Announcing the finalists for the sixth annual VentureBeat AI Innovations Awards

As enterprise decision-makers prepare for VentureBeat’s flagship enterprise AI event, VB Transform next week, we’re excited to announce the finalists for the sixth annual VB AI Innovation Awards.

The winners can be announced during an awards ceremony on the most important stage of Transform on July 10, 4-5 p.m. in San Francisco. 

Transform, the premier event for enterprise technical decision-makers focused on mastering generative AI applications, is ready to happen from July 9 to 11. This exclusive three-day in-person gathering offers a novel opportunity to explore the impact of gen AI across crucial sectors including health, finance, and software. Attendees will gain invaluable insights from a various lineup of speakers, featuring tech leaders from Fortune 500 firms including Wells Fargo, Walmart and Kaiser Permanente, and progressive and disruptive corporations like Brex, Pinterest and Airbnb.

On July 10, VentureBeat will recognize and award various types of excellence in AI through our sixth annual VB AI Innovation Awards. The winners can be in nine categories including the next categories: Generative AI Innovator of the Year, Best Enterprise Implementation of Generative AI, Most Promising Generative AI Startup, Generative AI Visionary, Generative AI Diversity, Fairness and Inclusion and Generative AI Open Source Contribution.

The nominees are drawn from our every day editorial coverage and the expertise, knowledge and experience of our nominating committee members. Prepare to witness the trailblazers and game-changers within the realm of generative AI take center stage as we recognize their outstanding contributions.

Thank you to our nominating committee members for his or her guidance, insights and suggestions: 

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

Here are the nominees for every category:

Generative AI Innovator of the Year

This award will go to the corporate that has pushed the boundaries of gen AI the furthest up to now yr and demonstrated probably the most progressive use of the technology. The winner could have created an application, platform or service that showcases the vast potential of gen AI in a creative, impactful way.

OpenAI

• OpenAI has quickly claimed the focus within the tech world, charming each industry insiders and most people with its groundbreaking AI innovations. From the viral success of ChatGPT to the anticipation surrounding each recent model release, OpenAI has masterfully kept the highlight on generative AI. Their rapid-fire advancements, including GPT-3, GPT-4, and DALL-E, haven’t only showcased the potential of AI but have also sparked global conversations about its implications. With the recent announcement of GPT-4o (GPT-4 Omni), OpenAI continues to command headlines and steer the narrative of AI’s future, cementing its role as the corporate everyone’s watching within the AI revolution.

Mistral

• Mistral AI has quickly grow to be a outstanding player within the AI space because it was founded in 2023. The company goals to “democratize” AI through open-source innovation. At the tip of May, the corporate marked its entry into the programming and development space with the launch of Codestral, its first-ever code-centric LLM. Just a few weeks later Mistral announced it had secured $640 million in a series B funding that brings its valuation to $6 billion.

Google

• Google has developed a wide selection of AI-powered tools and features within the Google ecosystem, from Gmail to Google Search, not to say the work of Google’s Deepmind unit. In February Google unveiled Gemini 1.5, the most recent iteration of its conversational AI system, which offers higher efficiency, performance and reasoning capabilities. In June Google made the most recent two variations of Gemini 1.5 Flash and Pro publicly accessible. 

ElevenLabs

• ElevenLabs focuses on using machine learning (ML) for voice cloning and synthesis in several languages. In January, just two years after its inception the corporate announced an $80 million series B funding round, growing its valuation to $1.1 billion. It also announced a bunch of latest features, including a tool for dubbing full-length movies and a brand new marketplace where users can sell their cloned voices for money. In May the corporate announced a brand new text-to-sound AI offering called Sound Effects. In June, the corporate released an iOS app focused on converting text files or links from the online into audio narration that the user can take heed to while on the go. Just this week the corporate released its first major consumer-centric product-a Reader app. This week the corporate also announced it’s expanding its library of voices and accents.

Amazon

• Amazon has developed a wide selection of AI-powered products and tools within the Amazon ecosystem. In February Amazon announced Rufus, a brand new generative AI-powered conversational shopping experience. In April, AWS announced a serious update to Amazon Bedrock, a platform that goals to make it easier for developers to construct and deploy gen AI models. The update brought recent models and improved security. In June, Amazon SageMaker, one other service on AWS, expanded it’s capabilities with the overall availability of the managed MLflow on SagMaker. Also In June, Q, Amazon’s conversational AI assistant for enterprises got an update for call center employees: real-time, step-by-step guides tailored to resolve whatever issues a customer is asking about.

