In another sign that the current VC appetite for AI is insatiable, Adept, a startup building AI that "enables humans and computers to work together creatively to solve problems," yesterday announced that it raised $350 million in a Series B funding round co-led by General Catalyst and Spark Capital with participation from Addition, Greylock, Atlassian Ventures, Microsoft, Nvidia, Workday Ventures, Caterina Fake, Frontiers Capital, PSP Growth, SV Angel and A.Capital. Forbes reports that the valuation was "at least" $1 billion. The cash injection brings Adept's total raised to $415 million, which co-founder and CEO David Luan says is being put toward productization, model training and headcount growth. "Giant foundation models for language and for images have shown astounding capabilities in the last few years. Adept is building on this momentum via a new kind of foundation model that can perform actions on any software tool using natural language," he said in a press release.

One of AI's most ambitious goals is to build systems that can do everything a human can. GPT-3 can write and Stable Diffusion can paint, but neither can interact with the world directly. AI companies have been trying to create intelligent agents this way for 10 years. This seems to be changing now. One of my latest articles covers Google's PaLM-SayCan (PSC), a robot powered by PaLM, the best large language model to date. PSC's language module can interpret human requests expressed in natural language and transform them into high-level tasks that can be further broken down into elemental actions.

Yesterday, California-based AI firm Adept announced Action Transformer (ACT-1), an AI model that can perform actions in software like a human assistant when given high-level written or verbal commands. It can reportedly operate web apps and perform intelligent searches on websites while clicking, scrolling, and typing in the right fields as if it were a person using the computer. In a demo video tweeted by Adept, the company shows someone typing, "Find me a house in Houston that works for a family of 4. My budget is 600K" into a text entry box. Upon submitting the task, ACT-1 automatically browses Redfin.com in a web browser, clicking the proper regions of the website, typing a search entry, and changing the search parameters until a matching house appears on the screen. It's called Action Transformer (ACT-1) and we taught it to use a bunch of software tools.