Interesting pivot. They used to call themselves a "non-profit distributed AI research lab" that gave small chunks of cash to AI researchers. Now they've changed to much larger investments for products/startups.
As someone on the outside of AI tech, I wonder if this is also a reflection of how difficult it can be to make create a differentiated product in the AI space on a small budget. The mission statement also indicates that they would like to find products that are complex, likely to create a moat and make it difficult for competitors to move into the same space quickly.
Given that the Hacker News frontpage has been taken over by GPT-3/DALL-E/Stable Diffusion in the past couple months, consumer AI popularity definitely is not fading away.
The HackerNews community is not reflective of the general tech, consumer, or business environment. First-hand experience in delivering and selling AI solutions to enterprises and governments plus activity at conferences, venture capital investment, and other measures are showing that interest in AI is generally cooling off, even if there are interesting things happening with generative transformer models, which is where the interest is currently.
DALL-E mini/Craiyon, Midjourney, and Wombo all blew up because of the easy/free accessibility of AI generation tools, to the point of John Oliver doing a sketch about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YNku5FKWjw
The consumer applications will incidentially provide more of an incentive into investing into AI research since there's a good chance of ROI, which will trickle down into better open source AI like Stable Diffusion.
I’d be interested in what you mean by that - VC investment has slowed down, but investment by large firms (tech or otherwise) is only increasing.
And with large language models, generative models, diffusion models, etc becoming more and more common its becoming less novel, but certainly not less popular.
See their HN announcement 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851806