Best Enterprise Implementation of Generative AI

This award will highlight the highest enterprise company that has implemented gen AI in a very transformative way.

Microsoft

• Microsoft has been working on incorporating generative AI into its Microsoft Dynamics and Power platforms to enable enterprise applications with the ability of generative AI. The company has also deployed its Copilot generative AI assistant across the Microsoft 365 suite of business productivity and collaboration apps. In May, the corporate announced that Microsoft Copilot Studio will let developers construct AI bots that act like agents. In June, the corporate’s Azure AI team dropped a brand new vision model called Florence-2 on Hugging Face.

GitHub

• GitHub is the widely used platform for version control and collaborative software development. GitHub’s Copilot is an AI-powered coding assistant developed by GitHub in collaboration with OpenAI. In May, GitHub debuted CoPilot Extensions, plugin support connecting third-party apps with Copilot Chat.

Klarna

• Klarna, the Swedish fintech company known for its “buy now, pay later” services, has implemented AI extensively across its operations, each in customer support and internal processes. This includes an AI assistant for customer support, internal AI assistant (Kiki) and widespread adoption of AI by employees.

Cohere

• Cohere offers an enterprise platform for generative AI, search, and advanced retrieval. In 2024, the corporate made significant strides: In February, its nonprofit research lab unveiled Aya, an open-source LLM supporting 101 languages. March saw the discharge of Command-R, a robust enterprise-focused language model, amid a serious fundraising round. In April, Cohere launched a toolkit to speed up enterprise generative AI app development. Finally, in May, the corporate released Aya 23, an open-weights model supporting 23 languages.

Salesforce

• Salesforce, a number one cloud-based based software company focused on customer relationship management (CRM) solutions in February launched the general public beta release of Einstein Copilot. Salesforce can also be integrating with OpenAI to deliver AI-generated content. The company rolled out expanded availability of the copilot in April. Also in April, Salesforce’s Tableau division detailed the subsequent wave of AI-powered analytics for the platform.  

Best Enterprise Implementation of Generative AI (Finance)

Visa

• Visa is a pioneer in AI-driven fraud protection and has embraced the transformative potential of generative AI. The company has been using AI to guard payments since 1993. The corporations recent moves have included launching a secure instance of GPT-4 for developers and investing $100 million in a gen AI ventures initiative. In May the corporate added to it’s arsenal of attack intelligence tools with the addition of a brand new gen AI-powered VAAI Score to discover and rating enumeration attacks.

FinTool

• FinTool is an AI-powered financial evaluation tool designed primarily for institutional investors and equity research professionals. It’s described as an “AI Equity Research Copilot” that analyzes SEC filings, earnings calls and conference transcripts to supply insights and answer complex financial questions.

Patronus AI

• Patronus AI is concentrated on AI evaluation and security, particularly for LLMs. As more tech corporations release models able to seeing, hearing and injecting emotion into interactions, it makes it difficult to maintain up with accuracy, privacy and auditing needs. Patronus AI goals to deal with these challenges has launched “FinanceBench” benchmarks, datasets and diagnostics to assist in areas like detecting personally identifiable information (PII) in bot information. In May, the corporate raised $17 million in a series A funding, bringing its total funding to $20 million.

ING Bank

Bloomberg

• Bloomberg the worldwide financial news and media company has been integrating AI across its operations, including in news productions, data evaluation and financial tools. In March 2023, Bloomberg introduced BloombergGPT, an LLM specifically trained on financial data.

Best Enterprise Implementation of Generative AI (Health)

Abridge

• Abridge is an AI-powered platform built for medical conversations and improving clinical documentation. The company’s technology transforms patient-clinician conversations into structured clinical notes in real-time with deep electronic medical records integrations. In February the corporate announced a $150 million series C round, just 4 months after a $30 million series B round. The company also announced a brand new enterprise agreement with Yale New Haven Health System, to cut back the mental load of clinical documentation to deal with patient care.

Cradle

• Cradle is a web-based software that makes protein engineering faster. The company’s gen AI tool is trained on a proprietary dataset of billions of sequences and might design novel, high-performing proteins for various industries. In 2023, the corporate raised a $23 million series A round.

Viz.ai

• Viz.ai uses AI to research medical imaging data, including CT scans, to supply real-time insights and automatic assessments to speed up the diagnosis and treatment of doubtless life-threatening diseases resembling stroke. The company was valued at $1.2 billion within the last funding round in 2022. 

