This Week in Australian Startups #30, 28th July 2023 - Meta makes Llama free for commercial use
This Week in Australian Startups #30, 28th July 2023 - Meta makes Llama free for commercial use
Whilst Musk rebranded Twitter to X to revive his plans to build a super app to rival WeChat in the west - Meta also rebranded their LLM from LLaMA to Llama. The announcement came as they made the model available free for commercial use - but in the commercial terms it states platform with more than 700 million monthly active users must request a licence from Meta as Microsoft has done. It doesn’t state if this licence must be paid or not, but reading between the lines it’s been designed to prevent competitors from using it.
It’s widely accepted that OpenAI’s GPT-4 is the best model available on the market, even with studies showing worsening results from ChatGPT over time. But the fact Llama is available for free, even if it’s not as good as GPT-4, means it provides a different value proposition that could lead to it being much more widely adopted and eventually become the dominant LLM in the market. In May I wrote about the argument of Open Source vs Proprietary models and when an inflection point may arise, and signs are pointing towards reaching that inflection sooner rather than later.
The fact Llama is now free for commercial use and available on Azure and AWS means businesses can run the models in their own environment. The 700 monthly active user limit, does pose considerations for any future acquisition or growth and what position that could leave anyone using Llama in.
Meta of course has its own incentives, but this does start to pose a question - does OpenAI actually have a strong moat on its LLM, and does it even care?
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
That’s on OpenAI’s About page - that’s what they really care about. With ChatGPT they have an extremely unique position to launch the next big consumer tech business - something extremely difficult to do. Yet they’ve gone down the route of commercialising their API and forging a deep and entangled partnership with Microsoft.
There’s a perspective that OpenAI doesn’t care about the moat around GPT, they simply want to continue doing research and develop artificial general intelligence and is why the partnership with Microsoft makes so much sense for them.
Top News
Australia
Main Sequence, founded by the CSIRO in 2017 to address the ‘valley of death’ between research and commercialisation, closes its third fund of $450M bringing its total funds under management to $1B (Medium)
Lisa Fedorenko (Alberts), Samar McHeileh (Scale Investors) and Rachel Yang (Giant Leap) have initiated a program leading to 13 Australian funds, with another 40 expressing interest, to release data on the number of women-led and mixed teams they conduct due-diligence and invest in (Business News Australia)
‘Pay in advance’ fintech Paylab enters voluntary administration with trading future up in the air (SmartCompany)
Luke Latham, former Milkrun COO does his first interview since the Woolworths acquisition and joining Airwallex as MD & GM for ANZ (The Australian)
CSIRO reveals AI-powered insights to support Indigenous recruitment (CSIRO)
Square Peg Investor Letter Half Year Report 30 June 2023 (Square Peg)
LaunchVic is tipping another $300,000 into Startmate to teach 300 uni students about startup life (Startup Daily)
Little Birdie launches e-commerce browser extension to help smaller retailers challenge big competitors (SmartCompany)
Atomi, the online education platform, announces their biggest product launch to date, with the addition of Year 7-8 interactive lessons (Atomi)
Haventec, a provider of password-less cybersecurity systems founded by former Nuix chairman Tony Castagna, has closed after failing to raise fresh financing, but not before splitting out its intellectual property (AFR)
NRMA acquires Carrie Kwan’s women in business networking platform Mums & Co for an undisclosed sum (Startup Daily)
CBA backs RLF AgTech soil carbon credit pilot scheme (Business News Australia)
Nourished Life founder’s latest startup, Sans Drinks, placed in administration (Startup Daily)
Meta slammed with $20M penalty over Aussie user data security claims (ARN)
Hospitality tech startup Liven feasts on $152M buffet acquiring Abacus, Order Up and more (Business News Australia)
Haymarket HQ announces launch of the Southeast Asia Tech Immersion Mission - to help find opportunities in South East Asian for startups and investors (Business News Australia)
AWS reveals A/NZ start-ups for inaugural GenAI Accelerator (ARN)
Tesla chair Robyn Denholm joins Australian AI healthcare start-up harrison.ai (FT)
UQ Ventures launches Empower Women's Accelerator (Business News Australia)
Fleet Space Technologies bought the rights to a new long-term frequency filing in Europe, giving it a claim to spectrum and orbital resources for satellite networks with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a specialised UN agency (Business News Australia)
Educational start-up Edrolo announces new CEO David Wright (AFR)
Around the World
Amazon expands Bedrock with conversational agents and new third-party models (TechCrunch)
Lionel Messi is already giving Apple’s MLS streaming service a boost (The Verge)
Apple Maps versus Google Maps? A free solution from Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft could be the winner (9to5Mac)
Microsoft shares fall after earnings report even as AI bet bears fruit (The Guardian)
OpenAI, Google Form New Body to Self-Regulate Their AI (Futurism)
Netflix lists $900,000 AI job as actors and writers continue to strike (Engadget)
Andreessen Horowitz goes all in on AI with Anjney Midha joining as GP (Axios)
Microsoft and Activision Blizzard extend merger agreement to October (The Verge)
Sergey Brin is back at Google—and he’s working on AI (Fast Company)
TikTok launches text posts amidst Twitter 'X' rebrand (Mashable)
Apple is already using its chatbot for internal work (The Verge)
Twitter’s X rebrand revives Elon Musk’s superapp plans (Axios)
Meta releases latest AI model, Llama 2, for commercial use (Axios)
Twitter hijacks @X handle, offered user merch, trip to HQ as ‘thank you’ (Cointelegraph)
It Turns Out Facebook Also Owns a Trademark to "X," Specifically for Social Media (Futurism)
Australian Funding Rounds
Silicon Quantum Computing has closed a $50.4M in Series A, with input from CBA, the UNSW, Telstra and the Australian Government
Fashion deals startup Her Black Book rebrands as Wrapd after raising $1.8M (Startup Daily)
Events rental startup Gecko raises $350,000 pre-Seed round by Techstars, Goodwater capital and Launch House (Startup Daily)
Quantum sensor startup Q-CTRL tops up Series B adding $3.8M to bring the total raised to $80M (Startup Daily)
Hangover ‘prevention’ drink Bae Juice takes $500,000 shot as it looks to US (Startup Daily)
Cartelux, the adtech company changing how retail networks execute marketing campaigns, has secured $3M from QIC and TEN13 (AFR)
Koodaideri Innovation and Technology wins a $1M grant from the WA government to roll out HydraTune, a device and app, that allows mechanics to service heavy machinery remotely (AFR)
International Funding Highlights
Hightouch Raises $38M and Unveils Customer 360 Toolkit (Hightouch)
Preply, the language app known for its live tutors, closes out Series C at $120M and doubles down on AI (TechCrunch)
Montreal startup HumanFirst raises $5M to transform organizations’ conversational data into no-code AI (VentureBeat)
Karat, a startup building financial tools for content creators, raises $70M (TechCrunch)
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