[Updated December 18, 2024 with new details on Databricks] In 2024, AI-focused startups continued to dominate the funding landscape with industry leaders like OpenAI ($6.6B), xAI ($6B), and Anthropic ($4B) leading the pack. Adding to this trend, MLflow and data lakehouse pioneer Databricks recently secured a $10 billion funding round that was primarily equity-based, at…
This week in AI research: Enterprise firms warming up to autonomous agents, Sora debuts
This week, Meta’s unveiled of a “concept-predicting” language model and AI-powered Metaverse avatars. Meanwhile, industry leaders are forecasting autonomous AI agents by 2025. Deloitte has projected that by 2025, 25% of enterprises using generative AI will deploy such agents, expanding to 50% by 2027. Also this week, OpenAI finally opened up its video creation tool…
Slip and slide into reinforcement learning with the Frozen Lake challenge
Remember when DeepBlue mastered chess and AlphaGo conquered the game of Go, the board game with more moves than particles in the known universe? Or what about when cars learned to drive themselves? Reinforcement learning (RL) plays an essential role in each of these examples. RL is having a significant impact on R&D across an…