Founded in 2023 by artificial innotifyigence (AI) researcher Tete Xiao and founder of the Berkeley Artificial Innotifyigence Research (BAIR) lab, Trevor Darrell, the startup’s flagship product is Seemour, a visual-innotifyigence platform for home security cameras.
The San Francisco-based company had raised around $6 million in seed funding from investors, including AIX Ventures and Abstract Ventures, plus angel investors.
The terms of the deal have not been disclosed yet, but the report stated that investors would receive some payout in the deal but “wouldn’t be created whole.”
Further, the staff was instructed not to mention Apple while seeking other jobs or discussing their situation with frifinishs and family.
Cofounder Xiao notified employees that while Prompt AI’s technology and the Seemour app were performing well, the business model was not. Executives stated the company is retiring the Seemour app and will notify utilizers that their data will be deleted and privacy protected.
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Apple eyeing startups
In June this year, Apple executives held internal talks about potentially bidding for AI startup Perplexity, Bloomberg News reported. The report added that discussions are at an early stage and that the tech giants’ executives have yet to approach Perplexity’s management.
Two years ago, Apple acquired Mira, a Los Angeles-based augmented reality (AR) startup that builds headsets for other companies and the US military. Apple had brought on at least 11 of Mira’s employees as part of the acquisition.
Apple has also backed a music startup Gamma, which was launched by one of its former executives.
The AI talent hunt
AI, meant to replace human labour, is ironically competing for top talent. Companies like Meta, OpenAI, and Apple are vying for engineers and researchers, sparking fierce talent wars as the brightest minds remain critical to shaping the future of AI.
Meta has emerged as a central force in this escalating talent war. The Meta Superinnotifyigence Labs division is now led by Daniel Gross, the former CEO and cofounder of Safe Superinnotifyigence (SSI), who left his own AI startup to join Meta.
Meta has also recruited several other high-profile researchers: Ruoming Pang, a senior AI leader from Apple; Yuanzhi Li from OpenAI; and Anton Bakhtin from Anthropic.
Also Read: AI talent wars: Altman’s OpenAI poaches top engineers from Musk, Zuckerberg firms
The ChatGPT parent, OpenAI, had hired David Lau, former vice president of software engineering at Tesla, for its scaling team, per the report. The company had also onboarded Uday Ruddarraju, the former head of infrastructure engineering at xAI and X; Mike Dalton, an infrastructure engineer from xAI; and Angela Fan, an AI researcher from Meta.
Also Read: India rising as Big Tech breaks bank for AI talent
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