model.
It quickly emerged that the OpenAI board was in talks with Sam Altman to return as CEO. Mira Murati and other leaders within the company pushed for his reinstatement, while investors also started to apply pressure.
Seemingly ending hopes of Sam’s return, Emmett Shear (co-founder of Twitch) was announced as the new OpenAI CEO, with his initial statement here.
Sam Altman and Greg Brockman joined Microsoft, as CEO Satya Nadella announced that they would lead a new advanced AI research team.
Almost all OpenAI employees called for the board to resign and have Sam Altman reinstated, otherwise threatening to leave.
On Wednesday 22nd November, Sam Altman returned as CEO of OpenAI. More here. And a strong selfie from Greg Brockman as he too made his return.
And a return to suggestions that the original dismissal was triggered by several researchers within the firm warning the board of a powerful AI discovery that they said could threaten humanity. Either way, an internal investigation is set to be conducted in order to explore the reasons given by the board.
A lot of the fallout currently focuses on learnings related to governance & structure, questions as to how powerful the tech OpenAI is creating may be, the pitfalls of effective altruism (here and here), and the reflection that we’re still very early in the development of the AI space - things can change very quickly and no one has won it yet.
Guess we’ll have to keep watching this space.
And breathe 🧘♀️
In other news…
📣 Microsoft hosted its annual developer conference “Ignite”, with CEO Satya Nadella emphasising Microsoft as the copilot company, walking through the 5 layers of the “Copilot Stack”.
They also announced their own chips, as an alternative to Nvidia.
💰 Billionaires including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt invested $300m in the French non-profit AI lab Kyutai, as France continues its push to develop sovereign AI technology.
🆕 Meta announced new models Emu Video and Emu Edit, capable of generating videos from text prompts and precisely editing images via text instructions.
🏥 AI is proving capable of detecting 13% more breast cancers than radiologists in a study of 25,000 mammograms.
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