Delivery drones, Google leaked document, a new Twitter CEO, and many more...
What's Up Tech? #137
Welcome to our 137th newsletter. It was written with 🖤 by Anas El Aissaoui, Henry Waldersee, and Angèle Sahraoui
In 2023, baby vc is proudly sponsored by OneRagtime which will fund enrolment fees for the 2023 VC bootcamps participants, to promote diversity and inclusivity in the VC ecosystem — giving everyone the opportunity to succeed, regardless of their background.
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Fundraisings from last week with builders ai and wingcopter
News from last week with a new Twitter CEO, Google IO Keynote and the battle between big tech and open source
Internship & Job offers of the week
Wishing you a pleasant read 🖤
💰 Builders.ai is now backed by Microsoft (🇬🇧)
Microsoft is investing in Builder.ai, a company that provides no-code application creation solutions using AI (their motto being “We make Building Software as Easy as Ordering Pizza”). It has taken an equity stake in the London-based code-building platform. The platform uses different blocks of code to build apps. 👨💻
The partnership will allow Microsoft to integrate Builder.ai's services into Teams and Azure, and this will allow users to build business apps within the platform. The collaboration aims at creating complementary add-ons more easily for Teams, a video and collaboration platform used by over 300M people worldwide. The partnership is aimed at small businesses, while large companies already use GPT-4, integrated with Azure's cloud ecosystem. 🤝
The move is aimed at reducing the gap between Microsoft and Google's Chrome search engine, which generates $200B in advertising revenue. The companies declined to disclose the financial terms of the deal, but clearly Microsoft is ramping up its AI effort to become the leader in the field. 👀
Microsoft makes strategic investment into Builder.ai, integrates its services into Teams
🚁 Wingcopter raised €40M to deploy its drone delivery solution (🇩🇪)
German startup Wingcopter, known for its delivery drones used primarily for transporting medicine and goods to remote areas, has secured €40M in funding from the European Investment Bank (EIB), which brings the company's total funding to €100M. The financing will be used to further develop Wingcopter's hardware line and launch a new logistics and delivery services business centered around its drone fleet.
Wingcopter has already started to deploy its drones for various purposes in Africa and now intends to expand its services in other emerging regions, including Asia and Latin America. The company also plans to develop a hydrogen-powered model to extend its drones' range. Lastly, let’s note that the EIB's investment aligns well with Europe's environmental mandates as Wingcopter helps driving the number of (polluting) delivery vehicles down. ♻️
Wingcopter, Germany’s drone delivery startup, raises another $44M from the EIB
🔍 And the new Twitter CEO is…
Elon Musk has announced that he will step down as CEO of Twitter and serve as its executive chair and chief technology officer, with a new candidate set to start in six weeks. Linda Yaccarino, formerly head of advertising at NBCUniversal, is the one who was elected—and who agreed to take on the role. 🤝
Musk purchased Twitter last October and took charge as CEO, but plans to step down before the end of 2023, and has significantly overhauled Twitter’s policies and features during his time in charge. His decision to appoint a new CEO is expected to appease Tesla investors, who have been concerned about his focus on Twitter. 👀
New Twitter CEO says she is excited to help to transform the company
👀 Multiple format AI and new search engine use cases
Last week, Google held its annual developer conference, the Google IO Keynote day. During this conference, CEO S. Pichai had only one word on his lips: AI. Indeed, Google wants to deploy its generative AI throughout its ecosystem and its search engine. The new version of Google Search is designed to help users with complicated search queries. 🔍
This could lead to major changes in the way search engines work: fewer website visits for media companies, bloggers, and other businesses, as Google and Bing become more adept at generating answers to questions using large language models (LLM).
With PaLM2, Google’s latest LLM, CEO S. Pichai highlights that the model will function as the foundation for most of the new AI features of the company. For instance, Google has released MusicLM, a new experimental AI tool that can generate music from text descriptions. Users can type in prompts like “soulful jazz for a dinner party” or “create an industrial techno sound that is hypnotic” and have the tool create several versions of the song. On the other hand, Meta is capable of producing content in multiple formats with their new AI tool ImagineBind as well. It can generate both video and sound based on a text description. This is a significant development because previous AI tools have been limited to generating content in a single format. 📈
A lot of business and startups will emerge from these new significant steps in the AI field. Charles Hudson, a venture capitalist at Precursor, considers that there are too many "wrapper" companies stitching together to pre-existing companies. Let’s see who will win the battle to transform this innovation into a practical go-to-market advantage. 👀
Google I/O 2023 is a wrap — here’s a list of everything announced
🥊 Big Tech vs Open Source: who has the advantage?
In the last few days, a leaked internal document from Google, initially shared by an anonymous user on a Discord Server, has been making the rounds in AI communities and beyond. In this document, the writer mentions how, in their opinion, Google and other AI trailblazers such as OpenAI have no defensibility in the long-term. The speed at which open source communities are catching up to the BigTech AI researchers is only just accelerating as we see open source versions of Facebook’s LLaMA or OpenAI’s GPT-3 being released for free in the last few weeks. 👀
Open source communities have been solving issues that Big Tech has been struggling to solve, such as running foundational models on mobile devices, fine tuning models on personal laptops and training language models to be multimodal in just a few hours. Beyond that, open source communities are “doing things with $100 and 13B params that [Google] struggle with at $10M and 540B. And they are doing so in weeks, not months”.
So what does this mean for VCs and entrepreneurs? First and foremost, the document illustrates the degree to which even the Big Tech companies with their seemingly unlimited resources can still be disrupted. Secondly, just as Big Tech companies and AI R&D teams must account for open source in their strategy, so must entrepreneurs and investors. If entrepreneurs do not leverage these communities, they will be competing on two fronts against both Big Tech and open source. For investors, developing an AI thesis must account for the open source community and consider how disruptive the accelerating open source development will be to their thesis and investments. 📝
Internships
Analyst Growth - Eurazeo (Paris)
VC Analyst - Eurazeo (Paris or London)
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Take care, and see you next week,
The whole baby vc crew 🖤