1/4/2024: Jeff Bezos backs Perplexity's $520m Series B.
Perplexity closes a $520 million Series B funding round with backing from Jeff Bezos, while Anthropic separately raises $750 million projecting over $850 million in annualised revenue.
Perplexity announced their Series B funding round with notable investor Jeff Bezos, who previously invested in Google 25 years ago. Anthropic is raising $750 million, projecting at least $850 million in annualized revenue next year and implementing "brutal" changes to their Terms of Service. Discussions in Nous Research AI Discord cover topics such as document recall limits from gigabytes of data, RNN memory and compute trade-offs, synthetic datasets, and benchmarking of models like WizardCoder-33B-V1.1, MobileLLaMA-1.4B-Base, ShearedLLaMA, and TinyLLaMA.
Other highlights include UnsLOTH optimizations for multi-GPU systems, AI rap voice models, context-extending code, and architectural innovations like applying Detectron/ViT backbones to LLMs, sliding window attention in Mistral, and parallelizing Mixtral 8x7b with FSDP and HF Accelerate.