Business spending on AI surged 500% this year to $13.8 Billion, says Menlo Ventures
Business spending on generative AI surged 500% this year, from $2.3 billion in 2023 to $13.8 billion, according to data released by Menlo Ventures on Wednesday.
The report also found that OpenAI ceded market share in enterprise AI, declining from 50% to 34%. Anthropic doubled its market share from 12% to 24%. The results came from a survey of 600 enterprise IT decision-makers from companies with 50 or more employees, per the report. Menlo is an investor in Anthropic. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Tim Tully, a partner at Menlo Ventures, told CNBC in an interview that the power shift is thanks in part to the advancement of Claude 3.5 and because the majority of companies are using three or more large AI models. Although OpenAI and Anthropic dominated companies’ AI model use, he said, people are “juggling models” and that habit is “not a well-understood piece of data.”
“Developers are pretty savvy — they know how to go back and forth between models fairly quickly,” Tully explained. “They’re choosing the model that fits their use case best... and that’s likely Claude 3.5.” Meta’s market share stayed at 16% and Cohere’s share remained at 3%. Google’s rose from 7% to 12%, and Mistral’s lost one percentage point, declining to 5% in 2024.
Foundation models — such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude and others — still dominated enterprise spend, the report found, with large language models receiving $6.5 billion in enterprise investment.
Read more about business spending on AI on CNBC
“Death of a Salesforce” | a16z on AI Sales
The sales landscape is undergoing a major transformation, moving from structured CRM data to unstructured, contextual insights powered by AI. AI-native systems are capturing customer interactions in real-time, automating early-stage processes like prospecting and qualification. This frees up sales reps to focus on higher-value tasks, with AI even providing live coaching.
These systems capture a rich, multimodal "system of record" - emails, Slack, social, surveys - providing the context needed for better decision-making. It also has the potential to align sales, marketing, CS, and product around a shared view of the customer.
The result? Personalization at scale, with AI-generated insights. And a feedback loop between customers and innovation, with product roadmaps directly informed by comprehensive customer data. Is this the "Death of a Salesforce"? Perhaps this is an overstatement. But a major transformation is underway. The winners will be those who leverage data and AI to drive decisions, not just activities.
AI Can Now Create a Replica Of Your Personality From a Two Hour Interview
A two-hour interview is enough to accurately capture your values and preferences, according to new research from Stanford and Google DeepMind.
Imagine sitting down with an AI model for a spoken two-hour interview. A friendly voice guides you through a conversation that ranges from your childhood, your formative memories, and your career to your thoughts on immigration policy. Not long after, a virtual replica of you is able to embody your values and preferences with stunning accuracy.
That’s now possible, according to a new paper from a team including researchers from Stanford and Google DeepMind, which has been published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Led by Joon Sung Park, a Stanford PhD student in computer science, the team recruited 1,000 people who varied by age, gender, race, region, education, and political ideology. They were paid up to $100 for their participation. From interviews with them, the team created agent replicas of those individuals. As a test of how well the agents mimicked their human counterparts, participants did a series of personality tests, social surveys, and logic games, twice each, two weeks apart; then the agents completed the same exercises. The results were 85% similar.
“If you can have a bunch of small ‘yous’ running around and actually making the decisions that you would have made—that, I think, is ultimately the future,” Joon says.
More about AI replicating your personality on MIT Technology Review
AI in 2024: Efficiency Over Model Size
Nick Jakobi, Director of Product for the modeling team at Cohere, discusses enterprise AI deployment, model economics, and societal implications. The conversation provides substantial insights into the strategic considerations of deploying large language models (LLMs) in enterprise environments.
Jakobi articulates Cohere's differentiation strategy in the competitive LLM landscape, emphasizing their focus on enterprise-specific capabilities such as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), tool use, and multilingual support.
OpenAI Launches Free AI Training Course For Teachers
OpenAI and non-profit partner Common Sense Media have launched a free training course for teachers aimed at demystifying artificial intelligence and prompt engineering, the organizations said on Wednesday.
The move comes as OpenAI is stepping up efforts to highlight the positive role in education of its ChatGPT chatbot whose launch in November 2022 kicked off a generative AI craze and made it one of the world's fastest-growing applications.
Trained on reams of data, generative AI can create brand-new humanlike content, helping users spin up term papers, complete science homework and even write entire novels. ChatGPT's launch - in the middle of the school year - caught teachers off-guard when they realized it could be used as a cheating and plagiarism tool, which then sparked a backlash and school bans.
OpenAI, backed by Microsoft and other investors and valued at $157 billion in its last funding round, has formed a dedicated team to support what it says is the responsible use of AI in education and learning, led by former Coursera executive Leah Belsky.
More about OpenAI education efforts on Reuters
Agentforce World Tour | New York City
Join leaders at Salesforce as they show you what AI was meant to be: humans with agents driving customer success together.
H, the AI startup that raised $220M, launches its first product: Runner H for ‘agentic’ applications
H, the Paris startup founded by Google alums, made a big splash last summer when, out of the blue, it announced a seed round of $220 million before releasing a single product. Three months later, still without a product, that splash started to look like a catastrophic flood when three of the company’s five co-founders left over “operational and business disagreements.”
But the company has kept swimming, and today it’s announcing its first product: Runner H, an “agentic” AI aimed at businesses and developers across tasks like quality assurance and process automation. It’s built atop the startup’s own, proprietary “compact” LLM based on just 2 billion parameters.
H has set up a waitlist for Runner H on its site. CEO Charles Kantor said that it will be releasing APIs to those on the list over the coming days to use agents “off the shelf” that have been pre-built by H, as well as for developers to create their own. Access to the API will also come along with access to something called H-Studio to test and manage how these services work. Initially, using those APIs will be free, and later there will be a payment model introduced.
More about AI startup H’s new Runner on Tech Crunch
Nvidia Nearly Doubles Revenue As Demand For AI Chips Stays High
Chipmaker Nvidia nearly doubled revenue with demand for their powerful artificial intelligence chip maintaining rapid growth. Editor-in-chief at Investopedia, Caleb Silver, details what it means for the tech and AI industry.
Thats all for today, however new advancements, investments, and partnerships are happening as you read this. AI is moving fast, subscribe today to stay informed.