Amazon Bets the Farm on Anthropic's AI 🐔

Good morning. Here’s what’s leading each section today

  • Headlines: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

  • Startups & Fund Raising: qbiq secures $10 million in Seed for its GenAI real estate planning platform

  • Research: Generate high quality 3D scenes from 2D source in realtime

  • Quick Bytes: Computer vision guided this robot mower wins Hackaday Prize 2023

Must-reads 📰

  1. Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic, making Anthropic’s safe and steerable AI widely accessible to AWS customers. (Anthropic) 3-minute read

  2. ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak, allowing users to have a more intuitive experience (OpenAI) 5-minute read

  3. Gucci will offer three virtual experiences, playing out across three global metaverse platforms simultaneously. (Vogue Business) 7-minute read

  4. Web3 Could Change the Business Model of Creative Work by offering new tools for creators to earn and own assets, build wealth, and wrestle back control from powerful platforms and intermediaries. (HBR) 8-minute read

  5. Tokenizing real-world assets on blockchains is growing among crypto natives and skeptics alike (CNBC) 3-minute read

Startups & Fund Raises 🦄 

  1. qbiq secures $10 million in Seed for its GenAI real estate planning platform from strategic investors including JLL Spark Global Ventures, 10D, Ocean Azul, Randomforest, and M-FUND (calcalistech) 2-minute read

  2. Bastion raises $25 million in funding round led by a16z to provide custody and other services on one platform (Bloomberg) 2-minute read

  3. Upland to sell NFTs to raise money for equitable playground access (Blockworks) 3-minute read

Research 🔬

3D visual grounding is a crucial skill for household robots, enabling them to understand and interact with their environment. Existing methods often rely on labeled data and struggle with complex language queries. In this research, the authors introduce LLM-Grounder, a novel approach that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform zero-shot, open-vocabulary 3D visual grounding. This means it can handle a wide range of natural language queries without the need for labeled training data. The significance lies in its potential to enhance robots' ability to comprehend and respond to human instructions in real-world scenarios.

How it works: LLM-Grounder operates by employing a Large Language Model (LLM) to break down complex natural language queries into meaningful parts. It then uses a visual grounding tool, such as OpenScene or LERF, to identify objects in a 3D environment. Afterward, the LLM assesses the spatial and commonsense relationships among the identified objects to make a final decision regarding their grounding. This entire process is performed without any reliance on labeled training data, allowing LLM-Grounder to adapt to new 3D scenes and handle diverse text queries effectively.

Between the lines: The paper addresses a significant challenge in robotics, where household robots need to understand and act upon human language instructions within their environment. Traditional approaches often require extensive labeled data, which can be impractical to obtain for every possible scenario. LLM-Grounder, on the other hand, leverages the power of large language models like GPT-3 to parse and interpret language, combined with visual grounding techniques, making it versatile and adaptable. The research suggests that LLMs can significantly enhance the grounding capability, especially when dealing with intricate language queries.

The bottom line: LLM-Grounder introduces a promising approach to 3D visual grounding for household robots. By combining the strengths of Large Language Models with visual grounding tools, it offers the ability to understand complex language queries and identify objects in a 3D scene without the need for pre-existing labeled data. This research has the potential to advance the field of robotics by improving robots' ability to interpret and respond to natural language instructions, making them more practical and versatile tools for various tasks in a home environment.

Quick Bytes ⚡️

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