Japanese Chip Packaging Giant Kyocera Launches $100 Million AI Startup Funds

Kyocera has unveiled two funds totaling $100 million for startups focused on technologies including artificial intelligence, renewable energy and mobility.

Oct 31, 2024

The Kyoto-based company has set aside $60 million to invest in early-stage startups in the U.S., the Middle East and Africa through its Kyocera Venture Fund-I over a 10-year period. It is pouring another $40 million in early to growth-stage startups in Asia via the Kyocera Venture Innovation Fund-I over the same period.

The two funds, both launched in April, target startups developing AI-related software and hardware, says Shouichi Nakagawa, senior general manager of corporate R&D group at Kyocera, in an interview in October. Its U.S.- and EMEA-focused Kyocera Venture Fund-I has since invested in Chipletz, a Texas-based chip packaging startup spun off from billionaire Lisa Su’s chip giant AMD, as well as Mixed-Signal Devices, a California-headquartered company that develops timing devices used in data centers and telecommunications.

Chipletz has developed an advanced chip packaging technology that allows the combination of individual chips without interposers, which are connectors that facilitate electrical signals. By eliminating interposers, chips can be connected more closely together to allow faster processing speeds. This technology has become increasingly important amid the AI boom for higher performing chips and technical challenges to make components inside a semiconductor smaller.

Read the Kyocera press release about the new Venture Funds

Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, Richard Socher & Prem Akkaraju Discuss the Future of AI Beyond Models Like ChatGPT

The panel "BEYOND GPT MODELS — WHAT IS THE DECADE AHEAD?" took place at the King Abdulaziz International Conference Center in Riyadh on October 30, 2024, during the 8th Edition of Future Investment Initiative. #fII8

Large language models are demonstrating remarkable capabilities in understanding and generating human language. OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo, for example, features a context window of 128,000 tokens, a significant increase from the original GPT-4's 8,192 tokens. What breakthroughs lie ahead for these AI systems as they reshape industries and impact daily life?

Robert Downey Jr. Plans to Fight AI Recreations From Beyond the Grave

Robert Downey Jr. has declared that he will sue any future Hollywood executives who try to re-create his likeness using AI digital replicas, as reported by Variety. His comments came during an appearance on the "On With Kara Swisher" podcast, where he discussed AI's growing role in entertainment.

"I intend to sue all future executives just on spec," Downey told Swisher when discussing the possibility of studios using AI or deepfakes to re-create his performances after his death. When Swisher pointed out he would be deceased at the time, Downey responded that his law firm "will still be very active."

The Oscar winner expressed confidence that Marvel Studios would not use AI to re-create his Tony Stark character, citing his trust in decision-makers there. "I am not worried about them hijacking my character's soul because there's like three or four guys and gals who make all the decisions there anyway and they would never do that to me," he said.

More about the actors firm stance against digital recreations of his likeness.

Board of AI Changemakers: Shou Chew, Jack Hidary, Benjamin Horowitz & More

The panel "THIRD BOARD OF CHANGEMAKERS: AI" took place at the King Abdulaziz International Conference Center in Riyadh on October 29, 2024, during the 8th Edition of the Future Investment Initiative. #fII8

AI is quickly moving from a topic of theoretical debate to a core driver of business strategy and global competition. According to McKinsey, global AI adoption surged to 72% in 2024, a significant increase from the 50% adoption rate observed in previous years. How can companies leverage AI’s potential to create new value, accelerate growth, and build the high-efficiency business models that will define future success?

SPEAKERS: Shou Chew, CEO, TikTok Jack Hidary, CEO, SandboxAQ Benjamin Horowitz, Co-Founder & General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz Travis Kalanick, CEO, CSS/Cloud Kitchens Ruth Porat, President & CIO, Alphabet & Google Jay Puri, EVP, Worldwide Field Operations, Nvidia Eric Schmidt, Co-founder with his wife, Wendy, Schmidt Sciences; Former CEO & Chairman, Google, KBE.

Chanel’s CEO Went to Microsoft HQ and Asked ChatGPT to Show Her a Picture of Her Company’s Leadership. They Were All Men in Unfashionable Suits

Chanel’s second female global CEO Leena Nair, who has worked to increase gender diversity in the workplace, recently learned that OpenAI’s ChatGPT had a much different idea about the demographic makeup of the legacy luxury brand.

