Enterprise Weekly #470: OpenAI & Google AI Showdown, What It Means For Startups, and More
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This week, the battle between OpenAI and Google heated up.
On Monday, OpenAI unveiled GPT-4o – a multimodal model that’s 50% cheaper and 2X faster than GPT-4 Turbo with capacity to understand real-time commands across voice, text, and images, translate speech between 50 languages, and interpret emotions from a person’s tone of voice or facial expression.
On Tuesday, at Google’s developer conference, the company announced dozens of new products and features – chief among them being AI Overviews, a revamped “Search Generative Experience” promising to give billions of Google users an AI-generated summary at the top of their search results.
While these announcements captured sweeping headlines, Danny chatted with Pitchbook about how this impacts the enterprise startup landscape, beyond the obvious sci-fi allure for consumers.
OpenAI’s large-scale cost reduction and latency improvements underscore a few key points that we’ve been shouting from the rooftops:
Building standalone LLMs is a capital intensive race to the bottom.
“Thin layer” startups are not going anywhere — as long as models continue to advance, builders will find new use cases to attach AI too.
Founders will continue to navigate the LLM Adoption Curve, using the flavor-of-the-month’s model until they can collate enough proprietary data to build their own models and differentiate from the pack.
We’ve already seen indie model developers create local and low latency voice models, however, we’re more interested in how open-source juggernauts like Mistral, LLaMa, will react.
🍺 Join our waitlists for IRL Work-Bench events:
Wednesday, May 22: NY Enterprise Tech Meetup with a female VC panel from a16z, Lux Capital and Work-Bench on what it takes to get funding and what the stickiest tech trends are in today’s environment.
Wednesday, June 5th: NYC Enterprise Operators Retreat with a fantastic lineup of speakers from Grafana, Linear, Databricks, Pinecone, Hugging Face, Retool, Merge, Clay, Chronosphere, and more
🖥️ Tactical (virtual) Work-Bench Enterprise Masterclasses:
Tuesday, June 18: Top Do's and Don'ts of Pricing Product at Seed with repeat founder and GTM advisor Rob Bailey
Wednesday, June 26: 10 Quick Wins to Grow Pipeline with OpenView’s Kyle Poyar
Wednesday, July 24: 5 Battle-Tested Leadership Tactics of Highly Successful Founders with David Politis, Founder of BetterCloud (acquired by Vista Equity)
📚 Read more news:
WSJ: AI Startups Are Making Their Home in New York. Can They Turn It Into an AI Powerhouse?
The Verge: OpenAI Strikes Reddit Deal to Train Its AI On Your Posts
📚 Read more (th)reads:
Company: Courier Health
Role: Strategic Account Executive
Technology: Patient Engagement Platform
Funding: $4M from Work-Bench
🌟 Company of the Week 🌟
GoodDay Software raises $6M led by FirstMark, Ridge Ventures and Others
Future of Work • Seed • Austin, TX
Founders: Kyle Hency (CEO), Dave Wardell (CPO), John Gully (CTO)
Numra raises $1.6M led by Elkstone
Future of Work • Pre-Seed • Dublin, Ireland
c/side raises $1.7M led by Scribble Ventures
Risk / Security • Pre-Seed • San Francisco, CA
Layer raises $2.3M led by Better Tomorrow Ventures
Future of Work • Pre-Seed • San Francisco, CA
Anthropos raises $2.7M led by Founderful
HR Tech • Pre-Seed • San Francisco, CA
Monitaur raises $6M led by Cultivation Capital
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series A • Boston, MA
LanceDB raises $8M led by CRV
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Seed • San Francisco, CA
Recall.ai raises $10M led by Ridge Ventures
Future of Work • Series A • San Francisco, CA
CoLab raises $21M led by Insight Partners
Collaboration / Productivity • Series B • St John’s, NL
Sona raises $27.5M led by Felicis
Future of Work • Series A • London, UK
Gorgias raises $29M led by Saastr and Alven
Sales / Marketing • Series C • San Francisco, CA
SmarterDx raises $50M led by Transformation Capital
Sales / Marketing • Series B • New York, NY
Alkira raises $100M led by Tiger Global
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • SeriesCB • San Jose, CA
GitKraken acquires CodeSee for an Undisclosed Amount
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Acquisition • Scottsdale, AZ