Lumian Gen AI Newsletter Issue #17

⏱️ News Flash

The 2-Minute Scoop to Keep You in the Loop

1/ OpenAI’s announces first developer conference on November 6 in San Francisco

Mark your calendars! On November 6, OpenAI is hosting its inaugural DevDay in San Francisco, gathering techies for a sneak peek at the latest in AI wizardry. Over 2 million devs are already harnessing the power of GPT and now's your chance to join the magic live. Grab your spot—or catch the keynote from your couch—and dive into a future!

2/ Anthropic joins the paid chatbot field with Claude Pro

Claude.ai, the AI assistant adored for its reasoning and speed, has launched its premium version, Claude Pro. For $20/month, you can enjoy 5x more usage compared to the free tier. While Claude has been trained on recent data and has impressive context handling, ChatGPT's vast array of plugins and broader international reach might still give it the upper hand for many users.

3/ Time magazine announces their list of 100 influential people in AI

Time Magazine just dropped their "Time 100 AI" list, showcasing the brightest brains behind the bots. While the list dazzles with AI all-stars, Twitter was abuzz with notable omissions like Juergen Schmidhuber. Dive in, and maybe discover a few names you've never heard of changing the AI landscape!

🧠 Midjourney's Meteoric Rise

Bootstrapping to a Billion-Dollar AI Empire!

In a world increasingly dominated by VC-backed unicorns, not all trailblazing tech stories begin with a hefty check from Silicon Valley. The story of Midjourney, a brainchild of David Holz, stands testament to this.

The Vision: Nestled in the heart of San Francisco, David launched Midjourney in February 2022. It wasn't just another startup – it was his dream of marrying human creativity with AI's limitless possibilities.

The Magic: A seamless integration with Discord transformed the way artists interacted with tech. With the "/imagine" command, users found themselves artists of the future, painting with words to create AI-powered masterpieces.

The Numbers: David's vision quickly bore fruit. By the end of its first year:

• 💰 Midjourney raked in over $250 million in revenue

• 🤖 Art went viral, with over 1 million AI-generated pieces

• 🌐 Their digital footprint? A staggering 48.5 million website visits in just June 2023

The Catch: But it wasn't all AI rainbows and sunsets. With a tight-knit team of just 11 and surging popularity, challenges around copyrights and potential AI biases emerged.

The Lesson: So, what’s the secret sauce behind Midjourney's success? Authenticity. A genuine passion for art and tech, a commitment to community engagement, and leveraging the right platforms at the right time. And all this, without chasing VC dollars.

Remember, it's not always about the money – sometimes, it's about the journey.

🤑 Fundraising

The (AI) Intelligent Investor

• Imbue raises $200M to build AI systems that can reason

• Story Protocol Launches IP Ownership Network with $54 Million in funding

• AI reading coach startup Ello raises $15M to bolster child literacy

🤖 Nerd Out

Technical and Business Readings

• India’s Reliance partners with Nvidia to build large language model

• Product-Led AI by Greylock

• LLMs Are Not All You Need

😜 Techie Tots

When 'dada' upgrades to 'data'

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Best,

Robin and Saswat7