Announcing the winners of VentureBeat’s 6th Annual AI Innovation Awards

Capping the second day that includes insights from enterprise AI and information leaders throughout VB Rework 2024 in San Francisco, VentureBeat introduced the winners of the sixth annual AI Innovation Awards. 

The awards acknowledged enterprise implementation, innovation, startup promise and visionary and inclusivity initiatives in generative AI. 9 awards got in 5 classes: Generative AI Innovator of the Yr, Finest Enterprise Implementation of Generative AI, Most Promising Generative AI Startup, Generative AI Visionary, Generative AI Variety and Inclusion and Generative AI Open Supply Contribution.

The nominees and winners had been drawn from our each day editorial protection and the experience, data and expertise of our nominating committee members.

Thanks to our nominating committee members for his or her steering, insights and proposals: 

• Jonathan Frankle, Chief Scientist for neural networks at Databricks
• Diya Wynn, Accountable AI lead at AWS. 
• Tonya Custis, Senior Director of AI analysis at Autodesk
• Prem Natarajan, Chief Scientist and head of enterprise AI at Capital One
• Kalyan Veeramachaneni, Principal Analysis Scientist at MIT College of Computing

And the winners are: 

This award goes to the corporate that has pushed the boundaries of gen AI the furthest previously yr and demonstrated essentially the most progressive use of the expertise.

Our winner is OpenAI. The startup has rapidly claimed the focal point within the tech world, charming each business insiders and most of the people with its groundbreaking AI improvements. From the viral success of ChatGPT to the anticipation surrounding every new mannequin launch, OpenAI has masterfully stored the highlight on gen AI. Their rapid-fire developments, together with GPT-3, GPT-4, and DALL-E, haven’t solely showcased the potential of AI however have additionally sparked international conversations about its implications. With the current announcement of GPT-4o (GPT-4 Omni), OpenAI continues to command headlines and steer the narrative of AI’s future, cementing its position as the corporate everybody’s watching within the AI revolution.

This award highlights the highest enterprise firm that has carried out gen AI expertise in a really transformative method.

Our winner is Microsoft. The tech big has been engaged on incorporating gen AI into its Dynamics and Energy platforms to allow enterprise purposes with the ability of gen AI. The corporate has additionally deployed its Copilot gen AI assistant throughout the Microsoft 365 suite of enterprise productiveness and collaboration apps. In Might, the corporate introduced that Microsoft Copilot Studio will let builders construct AI bots that act like brokers. In June, the corporate’s Azure AI team dropped a brand new imaginative and prescient mannequin referred to as Florence-2 on Hugging Face.

Colette Stallbaumer, WorkLab co-founder and Copilot GM at Microsoft, was a speaker at Rework. She accepted the award in a video earlier within the day.

“I’m honored that VentureBeat is recognizing Microsoft for finest enterprise and implementation. It’s been an unbelievable yr and I’m thrilled that our clients are seeing the worth of Copilot within the enterprise. I’m honored to just accept this award on behalf of Microsoft and the unbelievable workforce behind Copilot. Thanks.”

Our winner is Patronus AI. The corporate is concentrated on AI analysis and safety, notably for giant language fashions (LLMs). As extra tech corporations launch fashions able to seeing, listening to and injecting emotion into interactions, it makes it troublesome to maintain up with accuracy, privateness and auditing wants. Patronus AI goals to deal with these challenges and has launched “FinanceBench” benchmarks, datasets and diagnostics to assist in areas like detecting personally identifiable info (PII) in bot info. In Might, the corporate raised $17 million in a collection A funding, bringing its whole funding to $20 million.

The Patronous AI workforce couldn’t be on the convention to just accept the award in particular person; nevertheless, Anand Kannappan, co-founder and CEO, did ship in an acceptance video.

Kannappan mentioned the corporate was thrilled to be receiving the award.

“We assist corporations scale, we catch failures to inform their programs…we launched the patch late final yr to assist monetary providers corporations and take a look at their programs,” he mentioned. “It has since been broadly adopted as an ordinary by monetary establishments. We’re so pleased with this recognition from VentureBeat and we’re actually thrilled about what’s coming subsequent in 2024 and past.”

Our winner is Abridge. The corporate provides an AI-powered platform constructed for medical conversations and enhancing medical documentation. The corporate’s expertise transforms patient-clinician conversations into structured medical notes in real-time with deep digital medical data integrations. In February the corporate introduced a $150 million collection C spherical, simply 4 months after a $30 million collection B spherical. The corporate additionally introduced a brand new enterprise settlement with Yale New Haven Well being System, to cut back the psychological load of medical documentation to concentrate on affected person care.

