Investment in AI around 100 million, not billions!

3 innovation and digital news in 1 minute. Every Monday. Episode 371

Dubbing is the market for ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs is a text-to-speech software in 29 languages. The main use case is for dubbing short videos and games. ElevenLabs even has a dedicated “dubbing studio”. For that an investment of $80m in January 2024, mainly by iconic VC Andreessen Horowitz. Opinion: We’ve always wondered where the market is for text-to-speech and then comes ElevenLabs. The clear market is in dubbing! Dubbing short video sequences (makes sense!) and games (mini-games).

A well-defined market, a tech — it sounds like product-market fit!

Japan steps into LLM, in fact, SLM

Based in Tokyo, Sakana AI develops “Small Language Models” (SLM like Mistral 7B or Microsoft Phi-2). Japan is following other geographies to build its own LLM (in that case an SLM). They just gathered $30m from venture capital and telecommunication giant NTT. NTT also runs an LLM development called “Tsuzumi”. Opinion: Sakana AI claims to build nature-inspired intelligence. Every SLM has a focus and duty, the addition of them can solve larger problems. Like a bird, a fish (see logo) or a river that has a single-minded role to play in nature.

Nice analogy! And a good way to describe the advantages of SLM (and Mixture-of-Experts).

Luma AI for 3D

Just an app and an iPhone, then everyone can build a 3D photo. Just with a phone camera, no lidar, no complexity. This is the Luma Labs software (for iOS or Web). They gathered a last series B round, adding to $68.5m. Again with Andreessen Horowitz backing (as in the previous rounds). Opinion: The usage is for 3D capture in B2C but also a product photo transferred into 3D (and inserted on a website). The result can be exported to Unity or Unreal. The barrier for 3D goes lower again.

Try the app — amazing results (we tried)!