Nabla

• Nabla is the developer of Nabla Copilot, which generates clinical notes, AI-enabled medical coding identification and electronic health record integrations. Since its launch in 2018, Nabla has raised a complete of $43 million. In March the corporate announced the launch of Nabla Copilot’s recent Magic Edit feature, which allows for personalization inside automated clinical documentation. 

Amazon

• Amazon has been expanding its presence within the healthcare sector through various initiatives and acquisitions including Amazon Care, Amazon Pharmacy, Amazon Clinic, acquiring One Medical, AWS for Health, Alexa Health and Wellness and Amazon Halo. Amazon pharmacy has doubled the number of consumers it serves within the last yr. The company utilizes AI and machine learning to administer inventory, help customers find one of the best price, real-time insurance estimates on prescription medications.

Best Enterprise Implementation of Generative AI (Software)

Cognition Labs

• Cognition Labs emerged from stealth in February to announce a full autonomous AI software engineer called “Devin.” The announcement of Devin marks a big shift within the AI-assisted development space, giving engineers a full-fledged AI employee for his or her projects, somewhat than a copilot that might merely write barebones code or suggest snippets. Just months later, the corporate is searching for a valuation of $2 billion.

Replit

• Replit, is a startup that gives a cloud-based platform for software development. The company is aggressively pivoting towards AI to power its coding tools. Central to that plan is an AI-powered code completion tool called Ghostwriter, which Replit made available to all users and rebranded simply as “Replit AI.”

ServiceNow and Hugging Face

Cohere

• In March the corporate announced the discharge of a serious recent language model, Command-R, amid a heated fundraising round. In April, the corporate released a toolkit to speed up generative AI app development within the enterprise. In May the corporate launched open weights AI model Aya 23 with support for nearly two dozen languages.

Airtable

• Airtable is a low-code platform that helps users construct applications. Airtable AI allows users to directly deploy AI into critical workflows. In March, the corporate launched Airtable AI to GA alongside prolonged capabilities. The power of AI in Airtable is its ability to develop recent assets within the context of existing data and insights, after which supercharge the execution of the work inside an enterprise workflow. 

Most promising generative AI startup

This award will go to probably the most promising startup that has developed an progressive gen AI application and demonstrated high growth potential and has raised lower than $30 million in funding.

Viggle.AI

• Viggle.AI has emerged as an progressive and powerful creative AI tool within the realm of controllable video generation. Viggle.AI is powered by JST-1, a complicated video-3D foundation model. This advanced AI system forms the backbone of Viggle’s capabilities, enabling it to generate and manipulate video content with unprecedented control and adaptability.

Create Labs

• Create Labs focuses its efforts on the AI and metaverse design space. The company offers customized AI application development services to its clients. In addition to its tech offerings, Create Labs has initiated programs aimed toward providing skills training, resources, and networking opportunities to underserved populations.

DataCebo

• DataCebo, launched an open-source library called Synthetic Data Vault (SDV) the co-founders created at MIT. They took this and decided to take it to enterprises. The company uses relational and tabular databases to create synthetic data. (Disclosure: One of our nominating committee members is a co-founder of

​​Midjourney

• Midjourney is an independent research lab. Midjourney generates images from natural language descriptions called “prompts” just like OpenAI’s DALL·E and Stable Diffusion. Midjourney stands out since the AI bot can only be accessed via the voice-over-internet protocol, fast messaging social platform Discord — somewhat than via its website or mobile app. 

Lamini

• Lamini, a startup offering a platform for AI model development and deployment, recently announced findings that its fine-tuning reduces hallucinations by 90%. The company founded in 2022, goals to simplify the means of creating, fine-tuning and deploying custom LLMs for businesses. Lamini’s platform focuses on enabling model training on proprietary data while addressing privacy concerns and computational efficiency.

Generative AI Visionary

This award will go to a person who has made significant contributions to the sphere of gen AI through their thought leadership, research or work constructing foundational technologies. The winner could be judged based on the novelty and influence of their contributions, as evidenced by publications, patents or products developed.

Clement Delangue

• Clem Delangue is the CEO and co-founder of Hugging Face. His mission is to democratize good machine learning and promote transparency, openness and distribution of power in AI capabilities. He was recognized in Time’s 100 Most Influential People in AI for 2023.

Yann LeCun

• Yann LeCun is the Chief AI Scientist for Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and is understood for his pivotal work in machine learning, computer vision and deep learning. 

John Pasmore

• John Pasmore is the founder and CEO of Latimer. Latimer is an LLM designed with deep empathy and a commitment to reducing bias. Latimer understands the nuances of diverse voices and narratives and leverages a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model architecture to make sure every response is grounded in probably the most accurate and comprehensive data available.

