DeepMind FACTS Grounding πŸ“š, largest AI startup fundings of 2024 πŸ’°, Tencent’s music foundation model 🎡

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The FACTS Grounding benchmark evaluates LLMs' ability to generate factually accurate responses grounded in source material to reduce hallucinations. β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ  β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ 
TLDR

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TLDR AI 2025-01-07




Building in the age of AI: Startup lessons for early-stage growth (Sponsor)


In an era where AI is reshaping how businesses operate, the journey of building an early-stage startup has never been more dynamicβ€”or complex. How do founders navigate finding product-market fit, delegation, and scaling, all while adapting to technological innovations?

Join on January 14 at 3 pm PT for a fireside chat with Christina Cacioppo, CEO and Co-founder of Vanta, and Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and Founder of LTSE, as they explore the journey of the modern startup founder.

Eric and Christina will discuss:

  • Learnings from their own experiences
  • How the principles of β€œfounder mode” and lean methodology intersect
  • The ways that today’s AI-driven landscape shapes early-stage growth and startup success

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Headlines & Launches




FACTS Grounding: A new benchmark for evaluating the factuality of large language models (5 minute read)


The FACTS Grounding benchmark evaluates LLMs’ ability to generate factually accurate responses grounded in provided source material to reduce hallucinations. A leaderboard on Kaggle tracks industry progress, with initial results from leading LLMs. The evaluation involves diverse, long-form examples judged by multiple LLMs to ensure comprehensive and bias-free assessments.




Gen AI Present and Future: A Conversation with Rashmi Kumar, SVP and CIO at Medtronic (8 minute read)


Medtronic is leveraging AI to enhance productivity, automate tasks, and improve decision-making using tools like AI-driven contract management and supply chain optimizations. The company is focusing on AI applications in healthcare, such as precision in diagnostics, robotic-assisted surgeries, and image analysis for early detection of conditions. Medtronic balances internal AI R&D with collaborations, emphasizing partnerships with tech companies and AI startups.




The Largest AI Startup Funding Deals Of 2024 (6 minute read)


AI dominated 2024’s startup funding with Databricks raising $10B and OpenAI $6.6B. xAI secured $12B across two rounds, while Waymo raised $5.6B. Other notable raises include Anthropic at $4B and Anduril Industries with $1.5B.

🧠

Research & Innovation




Kalman Filter for 3D Vehicle Tracking (9 minute read)


HybridTrack proposes a novel multi-object tracking method that integrates a data-driven Kalman Filter.




Bridging LiDAR and Camera Detection (18 minute read)


TiGDistill-BEV introduces a novel approach to improve camera-based 3D object detectors by distilling knowledge from LiDAR using depth supervision and BEV feature distillation.




Face Video Restoration (5 minute read)


SVDR is a unified framework for face video restoration that supports tasks such as BFR, Colorization, Inpainting, and their combinations within one cohesive system.

πŸ§‘β€πŸ’»

Engineering & Resources




Tencent’s Music Foundation Model (GitHub Repo)


Tencent AI Lab’s Muq is a large music foundation model pre-trained via Self-Supervised Learning (SSL). It is SOTA in various MIR tasks.




Talking Face Video Editing (GitHub Repo)


JoyGen is a novel two-stage framework for talking-face generation. It combines audio-driven lip motion generation and visual appearance synthesis.




Multi-vision Reasoning Benchmark (GitHub Repo)


The MS-PR benchmark evaluates Vision-Language Models on sensor-specific reasoning, enhanced by DNA optimization to address information gaps between images and sensors.

🎁

Miscellaneous




Emerging Wedges in Vertical AI Startups (7 minute read)


Vertical AI startups are rapidly gaining traction by focusing on four key areas: voice automation, unstructured data parsing, verticalized search, and content generation. These technologies enable startups to address specific industry pain points, enhancing efficiency and accessibility while reducing costs. As these companies grow, they may evolve their offerings and potentially become essential systems of record within their industries.




Is AI hitting a wall? (15 minute read)


AI model pre-training improvements may be stalling, according to experts like Ilya Sutskever, but the perception of an AI progress plateau could be due to outdated evaluation methods. Despite scaling challenges, AI’s potential continues with untapped data sources and synthetic data, enhancing capabilities across various domains. Advances in teaching models reasoning and using new data could unlock significant improvements, suggesting AI development remains robust.




Sorry Human, You’re Wrong (7 minute read)


ChatGPT o1 Pro, despite its hefty $200 monthly fee, shows only marginal improvements over its predecessor. It fails key identification tests and displays an unsettling confidence in incorrect answers. This rigidity raises concerns about its reliability in critical scenarios, such as insurance or health discussions. The persistence of such behavior warrants closer evaluation and development adjustments.

⚑

Quick Links




Beyond RAG basics: Advanced strategies for AI applications with Elastic (Sponsor)


Go beyond the proof-of-concept stage for RAG applications. Get the highlights to understand the 5 layers of RAG architecture, advanced techniques, and scaling. Read the blog




The year of AI: 12 events that shaped the sector in 2024 (7 minute read)


European AI startups are experiencing significant growth, with $11bn expected to be invested in 2024, up from $6bn in 2023.




Meta’s AI video editing features are coming to Instagram (2 minute read)


Meta plans to introduce Movie Gen, an AI video editing tool, on Instagram in 2025.




Apple in talks with Tencent, ByteDance to roll out AI features in China, sources say (3 minute read)


Apple is in early talks with Tencent and ByteDance to integrate their AI models into iPhones sold in China.

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