Decart Emerges From Stealth With $21 Million Seed Funding to Enhance AI Efficiency, Bringing Costly AI Within Reach

Introducing Apple Intelligence for iPhone, iPad, and Mac

In recent months, it was rolled out to the iPhone and iPad, first to beta users and then publicly. According to Apple’s release notes, the Mac becomes the latest device in the Apple ecosystem to get this Apple Intelligence-powered feature with the latest macOS Sequoia 15.3 Developer Beta 1 update. Apple rolled out the macOS Sequoia 15.3 Developer Beta 1 for Mac on Monday, alongside beta updates for its other devices.

• AI is positioned to change the cost structure and increase productivity in some of the most crucial areas in our society.
• What’s more, their latest offering is purpose-built to address the growing shift toward compound AI systems.
• On the iPhone and iPad you can quickly trigger this by double tapping the Home bar at the bottom of the screen.
• Alternatively, it can also be added from the emoji palette on the keyboard.
• He’s well positioned to help us learn about the evolution underway with agents.
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To use it, you need to enter editing mode and then click or tap on the Clean Up icon. Apple Intelligence will scan your photo for potentially distracting items and will highlight them with a shimmering effect. Tapping shimmering items will remove them, but you can try to remove anything at all in a given image. The best way to remove an item is probably to swipe across it as if you’re blotting it out, but you can also try just circling an item to indicate that you want it gone. Unfortunately, I found Proofread’s interface to be pretty inconsistent.

Plus: Google stuffs Gemini into Workspace, with a hidden off switch?

The centerpiece of the Apple Intelligence rollout, as is the case with most tech giant’s Generative AI abilities, is a series of writing tools. They live inside the right-click menu and are available when you select a piece of text on any app. This means they work across the system and are not limited to the apps that release updates to support Apple Intelligence.

The focus is shifting to the development and scaling of the reasoning layer, where “System 2” thinking takes precedence. Inspired by models like AlphaGo, this layer aims to endow AI systems with deliberate reasoning, problem-solving and cognitive operations at inference time that go beyond rapid pattern matching. And new cognitive architectures and user interfaces are shaping how these reasoning capabilities are delivered to and interact with users. Sequoia’s current senior steward, Roelof Botha, is leading the firm through a different epoch, one where the venture capital industry is excited mostly about defense tech and large language models. Predictable software-as-a-service businesses are out; big, bold bets on the future are in. Hardware companies like Nvidia, an early Sequoia investment, are making a resurgence.

We’re seeing large companies benefit from integrating AI into their products. Workflow automation platform ServiceNow is achieving case avoidance rates of nearly 20% with their AI-powered Now Assist. Palo Alto Networks has reduced the cost of processing expenses with AI.

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What we’re all eagerly awaiting is Generative AI’s Move 37, that moment when – like in AlphaGo’s second game against Lee Sedol – a general AI system surprises us with something superhuman, something that feels like independent thought. This does not mean that the AI “wakes up” (AlphaGo did not) but that we have simulated processes of perception, reasoning and action that the AI can explore in truly novel and useful ways. This may in fact be AGI, and if so it will not be a singular occurrence, it will merely be the next phase of technology.

AI-enabled automations arm the providers, patients and pharma companies—whose incentives are all aligned—against this death by administration. LLMs have been able to generate prior authorization forms with remarkable accuracy out of the box, which is why so many startups have started here. Patient-facing workflows are well-suited to LLMs because they are natural language interfaces that require the flexibility to address a wide range of conditions and special cases. There is also the potential for alignment here between care providers, payors and pharma companies, creating vectors for monetization. For example, repeated messages from the Home app about the status of certain sensors can be grouped together with the most recent information highlighted.

Math superpowers for your notes

They’d used Figma to create a mock-up of the product that looked real. Expedia was willing to partner with Robust despite their product’s nascency because there was simply nothing else like it in the market. “I was like, ‘Shit, now we have to make this work,’” Oshiba remembers. In other words, deep reinforcement learning is cool again, and it’s enabling an entire new reasoning layer. That was one of the consensus messages that emerged from speakers on stage at Cerebral Valley New York Thursday. We now believe the market is entering “Act 2”—which will be from the customer-back.

Databricks Founder Ion Stoica: Turning Academic Open Source into Startup Success – Sequoia Capital

Databricks Founder Ion Stoica: Turning Academic Open Source into Startup Success.

Posted: Tue, 14 Jan 2025 16:09:45 GMT [source]

Within six months, the entire company was focused on building the guardrails that could keep LLMs safe for companies to implement. This threat also created an unprecedented opportunity for Robust, assuming they could figure out how to update their offerings fast enough to keep the company afloat. “All the customers were on hold because they weren’t going to be putting any money on non-generative AI and they didn’t know what their product roadmap was going to look like,” Singer says. So with a ‘streamlined’ team of just five employees, Robust Intelligence pushed forward and managed to ship to Expedia on time.

In the months and years to come, the grand ambition is to build the single best platform enterprises can rely on as they deploy AI into production. We are excited to double-down on our partnership with Lin and the rest of the team as we lead Fireworks’ Series B, and to continue supporting the growth of both the platform and the team. Rox is reimagining how modern enterprise sales teams work by introducing what some call an “Agentic CRM”—though that description only scratches the surface. Each agent can be equipped with capabilities like finding recent news, analyzing sentiment and identifying engagement opportunities—all powered by sophisticated AI that understands the nuances of B2B relationships.