Luke Zettlemoyer

• Luke Zettlemoyer is a professor on the University of Washington and a researcher at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). He is a prolific scientist and has been involved in an enormous variety of vital papers that affect the best way LLMs are created today (multimodal models released today by Meta, quantization through the BitsAndBytes library and Qlora, Toolformer for establishing tool use as a crucial area of LLM research, the OLMo project at AI2, several vital methods for LLM data selection, the OPT project at Meta etc.)

Joelle Pineau

• Joelle Pineau is VP of AI Research at Meta. She has overseen an enormous portfolio of impactful AI research at Meta for a few years and has championed higher reproducibility in the sphere of AI as an entire (through reproducibility checklists and the machine learning reproducibility challenge).

The Generative AI Diversity, Fairness and Inclusion Award

This award will recognize the corporate, organization or person that has done probably the most to advertise diversity and inclusion within the gen AI field. This could include advancing AI ethics, making AI technologies more accessible, providing opportunities and support for underrepresented groups or using AI in a way that reduces bias and promotes social justice.

Fei-Fei Li

• Fei-Fei Li is the Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. Li has been leading the event of cognitively inspired AI, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision and AI+healthcare, especially ambient intelligent systems for healthcare delivery. Li has also been a national leading voice for advocating diversity in STEM and AI. She is co-founder and chairperson of the national non-profit AI4ALL aimed toward increasing inclusion and variety in AI education. She has also been working with policymakers nationally and locally to make sure the responsible use of generative AI, resembling testifying before Congress, serving on the California Future of Work Commission, and being a member of the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force.

Stella Biderman

• Stella Biderman is a outstanding researcher in the sphere of artificial intelligence and machine learning. She is especially known for her work on large language models and AI ethics. Biderman is a co-founder of EleutherAI, a collective of researchers working on open-source AI projects. She has contributed significantly to the event and understanding of language models.

Maryam Rezapoor

• Maryam Rezapoor works on product development for Amazon AGI. She built the AWS AI and ML Scholarship, in collaboration with Intel and Udacity, from concept to creation to supply highschool and college students from underserved and underrepresented communities with resources to start out their profession in AI and ML globally.

Rosanne Liu

• Rosanne Liu is a research scientist at Google Deepmind, she can also be the co-founder and executive director of the ML Collective. ML collective is a decentralized, massively scaled, openly collaborative lab for those trying to research AI and ML at home.

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)

• DARPA is a research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense working on the event of emerging tech that might be used for the military. 

Generative AI Open Source Contribution

This award highlights the person, team or company that has made probably the most significant contribution to open-source tools, datasets or other resources to assist advance gen AI.

Hugging Face

• Hugging Face is a number one AI company and platform that gives a comprehensive ecosystem for machine learning practitioners, researchers, and developers. The company is renowned for its significant open-source contributions to the machine learning community, particularly in advancing NLP and CV technologies. Hugging Face’s platform has grow to be a go-to resource for AI practitioners, fostering innovation and knowledge sharing in the sphere.

Mistral AI

• Mistral AI is a French company founded in 2023 that gives a few of the hottest open-source large language models, positioning itself as a European alternative to major AI firms like OpenAI and Google.

PyTorch

• PyTorch is an open-source machine learning framework primarily developed by Facebook’s AI Research lab. It is widely used for applications resembling computer vision and natural language processing. PyTorch is understood for its ease of use, flexibility in model design, and powerful community support, making it a well-liked selection amongst researchers and developers in the sphere of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Meta-LLaMA

• Meta has made significant strides in open-source generative AI technology with the discharge of LLaMA-3. This latest iteration of their LLaMA series is designed to be more accessible and resource-efficient in comparison with larger proprietary models. By releasing LLaMA-3 as an open-source model, Meta is fostering innovation and collaboration throughout the AI community. The model’s smaller size makes it more practical for a wider range of users to experiment with and construct upon, potentially accelerating progress in the sphere of generative AI.

Toyota Research Institute 

• Toyota Research Institute is a research and development enterprise, whose mission is to create recent tools and capabilities focused on improving the human condition. TRI has been on the forefront of developing gen AI models with their open-source repository.

Counting right down to the AI Innovation Awards

We sit up for sharing the winners of the AI Innovation Awards next week. Awards can be presented at VentureBeat’s in-person event at VB Transform on July 10 in San Francisco. Stay tuned!