Startup Trends: The latest happenings with three AI unicorns
Artificial intelligence startups Hugging Face, OpenAI, and Perplexity each made headlines in recent weeks.
Hugging Face, an electronic watering hole for software developers to host AI models, announced earlier this month that it acquired Xethub, a Seattle-based startup that focuses on file management for artificial intelligence projects. According to Forbes, the purchase improves Hugging Face's AI storage capabilities, “enabling developers to work with larger models and datasets more efficiently.”
In a post on Hugging Face’s website announcing the news, Julien Chaumond, the company’s chief technology officer, said that the “XetHub team will help us unlock the next 5 years of growth of [Hugging Face] datasets and models by switching to our own, better version.”
Founded in 2016, New York City-based Hugging Face’s Forge Price™ is $25.25 as of August 15, 2024, which implies a valuation of $4.6 billion.
Meanwhile, OpenAI, a leading generative AI company, announced the latest version of its GPT-4o chatbot on its website.
“We’ve introduced an update to GPT-4o that we’ve found, through experiment results and qualitative feedback, ChatGPT users tend to prefer,” the company wrote.
However, San Francisco-based OpenAI was mum about the details. “Although we’d like to tell you exactly how the model responses are different, figuring out how to granularly benchmark and communicate model behavior improvements is an ongoing area of research in itself.”
Trade publication VentureBeat reported that sources believe the new model was updated based on comments from users.
OpenAI’s Forge Price™ is $190 as of August 15, 2024, which implies a valuation of $110.2 billion.
Finally, Perplexity, a San Francisco-based startup that has developed an AI-based search engine that is competing with the likes of Alphabet’s Google, keeps hitting new performance milestones at a speedy clip.
The Financial Times reported last week that Perplexity has increased its monthly revenues and usage by a factor of seven since the beginning of 2024. According to the article, the company’s AI-powered search engine answered about 250 million questions in the last month, compared with 500 million questions for calendar year 2023. “The new figures underscore Perplexity’s position as one of the fastest-growing generative AI applications to emerge since OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched to huge acclaim in November 2022,” the Financial Times wrote.
The article also reports that Perplexity is transforming its business model from one built on subscription revenues to one built on advertising, which will bring the company into closer competition with Google.
Founded in 2022, Perplexity’s Forge Price™ is $119.23 as of August 15, 2024, which implies a valuation of $3 billion.
About the Author
John Kimelman is a veteran journalist who has worked at Barron’s and CNBC covering such topics as investing and commercial banking. Mr. Kimelman has received compensation from Forge Global, Inc. for authoring this article. Read more from John.