But as the inference time scales, AlphaGo gets better and better—until it surpasses the very best humans. At our speaker dinner that we co-hosted with Greylock, I met the buzzy AI sales coach Rilla that was founded by a standup comedian. Meanwhile, at a breakfast on Wednesday that we hosted with Menlo Ventures, I met the Osmo CEO Alex Wiltschko who is building new ways to create scents with artificial intelligence.

• AI will enable us to do much more with less, but we will need both government and private efforts to retrain and empower everyone.
• The app requires you to pair your iPhone and Mac via Bluetooth to control it.
• Image editing is available from iOS 18.1, but you’ll have to wait for iOS 18.2 before you can get access to Playground and image creation tools including the Emoji maker.
• Incumbents in the documentation space will also have a formidable advantage here.
• In 2024, we will build from the substrate of Transformers, GPUs, RAG, Diffusers, open source and everything else that has been floating around the ecosystem in 2023.

Unfortunately, notification summaries on macOS Sequoia seem to be restricted to the Mail app for now. In the future, I’d love to see them cover macOS notifications and synced iPhone notifications. Cahn arrived at the $600 billion number by taking NVIDIA Corp‘s NVDA fourth-quarter GPU revenue of $150 billion and doubling it to account for the cost of AI data centers. Cahn doubled the resulting $300 billion to account for a 50% gross margin for the end-user of the GPU. Examples include “fixing software bugs that couldn’t be dealt with at launch; installing patches after unknown vulnerabilities emerge; and the costs of modernizing legacy tech infrastructure,” theWorks reported. Since the companies investing in AI hardware are not financing the purchases with debt, they face no urgency to repay the investment.

Apple Intelligence turned on by default in upcoming macOS Sequoia 15.3, iOS 18.3

These are many of the “old AI” applications and they will continue to scale. These same companies, which have benefitted from AI for a long time, continue to pour investment into leverage AI and democratize access to expensive AI infrastructure that will be required to innovate across industries. Still, these applications remain more nascent and will likely take a few years to become widely deployed and fully measurable.

Meanwhile, actual messages from, say, my literary agent or guests on my podcasts, get mixed in with all the other mail. Right now this feature feels tremendously uneven, and rather than helpfully highlighting mail you really should see, it’s mostly providing opportunities for eyerolling and occasional amusement. It’s my hope that the results will get better as Apple improves its model.

And so they were turning to Replicate, which had packaged, optimized and deployed Stable Diffusion, making the model available for anyone—AI expert or not—to use. The feature I want the most on my future iPhone 16 is Apple Intelligence. However, I’ll have to wait a long while to access Apple’s vision of genAI features on mobile devices, as Apple Intelligence is currently unavailable in Europe.

Decart’s platform enables organizations to train massive AI models at scale while significantly reducing training costs and improving efficiency tenfold. Within just a few months of launching, Decart achieved early profitability, securing paying enterprise customers and generating millions in revenue. Now, Decart is making a big bet on generative AI experiences, building its own foundation models and equipping the AI community with tools to eventually create their own real-time, AI-driven interactive experiences faster than ever before. Now, the Fireworks team is using those learnings to build a proprietary inference stack.

And yet, in spite of the existential threat this posed to his business, underneath it all Singer felt stirrings of excitement. He had been anticipating an AI watershed moment like this all the way back since his graduate studies at UC Berkeley. If LLMs were about to change the world, Robust Intelligence had the potential to play a meaningful role as a safeguard for the technology. In January 2023, Yaron Singer woke up in a suburban Las Vegas Airbnb with the feeling that things were finally on the upswing for his company, Robust Intelligence. This shift will move us from a world of massive pre-training clusters toward inference clouds—environments that can scale compute dynamically based on the complexity of the task.

It has been a pleasure to get to know Matan and Tomer over the past year as we welcomed them to Arc, Sequoia’s immersion for pre-seed and seed-stage founders, and as they built on Apex Security’s early success. We are proud to lead their seed round and to support them as they continue to grow their product and their team, empowering the companies of the future to swiftly and securely embrace the power of AI. This theme of crafting more reliable agents with custom cognitive architectures factors into our next episode, with Matan Grinberg and Eno Reyes of Factory, and in an upcoming episode with Clay Bevor of Sierra. From our first walk with Dean in the Bay Area, where he spends half his time, to meeting the full team in Tel Aviv, where Decart is based, they have blown us away with their technical depth and novel insights. We are grateful for the opportunity to lead their seed round and support their continued growth.

Thanks to an intensive push, the fledgling startup looked like it was on track to deliver a functional product by the time the contract was signed, but three months before their planned delivery to Expedia they hit another snag. Seven of Robust’s twelve staff members left the company, discouraged by the fact that they’d only managed to win a single customer a year and a half in. On his end, Singer was coming around to the notion of a life outside of academia. He had been granted tenure early, and with this goal achieved, realized how eager he was to see the practical applications of his research.

It took a while but it is now finally starting to rollout to users. Still officially in ‘beta’, Apple Intelligence is now available in the public release versions of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1 and macOS Sequoia 15.1. Firshman recalled being five years old and attempting to turn a landline into a wireless phone using a soldering iron. His father encouraged him to explore how the world worked, and Firshman seized every opportunity to do so.

Finally, Siri also gains easier to access “type to Siri” options across the line. On the iPhone and iPad you can quickly trigger this by double tapping the Home bar at the bottom of the screen. This will pop up a keyboard and dialogue box, backed by the same undulating colors. On the Mac, you can configure a keyboard shortcut to bring up a glowing dialogue box that you can drag around the screen. As you type, it’ll suggest actions to you, including shortcuts you’ve created. This app behaves like your personal assistant and records everything you see, say, and hear on your Mac.