The Hidden World Of AI

Artificial Intelligence has been a popular topic for science fiction writers in books and movies for a long time. The last few months though, have seen a rise in its popularity with news publications. The emergence of ChatGPT and its numerous uses in multiple industries just keeps growing as we go. This is evident in the fact that the tool saw the users reach one million in just five days after its release. How’s that for a statistic!

While the Microsoft-backed chatbot owned by OpenAI is the one that garnered all the attention over the last couple of months, last week was dominated with news pieces, discussions and debates mulling over a new search engine war between ChatGPT and its Google owned counterpart – Bard. A week that was filled with twists and turns for the two chatbots and their tech giant backers.

To get up to speed with Microsoft, Google announced its own AI-powered chatbot, Bard. A day later, Microsoft announced that its browser, Bing, would soon be integrated with ChatGPT’s AI capabilities. This made Google make its next move, which was to tweet out a promotional video demonstrating the ability of Bard.

Unfortunately, in the video, a question asked to the chatbot came with a factual error in the answer, which led to a $100 billion devaluation in market share for Google. Reportedly, this wasn’t the only error that came to light. Others included a presenter for Google’s search event forgetting the phone that was to be used to demonstrate a feature and a few employees who didn’t know such an event was taking place at all.


All this was preceded with the top brass being worried about “reputational risks” of releasing an AI tool too early in a meeting in December, as per reports. The plan to hold out longer seemed less in focus once ChatGPT got so far ahead, despite the belief that Bard won’t be available for a while after presenting.

However, while the world focuses on the battle of these two tech giants and their AI tools, there are other players in the AI sector that are innovating and have exciting news themselves.

Magic, a San Francisco-based startup announced they received $23 million in a funding round for their tool aimed at enhancing software engineering. In a statement, Eric Steinberger, Cofounder and CEO, said, “Our mission is to deploy AI to accelerate science and make the world more productive. For decades, technology was just a tool; soon it will be a colleague. The adoption of ‘AI assistants’ in the workplace will be as impactful as the Industrial Revolution, and it’s important to get this transition right.”


Israel-based GlossAi raised $8 million for a tool based on producing generative AI results but for videos. The aim is to help businesses generate video content instantly. The company believes its technology, “analyzes hundreds of parameters such as text, tone, pace, facial expressions and audience engagement using billions of data points, achieving its human-like content generation in near-real time.”

Similarly, Kognitos received $6.8 million to use generative AI to produce Koncierge, an enterprise automation platform, which aims to simplify business processes.

Moonhub, a startup looking to improve the hiring process, raised $4.4 million.
Mattiq raised $15 million to create a new generation of sustainable materials with the help of AI, claiming to synthesize and analyze over one trillion material combinations by 2024.

Raising $25 million, India-based Entropik wants to build on AI-powered market research, while expanding across the U.S., European and Asian markets.
California-based Ushur raised $50 million in a bid to improve its customer experience automation (CXA) platform.

MindsDB raised $16.5 million to build its open-source based machine learning (ML) platform which enables enterprises develop their own AI-powered applications.

While most of the publicity has focusing on AI has been directed towards ChatGPT and Bard, over the last few weeks, there are other startups and established companies looking to plant a flag in the AI sector that need more publicity.

What do you think of the Google vs Microsoft/Open AI situation and which other AI-engaged company are you looking forward to? Let us know in the comments below!