Money Flows in Generative AI

Author

Ardy Ala
26 Jan • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

newslounge.co · Jan 26, 2024

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on Today’s menu:

  • Money in Generative AI

  • ‘Dream State’ A Short Film By Ross Sneddon

  • Ad Design with AI - Animation Project

  • New AI tools and more…

-Ardy

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HEADLINE

Where is All the Money Going in Generative AI?

2024 is shaping up to be a significant year for generative AI startups. With a staggering $14.1 billion already invested across 86 deals by the second quarter of 2023, the industry is witnessing unprecedented growth. This surge is led by five trailblazing companies:

OpenAI: The brains behind ChatGPT, bagging a colossal $10 billion in a corporate minority round.
Inflection: Innovating in human-computer interfaces, they've secured $1.3 billion in Series B funding.
Anthropic: Known for developing AI models, they've raised $850 million through a Series C and corporate minority round.
Adept: Their enterprise-focused AI model, ACT-1, attracted $350 million in Series B funding.
Cohere: Specializing in text generation and classification tasks, they've garnered $270 million in their Series C round.

Of the $14.1 billion in funding, $387 million has been allocated to visual media, encompassing photo and video editing tools, AI avatars, and graphic and product design applications.


🚨Among the 360+ identified generative AI companies, 27% haven't raised any external equity funding. Over half are in the early stages, predominantly Series A or earlier.

CBINSIGHTS

💲💲Where is the Money Flowing?

The bulk of the investment is flowing into two main areas:

  1. Generative AI Infrastructure: This category, crucial for developing large language models, has attracted over 70% of the funding since Q3’22.

  2. Cross-Industry Generative AI Applications: Accounting for a quarter of the funding since Q3’22, this sector focuses on text and visual media generation, as well as generative interfaces.

In 2023, RunwayML and Pika Labs secured significant funding. Pika Labs, a video AI startup, raised $55 million in a series A round of funding.

-Ardy

CASE STUDY

Revolutionizing Ad Design with AI - Animation Project

Ardy Ala

Smooth Animation inside ComfyUI:

The video and the full project breakdown will be released in a couple of days, but for now, let's look at some of the main steps involved in creating a smooth, full animation inside ComfyUI using very basic renders from Houdini.

Houdini BTY Pass

Reference photo

💡When creating a system in your 3D application for use in ComfyUI, there are several factors to consider:

  • Planning properly from the start is crucial to achieve the best results in AI.

  • It's usually better to avoid extreme Dutch camera angles unless there is a very good reason for using them.

  • Rendering without a ground plane can yield better results for the main subject. However, this approach may lead to some inaccuracies in perspective during interpolation in Stable Diffusion.

  • The background also plays a role. If anything other than the main subject is present in the z-depth pass, the results for the main subject might be compromised compared to a scenario where these additional assets are not loaded. Having only the main subject in the depth pass gives you more creative freedom with the prompt, as it provides more breathing room for creativity.

  • Selecting the right checkpoint, motion model, and text prompt is extremely crucial. You could have the perfect setup, but tweaking your text prompt according to your checkpoint could yield significantly better results.

🚨Stay tuned for the full video.

-AA

FRAME BY FRAME

‘Dream State’ A Short Film By Ross Sneddon

Ross Sneddon

When I visited the Vanderbilt in NYC, I was completely floored by the experience. A 360 view of one of the most metropolis cities in the world. It's a powerful culture that we live in, where the desire for something more, is continuous. This is what gave me the idea for my short film, Dream State.

NYC is an impossibly massive and stunning city, that feels like it was built in someone's dream. The sheer scale and density, is a wonder in itself. It's so overwhelming at times, it's hard to experience the moment. City breaks are usually fast paced and can at times feels like you haven't arrived at your destination yet. This sense of being in transit the entire time.

Ross Sneddon

Every now and then, I come across films that genuinely grab my attention. They make you think, and it's hard to pinpoint exactly what makes them work so well - is it the narrative, the imagery, the music, or just the perfect blend of all these elements? This is definitely one of those moments!

-AA

AROUND THE WORLD OF AI

3D will change forever with tools like STMC. Now we can create 3D human animations from text

TokenFlow is a brand new free AI video generator that you can use to create AI videos.

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