Curated Intel from the Talent Tech Industry
March 4-10, 2024:
• Unleashing one more ChatGPT killer: Anthropic intros Claude 3 with “near-human” capabilities;
• Seeing the future of job ads: Video-generative AI platform Haiper nabs $13.8M in seed funding;
• Putting it all together: Deel buys self-development solution Zavvy to step up consolidation play;
• Peeking behind the curtain: M&A dealmakers now focusing on founders’ background checks;
• Expanding TA’s future: LinkedIn launches new internal mobility and career development tools.
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Is Claude 3 the ChatGPT Killer?
Anthropic claims that Claude 3, the company's most recent AI release, has achieved "near-human" capabilities in various cognitive tasks. It's a bold claim. Let's put it in perspective. Anthropic's claims for Claude 3 center around its performance across a range of cognitive tasks, including reasoning, expert knowledge, mathematics, and language fluency. The company suggests that the Opus model (in particular) exhibits near-human levels of comprehension and fluency on complex tasks. This claim is supported by Claude 3 Opus outperforming OpenAI's GPT-4 (the underlying model that powers ChatGPT) on 10 AI benchmarks, including MMLU (undergraduate level knowledge), GSM8K (grade school math), HumanEval (coding), and HellaSwag (common knowledge). Despite these achievements, it's important to note that achieving "near-human" capabilities on specific benchmarks does not equate to Claude 3 possessing general intelligence akin to human cognition. The AI research community often uses terms like "know" or "reason" to describe large language models' capabilities, but use of these words does not imply that these models have consciousness or understanding in the human sense.
London-based video-generative AI platform Haiper bags €12.6M to generate high-quality video content
London-based Haiper, a video-generative AI platform, has come out of stealth mode and announced on Tuesday that it has secured $13.8M (approximately €12.6M) in a seed round of funding led by Octopus Ventures. The latest round brings Haiper’s total funding to $19.2M (approximately €17.6M) ahead of its raising a Series A round in 2024. The company will use funds to develop and release a series of large trained models that will push the boundaries of technology-enabled creativity and imagination. Founded by Dr. Yishu Miao (CEO) and Dr. Ziyu Wang (CTO), Haiper is building a foundation model for visual content that allows anyone, even those without technical experience to generate high-quality video content. To advance video-generative AI, companies need to scale models and data to understand the world’s physics. Every frame of a video holds minute visual information, from light to motion and texture, and object interactions. Once generative AI can intuitively replicate reality, it can create stunning and true-to-life content, such as a linen shirt moving in the wind or a splash of water. The UK company’s team is training its perceptual foundation model with distributed data processing and model training infrastructure designed to be scaled up.
Deel, the $12B HR startup, acquires Zavvy to step up consolidation play
Consolidation is afoot in the world of HR services, with larger players snapping up interesting, smaller startups en route to more robust unit economics and providing one-stop shops for customers looking to cut down on suppliers. In the latest development, Deel — the $12 billion HR business — is scooping up Zavvy, a Munich-based AI-based “people development” startup building tools for personalized career progression, training, and performance management. Deel, which was founded in Paris but is now based in San Francisco, has made its name mainly with payroll and other HR services aimed at distributed workforces, will bring Zavvy’s services onto the same platform as its existing services — a nod to the company shifting focus to work more with distributed and non-distributed workforces. It plans also to start incorporating more AI across that wider portfolio. Finally, Deel will also make its existing Deel HR tool, which was free for organizations of up to 200 users, now “free” for existing customers regardless of their size.
M&A Dealmakers Intensify Focus On Founders’ Background Checks To Help Mitigate Risk
Managing investment risk is high on the agenda of M&A dealmakers in 2024. Thorough background checks on founders and the key management of potential target companies provide essential information to mitigate unforeseen exposure. Hunt Scanlon Ventures managing director, Drew Seaman, examines why talent screening should be at the top of every dealmakers diligence checklist. In the VC world, it seems that for every startup that fulfills its unicorn potential, there are countless others that flame out amid high-profile controversy. Often, those flameouts are accompanied by pointed media commentary asking how the signs — so obvious in hindsight — could have been missed. This has led to increased scrutiny by venture capital firms’ decision-making and risk-management teams. VC investors, however, are not alone in judiciously doubling down on due diligence prior to investing. Private equity operators and strategic buy-side teams are also paying closer attention to critical pre-acquisition due diligence to set the foundation for a seamless process, and often that means focusing on the talent that comes along with the deal.
LinkedIn launches new internal mobility and career development tools
LinkedIn is launching new learning and hiring tools to match employees to internal jobs and help them get discovered by internal hirers, according to a March 6 announcement. On LinkedIn Jobs, employees can now receive alerts about new internal roles and express their interest, which then passes into LinkedIn Recruiter, where hiring teams can see internal candidates’ interest immediately. On LinkedIn Learning, employees can also find internal roles, learn about the top skills they’ll need for those roles and locate courses to build those skills. The Next Role Explorer is intended to be a dynamic career path visualization tool that recommends potential next roles to employees inside the company based on their current title and career goals. The tool points employees to customizable role guides that outline the specific skills needed to succeed in a role. After that, employees can receive personalized learning plans to track their progress on the most important skills needed to advance their careers. The recommendations will include both hard and soft skills that employees can learn to grow and get promoted. “Especially in the age of AI, when jobs are changing on us even if we’re not changing jobs, these tools can help organizations align skill development to what their company needs,” Raines said.
TAtech North America: Content & Connections You Can Use for Business Success
Get worldclass content and business-building connections at TAtech North America & The World Job Board Forum. Avoid FOMO, register right now for the only conference in the North American market that is specifically designed both for job board and talent technology company CEOs, their direct reports and rising stars and to accelerate the bottom-line growth of their enterprises. Why the rush? Because the conference will be held June 4-6, 2024 at The International Spy Museum which has a limited seating capacity. Whether your company is a niche or general job board, aggregator, talent marketplace, online classifieds business, programmatic platform, chatbot, conversational AI solution, ATS, recruitment marketing solution, CRM platform, interviewing or assessment system or talent technology consultancy, this event will supercharge your sales and your profits. So, register today and accelerate the success your company achieves, today, tomorrow and into the future!