🥤 WordPress <3 OpenAI

Welcome to the Soda Road. The right way to start Monday mornings. A perfect blend of AI, memes, and caffeine.

• 1: OpenAI raised $10B of the $31B in global funding last month

• 2: WordPress and OpenAI go on a date

• 3: Smarter Startup Spotlight 💡 Using Stable Diffusion to create personalized kid’s books!

OPENAI RAISED 1/3 OF ALL FUNDING IN JANUARY

OpenAI hasn’t only stolen all the recent headlines. They had 33% of the overall capital raised in January 2023. That company raised as much as the entire capital world.

Global venture funding saw $31 billion raised in January 2023. OpenAI was $10 billion of that. Thanks to Microsoft <3

The last time we saw a funding round this large was in 2018 when Ant Group raised $14 billion. Ant Group is based in China and a sub-organization of Alibaba.

In 2018, we also saw Juul raise almost $13 billion from big tobacco. And now they’re trying to avoid bankruptcy. Talk about a bad investment.

Funding in January 2023 was up 27% compared to December 2022. But 50% lower than the $62 billion from January 2022.

TL;DR: Global funding has gone up since last month, but down since last year. OpenAI was 1/3 of global funding in January.

Sip on it here.

OUR OLD FRIEND WORDPRESS GETS A NEW UPGRADE

Remember that thing called “WordPress”? It was how your aunt ran her cooking blog for 2 weeks and became proficient in HTML.

We saw some early tests of how WordPress integrates AI into its image and text content editor.

They’ve partnered with OpenAI to use ChatGPT and DALL-E as “blocks” directly inside WordPress. The blocks are similar to Notion’s editor where you can edit and move sections.

Obviously, it sucks since it’s still in the testing stage. But this feature could be the comeback that WordPress needs to stay competitive amongst all the other website builders.

Sip on it here.

SMARTER STARTUP SPOTLIGHT 💡

This week’s spotlight is so wholesome 🥰 Deeply customized kid's books made with AI!

There are tons of personalized kids' books, based on changing the text to insert the kid's name. But the kid can't read!!

There are a few that go a little further with very basic image personalization, like a video game character creation screen. You pick one of 3 hair colors and one of 4 skin tones. No kid would see it and go "holy shit - that's me!!" *cough Metaverse cough*

The Big Brain Solution 🧠

Artificial Pub uses stable diffusion inpainting to deep-fake the kid's face right into the illustration.

You upload a dozen photos of your kid and they produce a book with each page a different story of a famous artist, and a photo of your kid drawn in the style of that artist!

100% "holy shit - that's me!!" guarantee. But if your kid is already swearing then you’ve got bigger problems…

You can view a sample of their books here.

Check out Artificial.Pub's website to get a 30-page hard copy + eBook for only $45.

And don’t forget to tell them that Soda Sally sent you ;)

Want to be featured for free in our Smarter Startup Spotlight? DM us on Twitter or email us at [email protected]

WHAT ELSE WE’RE SIPPIN’ ON

1. Large Language Models are cool and all, but do you ever wonder how they really work under the hood? This curated reading list explains the science behind LLM. Nerds will love it! Sip on it here.

2. Three stocks are set to benefit heavily from AI. Hint: It's Nvidia, AMD, and Marvell. Sip on it here.

3. IBM launches their AI supercomputer to its public cloud. Sip on it here.

That’s Everything

Send us cool AI stuff on Twitter. Until then ✌🏼

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