The Prompt is a weekly rundown of AI’s buzziest startups, biggest breakthroughs, and business deals. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here.
Welcome back to The Prompt.
Through its startup fund, OpenAI is backing a personalized AI health coach startup, Thrive AI Health. The AI coach would monitor a user’s health habits in terms of sleep, food, movement, stress management and social interaction and provide “real-time nudges” to make improvements, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in an article for Time. Thrive Global, which makes software for productivity and behavior change, is also backing the startup but the amount of the investment has not been disclosed. The app could be fed personal medical data to guide health recommendations. But using AI to offer health-related advice can be gnarly, with concerns ranging from data privacy to possible hallucinations. And, health coaches are a cluttered market, with several big players already, such as Google and Apple.
Now, let’s get into the headlines.
BIG PLAYS
Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia plans to use virtual AI teaching assistants in the classroom, Axios reported. The college is partnering with VictoryXR, an education-focused virtual learning company, to create animated 3D avatars that will give lessons and converse with students using large language models from OpenAI.
ETHICS+LAW
Design startup Figma removed a feature that let users create templates of app designs with generative AI after the tool produced designs that closely resembled Apple’s weather app. CEO Dylan Field posted on X that the company is temporarily disabling the “Make Designs” feature, which used “off the shelf” models trained on commissioned design systems. “I hate missing the mark, especially on something that I believe is so fundamentally important to the future of design,” he said.
AI DEALS OF THE WEEK
AI startup Hebbia, whose AI agents help businesses sort through and analyze different documents like regulatory filings and PDFs to answer complex questions better than consumer chatbots, raised $130 million in a Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, Bloomberg reported. It’s valued at around $700 million and claims it accounts for 2% of OpenAI’s daily traffic.
Plus, Volley, a startup that develops AI-powered games that can be controlled by someone’s voice instead of controllers, has raised $55 million in funding, according to The Information.
DEEP DIVE
Skild AI robots can perform a wide variety of tasks including identifying and grasping objects.
Skild AIRobots, whether they are bipedal humanoids handling basic factory tasks or four-legged military “robot dogs” intended for urban combat, need brains. Historically, these have been highly specialized and purpose-built. But a Pittsburgh-based robotics startup claims it’s created a single off-the-shelf intelligence that can be plugged into different robots to enable basic functions.
Founded in May 2023 by Abhinav Gupta and Deepak Pathak, two former Carnegie Mellon University professors, Skild AI has created a foundational model for what it describes as a “general purpose brain” that can be slotted into a variety of robots, enabling them to do things like climbing steep slopes, walking over objects obstructing its path and identifying and picking up items. The company announced Tuesday it has raised $300 million at a $1.5 billion valuation in a Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Ventures, Softbank, Coatue and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos with participation from Felicis Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Amazon and General Catalyst, among others.
More impressive, still: The robots using Skild’s AI models also demonstrated “emergent capabilities”— entirely new abilities they weren’t taught. These are often simple, like recovering an object that slips out of hand or rotating an object. But they demonstrate the model’s ability to perform unanticipated tasks, a tendency that occurs in advanced artificial systems like large language models.
Skild has pulled this off by training its model on a massive database of text, images and video — one it claims is 1000 times larger than those used by its rivals. To create this massive database, the cofounders, both former AI researchers at Meta, blended a mix of data collection techniques, which they have developed and tested over years of research.
Skild AI faces steep competition from a string of robotics companies that have emerged with billions of dollars in venture funding thanks to the AI boom. Industry behemoth OpenAI recently revived its robotics team to supply models to robotics companies, Forbes first reported. Then there’s outfits like humanoid robotics company Figure AI, helmed by billionaire CEO Brett Adcock, and Covariant, an OpenAI spin off that is building ChatGPT for robots and has raised over $200 million to do it.
Read the full story in Forbes.
YOUR WEEKLY DEMO
ChatGPT’s coding capabilities have a cutoff date, a new study found. After asking the chatbot to solve 700 coding problems across five programming languages from LeetCode, a platform used for coding interview preparation, the study found that ChatGPT was able to generate accurate and functional code for problems that existed in LeetCode before 2021. For problems that were added after 2021, ChatGPT struggled to understand the meaning of questions–, even basic ones. That’s because the system has learned how to code by seeing older problems, researcher Yutian Tang said.
AI INDEX
$600 billion
Revenue AI companies will have to earn every year to pay for AI infrastructure such as data centers, according to an analysis by Sequoia Capital Partner David Cahn.
QUIZ
This “unloved” AI company’s stock reached a three-month high amid a broader chip rally.
- Tesla
- Corning
- Nvidia
- Intel
Check if you got it right here.
MODEL BEHAVIOR
A new generative AI app called Pulpit AI allows pastors to upload sermons and repurpose them into more than 20 different types of additional content that can be distributed across social media channels, videos, blog posts and emails. Cofounders Michael Whittle and Jake Sweetman said the app could help churches save time and money in their communications.
