Strange Ventures

Excited to welcome two industry heavy hitters, Arianna McClain and Kathleen Osborne, who are joining us as Operating Partners at Strange Ventures! Arianna previously led research and insights teams at Doordash and Cruise, leveraging the power of data and design to help the fast-growing startups make savvy business and product decisions. Kathleen is a longtime PR veteran who has helped launch over 100+ companies, announced over $1B in funding, and helped to catapult under-the-radar businesses into renowned successes through the power of storytelling. For startups at the earliest stage, the ability to make strategic decisions quickly and compelling public narratives are incredibly powerful ways to get ahead. Welcome Arianna and Kathleen!

Congratulations to Archetype AI on their seed round! We were one of their first backers when we met them (almost a year ago now), and it's been incredible to see the growth. This is a team to watch. Read more about why we invested: https://lnkd.in/gXrnuADr 1. We believe that we will see increasing exploration into multimodality beyond computer vision and the semantic web in 2024 and onwards, as the ability to take in diverse sensor inputs leads to differentiated data sets and training. 2. Archetype AI is one of the few teams in the world that can take on this challenge. Previously, they have invented and shipped spatial and sensor technologies together, scaled in millions of consumer devices. 3. Any company building anything of value in the physical world can use Archetype AI to build intelligence on top of their sensors. For context, a car can contain more than 200 sensors. Large-scale industrials like factories or power grids can contain tens of thousands, if not millions of sensors in each facility. 4. Enables intelligence at every scale. Use-cases range from manufacturing and logistics tracking, robotics, consumer electronics. Because Newton, their Large Behavior Model, is designed to work with an extensive variety of inputs—from large-scale industrials to pico motion sensors—it enables intelligence at every scale. If you’re not following Archetype AI yet, you should. If you’re an enterprise ready to explore a pilot partnership, please reach out to me or info@archetypeai.io. They have a long waitlist, but will prioritize strategic use-cases. Developer access is coming soon. Sign up on their website to be notified. https://archetypeai.io

The latest in AI and creativity this week: 1. Now you're able to create consistent characters in Midjourney https://lnkd.in/ermUK485 2. Meet Devin, the AI software engineer with a side hustle on Upwork https://lnkd.in/dVubmeru 3. Deepgram launches Aura, a new text-to-speech API https://tcrn.ch/4cdAMaH 4. DeepMind and Stanford introduce RT-Sketch: A model that uses sketches to control robots https://lnkd.in/d7ZbJVPM 5. Chinese generative AI startup Alsphere, founded by former Bytedance execs, gets $14M funding to develop a rival to OpenAI’s Sora https://lnkd.in/dPrYFeG5 To get a curated update on AI and creativity, find us at thereview.strangevc.com

Ecstatic beyond measure that I'm the latest addition to the lineup at Strange Ventures.

We had a great chat with Victoria Weller at ElevenLabs on the emergent applications of Voice AI. Read the full report: strangevc.com/voice-ai

Happy Tuesday! Here’s our curated briefing of the news, partnerships, and experiments in AI and creativity. ✨ Inspiration: @javilopen created this evocative Miyazaki-esque animation using Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and RunwayML. https://lnkd.in/gpDMtr6T We will be publishing our living research report on Voice AI very soon. Don't miss it: subscribe at https://lnkd.in/gKFFM5xr 🔥 Latest news • OpenAI responds to a class-action lawsuit from book authors and disputes claims that “generative AI is derivative work” https://lnkd.in/g9Gbc6AQ • OpenAI releases a guide for teachers using ChatGPT in their classroom https://bit.ly/3r1P1gc 🤝 Partnerships • Sony and Universal Music Group-owned production music firm APM Music partners with AI startup Incantio to improve catalog discovery https://bit.ly/45NOj4S 🎓 Recent Academic Papers • Graph of Thoughts presents prompting approach that resembles human reasoning https://lnkd.in/gsk4T34e • NYU introduces technique for altering facial age https://bit.ly/3P7n8em • FaceChain, toolchain for portraits https://lnkd.in/gnWJ2zKd 🔧 Cool Tools and Experiments • Substack introduces AI-powered audio transcription tools for podcasts https://tcrn.ch/3qSwXVM • TikTok’s AR development platform Effect House exits beta, allowing creators to build AR effects for use in the video app https://tcrn.ch/44JjKfv 💰 Latest Fundings • OpenAI-backed language app Speak raises $16M to expand to the US https://tcrn.ch/3qSwXFg • AI-powered social platform BeFake secures $3M seed https://bit.ly/3qSwWRI • Martian Lawyers Club raises $2.2M for game personalization https://tcrn.ch/3qPJWaM

Wow. A new paper, TADA, proposes a simple but powerful method to generate animated 3D avatars just from text descriptions. In other news: OpenAI makes a power move by launching EnterpriseGPT. Meta introduces CodeLlama, an AI coding assistant, and open source platform Hugging Face raises a massive funding round valuing it at $4.5B. For more news like this on AI and the evolution of human creativity, check out research.strangevc.com or hit follow 👇 https://lnkd.in/gRyVbjwb

Google’s next-level AI model rumored to launch this fall, Microsoft adds game streaming to Xbox, MIT develops invisible BrightMarkers for enhanced 3D object interaction All this and more on Strange Daily Issue #7, out now on tinyurl.com/strangedaily and on Spotify: https://lnkd.in/ghneuUCV

Snapchat developer Kyle Goodrich builds a camera that turns your photos into generative art... instantly. 📸 The prototype references the composition and pose of the original photo, and uses it to influence the generative art work created using Stable Diffusion and ControlNet. It makes the resulting art work truly unique— generating it from an image captured in a moment in time. 🔮 For more inspiring projects, latest news, and key partnerships, read our latest issue of Strange Daily at tinyurl.com/strangedaily or listen to it on all major podcast platforms!