Amazon may not be known for making generative AI, but it's eager to help others get their technology up and running. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is launching a generative AI accelerator that will help the "most promising" startups flourish. The 10-week program provides credits for AWS use, access to mentors and other experts and networking events. At the end, startups pitch their work to potential investors and customers. While the accelerator is open to all generative AI startups, AWS recommends that candidates have at least a basic product ready with some interest from customers. Sign-ups are available worldwide through April 17th, and Amazon makes clear that there are no limits on how the AI is being used -- it can be used for everything from the legal world through to discovering new medicines.

Last week, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kevin Novak, founder of Rackhouse Venture Capital and Uber's first head of AI, and Alex Lee, founder and CEO, of Truewind, in front of a crowd of investors and LPs. The panel was titled, "AI and the battle to capture its value chain: base layer accrual vs the fine tuners." Here's a sample of the questions and topics we addressed. How has AI evolved since you started working in the field, and what is different about this current hype cycle compared to previous ones? According to the Economist, over 500 generative AI startups have collectively raised over $11B, not including OpenAI.

The enterprise is about to get hit by the generative AI hype train, as Salesforce prepares to invest in startups developing what it calls "responsible generative AI." The cloud software giant, via its Salesforce Ventures VC off-shoot, today announced a $250 million generative AI investment fund, which it said has already invested in four startups: search engine upstart You.com, which introduced generative AI smarts a few months back; Anthropic, a heavily VC-backed AI startup from former employees of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT; Cohere, a natural language processing (NLP) startup that recently partnered with Google; and a stealthy startup called Hearth.AI. In truth, Salesforce has had a busy day at its annual TrailblazerDX developer conference, announcing a generative AI pilot they're calling Einstein GPT, which brings ChatGPT-like features to the broader Salesforce platform. This includes a new ChatGPT app for Slack, promising conversation summaries and writing assistance directly inside the enterprise communications app. ChatGPT, for the uninitiated, is a chatbot-like technology trained on large language models (LLMs) that can generate essays, poems, lyrics, articles and more from simple natural-language instructions.

The company then spent the next decade, and billions of dollars, trying to use Watson's artificial intelligence capabilities to solve a broad set of healthcare challenges, from helping doctors diagnose diseases based on symptoms to recommending clinical trials. In January, IBM announced it was selling Watson for parts to PE firm Francisco Partners. AI technologies have come a long way since that game show triumph. Some AI, such as those recommending ads on Google or detecting cancer on medical scans, have become part of everyday life. While improvements for these types of AI have been mostly incremental, over the last year machines suddenly became good at generating images and writing text.

If you have been tracking anything about anything in AI, you would know that this year belongs to generative AI. Generative AI models have accomplished what was unthinkable five years ago. Creative labour, once considered to be under the realm of humans, has been overtaken by machines. Machines can now create things entirely new – write code, poetry, stories, design 3D products, create images and videos with little to no human help. Since AI research in these areas moves at a breakneck pace, investors are flocking startups working with generative AI models.

Sarah Guo, founder of venture capital firm Conviction, organized a buzzy salon at a posh bar in San Francisco last week that drew an animated crowd of engineers, entrepreneurs, and financiers. Guo's event was just one of several held last week in San Francisco by investors and technologists excited by the commercial potential of what has been dubbed "generative AI." Her guests included AI engineers from large tech companies, fellow investors, and entrepreneurs building businesses powered by recent advances in algorithms that generate text or images. One of the guests of honor was Clement Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, a company that hosts a number of open source generative AI projects, including one that recently sparked a frenzy of AI memes. He answered questions from engineers thinking about jumping onto the bandwagon with generative AI startups of their own. "It's just the hottest area from a fundraising perspective right now," Guo says.