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2021

May

3 events

Editors' summary

Anthropic announces itself, Google shows LaMDA

On 28 May, Anthropic's founding was announced. Dario and Daniela Amodei, who had left OpenAI at the end of the previous year, raised $124 million in a Series A, presenting the company as a research lab built around safety.

On the 18th, Google announced LaMDA and MUM at I/O. LaMDA, built for dialogue, was demonstrated speaking in the voice of Pluto and of a paper aeroplane. It did not ship as a product.

On the 26th, OpenAI announced the $100 million OpenAI Startup Fund, to invest in companies building on its technology.

This block is written by the editors. It is kept separate from the sourced record below.

Record3 events
  1. 18
    ModelGoogle / Sundar Pichai

    Google unveils LaMDA for dialogue and multimodal MUM

    At Google I/O, Google unveiled LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), a family of Transformer-based language models fine-tuned for open-ended conversation rather than generic text generation. Sundar Pichai said it was open-domain, designed to converse on any topic; demos had it speaking in the persona of Pluto and of a paper airplane. Google also announced MUM (Multitask Unified Model), a multimodal model trained across more than 75 languages that could work across text, images, and video. Google had a model capable of open-ended conversation at this point but did not release it broadly as a product, showing it only in demos. ChatGPT would appear a year and a half later.

  2. 26
    BusinessReportedOpenAI / Microsoft / Sam Altman

    OpenAI announces $100 million OpenAI Startup Fund

    In a prerecorded video at Microsoft Build 2021, Sam Altman was reported to have announced the OpenAI Startup Fund, a $100 million fund investing in AI startups. Microsoft joined as a partner and investor, and portfolio companies were to receive early access to new OpenAI systems along with Microsoft Azure resources. Altman reportedly said the fund would make big bets on a small number of companies, likely no more than ten, tackling problems in areas such as healthcare, climate change, and education.

  3. 28
    BusinessAnthropic / Dario Amodei / Daniela Amodei / Jaan Tallinn

    Anthropic emerges with a $124 million Series A

    Anthropic, an AI safety and research company founded in early 2021 by Dario Amodei and colleagues who had left OpenAI, revealed itself alongside a $124 million Series A. Dario Amodei serves as CEO and his sister Daniela Amodei as president, with a founding team drawn largely from the researchers behind GPT-2 and GPT-3. The round was led by Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype, with participation from Dustin Moskovitz, Eric Schmidt, James McClave, and the Center for Emerging Risk Research. The company said its goal was to make the fundamental research advances needed to build more capable, general, and reliable AI systems, centering its work on steerability and interpretability.

↑ 2021