September 4, 2024

Not like the other girls

Hi there, 

While its big tech peers have been vocal about their genAI ambitions, Apple has kept its AI strategy largely under wraps. 

Its biggest splash came in June 2024 — when it debuted its generative AI suite, Apple Intelligence. 

Apple Intelligence will be designed for everyday use, like writing and generating to-do lists.

The goal is for the AI to be integrated behind the scenes and across applications: invisible and intuitive. 

For Apple, all roads lead back to user experience. 

So where is it headed?

Its recent acquisitions, partnerships, and earnings calls taken together provide a window into its AI strategy.

Here are the key takeaways: 

• An AI agent built on top of its app empire: Partnering with OpenAI to turbocharge Siri (aka fix Siri), marking its entrance into agentic AI.
• Hybrid approach to genAI models: Building privacy-first small language models while tapping into third-party LLMs for heavy lifting. 
• Augmented reality (AR) ambitions: Gobbling up startups in AR, machine vision, and image recognition to fuel its spatial computing efforts.

CB Insights customers can get the full analysis here. 

Green giants

Big tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia are racing to achieve their sustainability goals.

And we mined our data on these companies to reveal how exactly they plan to meet their commitments.

Take Microsoft as an example — our data shows that it’s focusing on solar, fusion, and carbon capture tech to meet the growing energy demands of its AI-driven operations.

Dive deeper into its strategy and explore what its big tech peers are up to in this report.

Double agent

AI agents — LLM-based bots that can independently assign themselves to and complete tasks to fulfill a user’s goal — took off like wildfire in 2023.

Now, multi-agent AI systems are emerging that can outperform single agents on complex tasks.

For example, Sierra provides a multi-agent conversational AI for customer experience.

And one of its buyers highlighted a unique benefit of its multi-agent approach: its agents can course-correct and check each other’s work.

Dive into where multi-agent architectures are today and what’s coming next here.

Everybody wants to rule the world

Last week, we released our third annual Insurtech 50 — our list of the most promising insurtech startups in the world.

Global representation was strong this year, with the winners collectively representing more than a dozen countries.

And for the third year in a row, the US came out on top with the most winners (30).

Within the US, not surprisingly, Silicon Valley and New York led the pack with 10 winners each.

Check out these coastal champs and discover what they’re working on in the full report.

I love you. 

Anand 

@asanwal 

P.S. Applications are open for this year’s Fintech 100 — our list of the most promising fintech startups in the world. Get yours in today.

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