Let’s Get Personal: Why AI Will Unlock a Massive Market for Online Consumer Services Andreessen Horowitz

To ensure its relevance, accuracy, and adherence to BeInCrypto’s editorial standards, a human editor meticulously reviewed, edited, and approved the article for publication. Story Protocol’s co-founder Jason Zhao confirmed that the freshly injected funds will accelerate the launch of its blockchain-based technology slated for next year. Andreessen Horowitz received equity and an option to buy digital tokens, should the company decide to issue them. However, Zhao clarified that there are currently no definitive plans to do so.

The new user behaviors that have emerged with the generative AI wave are as startling as the economics have been. LLMs have been pulled into service as software development partners, brainstorming companions, educators, life coaches, friends, and yes, even lovers. Large image models have become central to new communities built entirely around the creation of fanciful new content, or the development of AI art therapy to help treat use cases Yakov Livshits such as mental health issues. These are functions that computers have not, to date, been able to fulfill, so we don’t really have a good understanding of what the behavior will lead to, nor what are the best products to fulfill them. This all means opportunity for the new class of private generative AI companies that are emerging. Generative AI models are incredibly general and already are being applied to a broad variety of large markets.

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He cited the hit game Genshin Impact, which has generated more than $3 billion in revenue since 2020, along with growing anime viewership on streaming platforms and expanding “vtuber” use. Zibra AI was one of the 32 companies accepted into the a16z speedrun out of 1,600 applicants. The speedrun provides coaching and funding to the most promising pre-seed startups in the gaming and tech spaces, with each of the accepted companies receiving an initial $500,000 investment and pitching to investors at the Speedrun Demo Day in June 2023.

Generative artificial intelligence, used to create content from text to images to videos, is still on the rise. Big Tech and startups across the globe are racing to compete and launch their own AI-powered chatbots, text-to-image generators, and video tools. AI Town represents a significant step towards making the development of AI-simulated environments more accessible. Combining reusable frameworks like Convex and Clerk with data-driven character definitions offers developers a strong base for building more complex games or conducting research experiments. Developers can customize various components, including character data and sprite sheets, the visual environment of the tilemap, the engineering of text generation prompts, and game rules and logic.

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“We are thrilled to back Ideogram AI and its talented team,” said Martin Casado, general partner at a16z. “We think that generative AI is one of the most exciting and impactful areas of AI innovation, and we are impressed by Ideogram AI’s vision and technology. We look forward to seeing what they will create and inspire with their platform.” A new startup, Ideogram AI, has emerged from stealth mode with a mission to help people become more creative through generative AI. The company announced today that it has raised $16.5 million in seed funding from a stellar group of investors, including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Index Ventures, AIX Ventures, Golden Ventures, and several prominent AI researchers and entrepreneurs.

The seed funding will be used to expand the team, develop the product, and launch the beta version of Ideogram AI’s platform later this year. The platform will allow users to access a variety of generative AI models and applications through a simple and intuitive interface. Users will also be able to customize and fine-tune the models according to their preferences and goals. Zibra AI was one of just 32 companies out of 1,600 applicants accepted into a16z’s inaugural Speedrun, which provides funding and coaching for the most promising pre-seed startups at the intersection of games and tech. Each of the companies accepted into the program received an initial investment of $500,000 and pitched to investors at the Speedrun Demo Day held in Los Angeles in June 2023. Following the success of the first Speedrun, a16z has announced Speedrun 2024 and committed to invest up to $75m in other promising startups in the space.

Yakov Livshits
Founder of the DevEducation project
A prolific businessman and investor, and the founder of several large companies in Israel, the USA and the UAE, Yakov’s corporation comprises over 2,000 employees all over the world. He graduated from the University of Oxford in the UK and Technion in Israel, before moving on to study complex systems science at NECSI in the USA. Yakov has a Masters in Software Development.

Another exciting aspect of these models is that they can also be used to apply filters to existing animations, such as making them look drunk, or old, or happy. Companies going after this space include Kinetix, DeepMotion, RADiCAL, Move Ai, and Plask. Startups trying to solve the 3D model creation problem include Kaedim, Mirage, and Hypothetic. Larger companies are also looking at the problem, including Nvidia’s Get3D and Autodesk’s ClipForge. Kaedim and Get3d are focused on image-to-3D; ClipForge and Mirage are focused on text-to-3D, while Hypothetic is interested in both text-to-3D search, as well as image-to-3D. Some studios are already experimenting with using the same tools for in-game production artwork.

Incredible performance and adoption, combined with a blistering pace of innovation, suggest we could be in the early days of a cycle that will transform our lives and economy at levels not seen since the microchip and the internet. The majority of companies on this list have no paid marketing (at least, that SimilarWeb is able to attribute). There is significant free traffic “available” via X, Reddit, Discord, and email, as well as word of mouth and referral growth. However, two other categories have started to drive significant usage in recent months—AI companions (such as CharacterAI) and content generation tools (such as Midjourney and ElevenLabs). Within the broader content generation category, image generation is the top use case with 41% of traffic, followed by prosumer writing tools at 26%, and video generation at 8%.

Why it’s significant Kabam has gifted all The Hunger Games’ players $0.14

As these technologies continue to evolve, businesses and industries must adapt to harness their full potential. By understanding the economic case for generative AI and Foundation models for decision making that can better prepare for the future and capitalize on the opportunities they present. ChatGPT is based on the GPT-3 architecture, which uses deep learning techniques such as neural networks and is trained on large datasets of examples.

• For consumers, LLMs may soon be able to give you recipe ideas then order the groceries you need, or suggest a brunch spot and book your table.
• For example, if you are worried about AI generating fake people and fake videos, the answer is to build new systems where people can verify themselves and real content via cryptographic signatures.
• The early applications of this have been in edtech and search—if you’re explaining why it rains, you’ll use different language for an eight-year-old than for a high school student.
• As a result, only 15 companies on the list currently have a live mobile app, and almost all of them see less than 10% of total monthly traffic come from their app versus the web.

Previously they had a collection of hand-drawn avatar images that players could mix-and-match to create their avatar—now they have thrown this out entirely, and are simply generating the avatar image from the player’s description. Letting players generate content through an AI is safer than letting players upload their own content from scratch, since the AI can be trained to avoid creating offensive content, while still giving players a greater sense of ownership. Games are the most complex form of entertainment, in terms of the sheer number of asset types involved (2D art, 3D art, sound effects, music, dialog, etc). Games are also the most interactive, with a heavy emphasis on real-time experiences. This creates a steep barrier to entry for new game developers, as well as a steep cost to produce a modern, chart-topping game. But generative AI will change this and open up a massive opportunity for consumer startups.

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Microsoft Flight Simulator enables players to fly around the entire planet Earth, all 197 million square miles of it. Microsoft partnered with blackshark.ai, and trained an AI to generate a photorealistic 3D world from 2D satellite images. Incumbents like Bing and Google and startups like Perplexity and You.com introduced search APIs. AI21 Labs introduced Jurassic-X, which addressed many of the flaws of standalone LLMs by combining models with a predetermined set of tools, including a calculator, weather API, wiki API, and database. OpenAI betaed plugins that allow ChatGPT to interact with tools like Expedia, OpenTable, Wolfram, Instacart, Speak, a web browser, and a code interpreter—an unlock that drew comparisons to Apple’s “App Store” moment. And more recently, OpenAI introduced function calling in GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, which allows developers to link GPT’s capabilities to whatever external tools they want.