Nair and her team visited Microsoft’s Seattle headquarters and spent time experimenting with ChatGPT, Nair said in a recent Stanford Graduate School of Business “View from the Top” interview.

“We’re like, ‘Show us a picture of a senior leadership team from Chanel visiting Microsoft’—it is all men in suits,” she said. Nair’s Silicon Valley trip also included a visit to Google and other tech firms—part of Chanel’s push into AI investment. But she said the image ChatGPT created to depict her team failed to account for Chanel’s employee makeup of 76% women—including the company’s own chief executive. She added that 96% of the brand’s clientele is also women.

“It was a 100% male team, not even in fashionable clothes,” she said. “Like, come on. This is what you’ve got to offer?” An OpenAI spokesperson told Fortune that bias continues to be a significant issue in artificial intelligence the industry is addressing. “We are continuously iterating on our models to reduce bias and mitigate harmful outputs,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

Trillium, Built to Power the Future of AI

To deliver the next frontier of models and enable you to do the same, we’re excited to announce Trillium, our sixth-generation TPU, the most performant and most energy-efficient TPU to date.

More than a decade ago, Google recognized the need for a first-of-its-kind chip for machine learning. In 2013, we began work on the world’s first purpose-built AI accelerator, TPU v1, followed by the first Cloud TPU in 2017. Without TPUs, many of Google’s most popular services — such as real-time voice search, photo object recognition, and interactive language translation, along with the state-of-the-art foundation models such as Gemini, Imagen, and Gemma — would not be possible.

Trillium TPUs achieve an impressive 4.7X increase in peak compute performance per chip compared to TPU v5e. We doubled the High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) capacity and bandwidth, and also doubled the Interchip Interconnect (ICI) bandwidth over TPU v5e.

Additionally, Trillium is equipped with third-generation SparseCore, a specialized accelerator for processing ultra-large embeddings common in advanced ranking and recommendation workloads. Trillium TPUs make it possible to train the next wave of foundation models faster and serve those models with reduced latency and lower cost. Critically, our sixth-generation TPUs are also our most sustainable: Trillium TPUs are over 67% more energy-efficient than TPU v5e.

Meta Platforms Is Pushing For The U.S. Government To Use Its Llama AI

Meta is “working with the public sector to adopt Llama across the US government,” according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The comment, made during his opening remarks for Meta’s Q3 earnings call on Wednesday, raises a lot of important questions: Exactly which parts of the government will use Meta’s AI models? What will the AI be used for? Will there be any kind of military-specific applications of Llama? Is Meta getting paid for any of this?

When I asked Meta to elaborate, spokesperson Faith Eischen told me via email that “we’ve partnered with the US State Department to see how Llama could help address different challenges — from expanding access to safe water and reliable electricity, to helping support small businesses.”

She also said the company has “been in touch with the Department of Education to learn how Llama could help make the financial aid process more user friendly for students and are in discussions with others about how Llama could be utilized to benefit the government.”

IA Summit 24: CIO Enterprise AI Strategy

Explore how top companies are moving beyond AI experimentation to full-scale enterprise deployment with Marco Argenti, GoldmanSachs‬, Michelle Horn, Delta‬ ), Swamy Kocherlakota, S&P Global‬, Lari Hämäläinen, McKinsey‬, and Ajay Patel, Apptio‬ during the "CIO Enterprise AI Strategy" panel at the 2024 IA Summit.

The panelists focused on three main topics: the importance of data quality and governance to a successful AI implementation, the critical need to bridge the AI talent gap through both hiring and internal development, and the strategic integration of AI into core business processes to drive measurable ROI.

They also emphasized the importance of creating safe, compliant environments for experimentation and focusing AI efforts on areas like customer experience, operational efficiency, and developer productivity. The overarching message was clear: successful AI strategies are business-driven, focused on real-world impact, and require careful alignment of technology, talent, and data.

Thats all for today, however new advancements, investments, and partnerships are happening as you read this. Subscribe today, so you don’t miss any AI related news.