Happy Friday!

In Today’s Email:

• How AI influences what we see 👀

• Microsoft’s AI shopping experience 🛍️

• Is venture capital in AI slowing? 🪙

How AI influences what we see 👀

Meta recently published a deep dive into how AI influences what we see on Facebook and Instagram.

In a series of recent posts, Meta is pushing back against the myth “that algorithms leave people powerless over the content they see.” The most recent blog post discusses how their AI systems rank content across their platforms based on user feedback.

The underlying goal of Meta’s AI systems is to predict how valuable a piece of content will be to the user. This goal is achieved through the use of “signals”, such as whether you like, comment on, or share a post. This goal is better understood by the 22 systems cards the company released that give detailed information about the ranking system.

Tools have been implemented into the algorithm to give users control over what they see, the most notable being the interested, not interested feature and the show more, show less feature. Meta’s push for transparency also expands into the realm of research. The company has released over 1,000 AI models, libraries, and data sets for researchers over the last decade.

“This is part of a wider ethos of openness, transparency, and accountability. With rapid advances taking place with powerful technologies like generative AI, it’s understandable that people are both excited by the possibilities and concerned about the risks,” the company says.

Microsoft’s AI shopping experience 🛍️

Yesterday, Microsoft announced a host of new AI-powered shopping tools for its Bing search engine.

Over the years, Microsoft has tried incorporating shopping features into previous internet browsers like Edge however, the features were met with a lot of criticism from users. Thankfully, the newest set of features that were announced yesterday actually looks useful.

Bing’s AI capabilities will be used to generate buying guides when a user gives a query such as “college supplies.” The specs and where to buy the item will be displayed in each buying guide. Microsoft is also releasing AI-generated review summaries. A user can ask Bing Chat to summarize what people think of a given product, and a quick overview will be displayed for the product.

A new Price Match tool is also being added that allows users to request a price match from certain retailers. “We’ve partnered with top U.S. retailers with existing price match policies and will be adding more over time,” Microsoft says. Bing’s newest shopping features will be sure to disrupt the massive ecosystem of sites focused on buying guides and price matching.

Is venture capital in AI slowing? 🪙

Many individuals think we’ve already entered an economic downturn, however, venture capital is typically the first industry to slow down.

The AI venture capital train looks like it’s not slowing down anytime soon. Yesterday, three AI startups announced over $1.5 billion in investments. Inflection AI’s massive $1.3 billion round. The company, partnered with CoreWeave and Nvidia, is said to be building the “largest AI cluster in the world.”

Microsoft, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, and Nvidia led the funding round. The investors value Inflection AI at $4 billion, the newest round of funding brings the total to $1.5 billion in capital raised. The company was co-founded by Mustafa Suleyman, who previously founded Google’s DeepMind.

In addition, Runway and Typeface both received significant funding. Runway raised $141 million which adds to its $50 million Series C from Google, Nvidia, and Salesforce Ventures. Runway helped develop the ultra-popular AI image generator Stable Diffusion. Typeface, which launched in February with a $65 million initial raise, also announced a $100 million series B on Thursday, led by Salesforce Ventures.

It doesn’t look like venture capital is slowing down.

That’s it for today, we’ll see you back here next week.