If you see startups mashing two of the hottest tech trends together – AI and crypto – you might be forgiven to think they’re merely riding the buzzword wave. But is there something of actual substance at that intersection?

French AI startup Mistral AI announced a financing of 385 million euros (415 million US dollars) with a valuation of 2 billion US dollars, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Ventures. The funds will be used for the development of its technology and open source software.<br>It is reported that Mistral AI focuses on generative AI tools, chatbot development, and customizable open source technology, with the goal of offering its products to the public in early 2024. The company is a new company formed by former researchers from DeepMind and Meta companies, and will attempt to compete with OpenAI and Google in developing generative AI infrastructure.

French AI startup Mistral AI has raised $487 million in funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), with participation from Nvidia and Salesforce, valuing the company at $2 billion.

Yann LeCun, the boss of Meta AI, shared his thoughts on the current state of artificial intelligence and quantum computing during a recent event celebrating the 10th anniversary of Meta's Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) team. He expressed skepticism about quantum computing and its application to AI, stating that it is unlikely to happen in the next five years. LeCun also commented on Nvidia's dominance in the AI hardware industry and disagreed with the company's CEO's assertion that AI would be able to complete tests in a manner "fairly competitive" with humans in the next five years. Furthermore, LeCun explained that generative AI, which is cited as a potential spark for AGI, was not good enough and that text is a poor source of information.

According to official sources, Web3 content delivery network AIOZ Network plans to launch AIOZ W3AI V1 in the second quarter of 2024, with V2 and V3 versions planned for the third and fourth quarters, respectively. AIOZ W3AI is a Web3 AI computing infrastructure designed to change the way artificial intelligence tasks are performed. AIOZ W3AI gives developers and businesses the ability to use decentralized AI computing while providing seamless AI-as-a-service integration.

Researchers from ETH Zurich have developed a method to potentially jailbreak any AI model that relies on human feedback, including large language models (LLMs), by bypassing guardrails that prevent the models from generating harmful or unwanted outputs. The technique involves poisoning the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) dataset with an attack string that forces models to output responses that would otherwise be blocked. The researchers describe the flaw as universal, but difficult to pull off as it requires participation in the human feedback process and the difficulty of the attack increases with model sizes. Further study is necessary to understand how these techniques can be scaled and how developers can protect against them.

Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, stated on social media that centralized artificial intelligence is the biggest honeypot in history. No one would put their mortgage contract on Facebook. However, people use ChatGPT to obtain summaries of contracts, mortgage loans, health records, and other information. Unbiased, universally trained models + local peer fine-tuning/customization will soon emerge. However, large tech companies will not invest in this because they will not obtain private data.

Vienna-based 3D generative AI platform, Atlas, has secured $6 million in funding to improve AI models for the gaming industry. The platform aims to speed up the creation of virtual worlds and experiences for game developers and brands building video games and extended reality (XR) environments. The funding came from two rounds led by 6th Man Ventures and Collab+Currency, with participation from investors such as Square Enix, Nvidia, and Gaingels. Atlas plans to launch an alpha version of the platform later this year to enable smaller, medium, and indie game developers to use its technology and build their own worlds. The CEO, James, emphasized the importance of principles such as privacy, human agency, oversight, and inclusion in the gaming industry. He expressed optimism that Atlas would develop to include a wider range of AI-powered tools to simplify complex tasks like 3D modeling and coding.

According to The Big Whale report, French investment company Serena has launched a new fund of 100 million euros, focusing on investments in the fields of blockchain, artificial intelligence, and quantum technology.

Decentralized artificial intelligence computing platform Ritual has received a $25 million investment in a round led by Archetype, with participation from Accomplice and Robot Ventures. The cash injection will be used to build network infrastructure, expand the team to 15 people, and develop Ritual's ecosystem. The startup plans to launch its alpha platform early next year.