🥟 Chao-Down #86 VC funding for AI falls, Google's plan to fight deepfakes, Amazon adding ChatGPT-style experiences to search, Europe leads in building guardrails around AI

Has peak AI hit the venture capital industry?

Despite a flurry of AI products being released left and right, VCs have been more hesitant deploying capital and have chosen to remain on the sidelines. Based off a report by CBInsights, during Q1 2023, AI startups raised $5.4B, a 66% drop from the previous year's figure and a 43% decline quarter-over-quarter.

So, while you very well could see VCs opine about AI all over Twitter, just know that your favorite VC might not be putting money where his mouth is.

-Alex, your resident Chaos Coordinator.

What happened in AI? 📰

Amazon Plans to Add ChatGPT-Style Search to Its Online Store (Bloomberg)

How Europe is leading the world in building guardrails around AI | (AP News)

Google I/O and the Coming AI Battles – (Stratechery by Ben Thompson)

As AI-generated fakes proliferate, Google plans to fight back (Ars Technica)

OpenAI’s red team: the experts hired to ‘break’ ChatGPT (Financial Times)

Police near Seattle issue warning about AI phone scammers impersonating family members (GeekWire)

Always be Learnin’ 📕 📖

OpenAI's Moat Is Stronger Than You Think (Airplane)

How Layoffs Hurt Companies - Knowledge at Wharton (UPenn)

Prompt Ensembles Make LLMs More Reliable (Substack)

Projects to Keep an Eye On 🛠

Real Multithreading is Coming to Python - Learn How You Can Use It Now | (Martin Heinz)

microsoft/guidance: A guidance language for controlling large language models. (Github)

paulpierre/RasaGPT: 💬 RasaGPT is the first headless LLM chatbot platform built on top of Rasa and Langchain. Built w/ Rasa, FastAPI, Langchain, LlamaIndex, SQLModel, pgvector, ngrok, telegram (Github)

Teach-O-Matic - Instructional "how to videos" on any topic (Google Colab)

The Latest in AI Research 💡

Self-Chained Image-Language Model for Video Localization and Question Answering (arxiv)

EfficientViT: Memory Efficient Vision Transformer with Cascaded Group Attention (Github)

Neural LiDAR Fields for Novel View Synthesis (NVIDIA)

The World Outside of AI 🌎

Post-SVB Collapse, Venture Debt for Tech Startups Is Drying Up (Bloomberg)

Consumer debt passes $17 trillion for the first time despite slide in mortgage demand (CNBC)

Repelled by high car prices, Americans are holding on to their vehicles longer than ever | (AP News)

What Ending US Covid Emergency Means for Vaccines, Tests, Drugs (Bloomberg)

Lyft Will Discontinue Pooled Rides, Boost Airport Rides (Bloomberg)

One Last Bite 😋