Abridge CTO/CSO Zack Lipton accepted the award for the corporate at VB Rework. He talked about how the corporate is working to take away the executive friction that medical professionals face.

“Already within the final yr we’ve gone from a single pilot to the main system deployed in over 50 hospital programs throughout the nation,” mentioned Lipton. The hope is to avoid wasting medical doctors and medical professionals priceless time, he added.

“Day by day we hear from medical doctors who’re in a position to get house earlier, take lunch breaks for the primary time in 10 years and spend time with their households within the night,” mentioned Lipton. “We’re saving medical doctors hours per day and we’re simply getting began.”

Our winners are ServiceNow and Hugging Face. StarCoder, a brand new LLM, a part of the BigCode Project, a joint effort of ServiceNow and Hugging Face, launched in May. That is a part of an effort to construct out an open neighborhood round code technology instruments for AI.

ServiceNow’s Sampada Chavan, an AI senior principal product supervisor, accepted the award at VB Rework.

“There are two predominant issues that I need to spotlight,” Chavan mentioned. “One, is we actually faucet into the virtuous cycle of open innovation as a result of that is the place the neighborhood got here collectively to construct the mannequin in accordance with the information and that may give it again to the dedicated neighborhood as effectively.” The second half, she added, is having open, clear details about the fashions.

“And that is going to assist us with the generative AI in addition to responsive, accountable AI at scale,” she mentioned.

This award goes to essentially the most promising startup that has developed an progressive gen AI software and demonstrated excessive development potential.

Our winner is Lamini. The startup provides a platform for AI mannequin growth and deployment and recently introduced findings that its fine-tuning reduces hallucinations by 90%. The corporate was based in 2022 and goals to simplify the method of making, fine-tuning and deploying customized LLMs for companies. Lamini’s platform focuses on enabling mannequin coaching on proprietary information whereas addressing privateness issues and computational effectivity.

Greg Diamos, CTO and co-founder of Lamini, accepted the award at Rework.

“It’s been an actual journey to get right here to have the ability to create this firm,” he mentioned. “I believe our mission is that each single enterprise can have entry to generative AI. He added that it was an honor for the corporate to obtain the award.

This award honors a person who has made vital contributions to the sector of gen AI via their thought management, analysis or work constructing foundational applied sciences.

John Pasmore is the founder and CEO of Latimer, an LLM designed with deep empathy and a dedication to decreasing bias. Latimer understands the nuances of numerous voices and narratives and leverages a retrieval-augmented technology (RAG) mannequin structure to make sure each response is grounded in essentially the most correct and complete information out there.

Pasmore accepted his award at Rework, saying: “It’s an unbelievable honor. We’re a really younger firm. We began final July and launched our product in January of this yr, with the only real purpose of creating AI as inclusive as potential. So we’ve constructed a built-in mannequin that we hope all people makes use of. We’ve seen large adoption, we’re working with a bunch of faculties and universities.”

This award acknowledges the corporate, group or person who has finished essentially the most to advertise variety and inclusion within the gen AI discipline. This might embody advancing AI ethics, making AI applied sciences extra accessible, offering alternatives and assist for underrepresented teams or utilizing AI in a method that reduces bias and promotes social justice.

Maryam Rezapoor works on product growth for Amazon AGI. She constructed the AWS AI and ML Scholarship, in collaboration with Intel and Udacity, from idea to creation to supply highschool and faculty college students from underserved and underrepresented communities with sources to begin their careers in AI and ML globally. (Disclosure: One among our nominating committee members works for AWS)

Rezapoor accepted her award at VB Rework. She thanked her workforce and management at AWS.

“The journey of constructing this product and program was crammed with dedication and reflection for me,” Rezapoor mentioned. “As any person from Iran, the expertise of navigating a brand new tradition formed my perspective. I vividly keep in mind the time that I completely acknowledged the worth and the ability of variety. Being in a room with individuals from completely different walks of life. I noticed firsthand how a imaginative and prescient can rework into one thing extraordinary with individuals of numerous backgrounds.”

“So I’m actually longing for future information concepts and creators which might be as numerous because the world,” she added.

This award highlights the particular person, workforce or firm that has made essentially the most vital contribution to open-source instruments, datasets or different sources to assist advance gen AI.

Our winner is Hugging Face. This main AI firm and platform gives a complete ecosystem for machine studying (ML) practitioners, researchers and builders. Hugging Face is famend for its vital open-source contributions to the ML neighborhood, notably in advancing pure language processing (NLP) and laptop imaginative and prescient (CV) applied sciences. Hugging Face’s platform has develop into a go-to useful resource for AI practitioners, fostering innovation and data sharing within the discipline.

Congratulations to all our winners and nominees.