Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More
Wrapping up the second day of VB Transform 2024 in San Francisco, VentureBeat announced the winners of the sixth annual AI Innovation Awards. These awards celebrate achievements in enterprise implementation, innovation, startup potential, and initiatives in generative AI. Nine awards were given across five categories: Generative AI Innovator of the Year, Best Enterprise Implementation of Generative AI, Most Promising Generative AI Startup, Generative AI Visionary, Generative AI Diversity and Inclusion, and Generative AI Open Source Contribution.
The nominees and winners were selected based on our daily editorial coverage and the expertise of our nominating committee members.
Thank you to our nominating committee members for their guidance and recommendations:
– Jonathan Frankle, 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
And the winners are:
Generative AI Innovator of the Year
This award goes to the company that has pushed the boundaries of generative AI the furthest in the past year and demonstrated the most innovative use of the technology. Our winner is OpenAI. The startup has quickly become a focal point in the tech world with its groundbreaking AI innovations. From the viral success of ChatGPT to the anticipation surrounding each new model release, OpenAI has kept the spotlight on generative AI. Their rapid advancements, including GPT-3, GPT-4, and DALL-E, have showcased AI’s potential and sparked global conversations about its implications. With the recent announcement of GPT-4o (GPT-4 Omni), OpenAI continues to lead the narrative of AI’s future.
Best Enterprise Implementation of Generative AI
This award highlights the top enterprise company that has implemented generative AI technology in a transformative way. Our winner is Microsoft. The tech giant has integrated generative AI into its Dynamics and Power platforms, enhancing enterprise applications. Microsoft has also deployed its Copilot generative AI assistant across the Microsoft 365 suite. In May, Microsoft announced that Copilot Studio would allow developers to build AI bots that act like agents. In June, the Azure AI team released a new vision model called Florence-2 on Hugging Face.
Colette Stallbaumer, WorkLab co-founder and Copilot GM at Microsoft, accepted the award in a video earlier in the day. She expressed her gratitude for the recognition and highlighted the value customers are seeing from Copilot in the enterprise.
Best Enterprise Implementation of Generative AI (Finance)
Our winner is Patronus AI. The company focuses on AI evaluation and security, particularly for large language models (LLMs). Patronus AI addresses challenges in accuracy, privacy, and auditing needs. They have launched “FinanceBench” benchmarks, datasets, and diagnostics to help detect personally identifiable information (PII) in bot information. In May, the company raised $17 million in a series A funding, bringing its total funding to $20 million.
Anand Kannappan, co-founder and CEO, accepted the award via video, expressing the company’s excitement and pride in receiving the recognition.
Best Enterprise Implementation of Generative AI (Health)
Our winner is Abridge. The company offers an AI-powered platform for medical conversations and clinical documentation. Their technology transforms patient-clinician conversations into structured clinical notes in real-time. In February, Abridge announced a $150 million series C round, just four months after a $30 million series B round. They also announced a new enterprise agreement with Yale New Haven Health System to reduce the mental load of clinical documentation.
Abridge CTO/CSO Zack Lipton accepted the award at VB Transform, discussing how the company is working to remove administrative friction for medical professionals.
Best Enterprise Implementation of Generative AI (Software)
Our winners are ServiceNow and Hugging Face. StarCoder, a new LLM, part of the BigCode Project, is a joint effort of ServiceNow and Hugging Face, launched in May. This project aims to build an open community around code generation tools for AI.
ServiceNow’s Sampada Chavan, an AI senior principal product manager, accepted the award at VB Transform, highlighting the importance of open innovation and transparent information about the models.
Most Promising Generative AI Startup
This award goes to the most promising startup that has developed an innovative generative AI application and demonstrated high growth potential. Our winner is Lamini. The startup offers a platform for AI model development and deployment, recently announcing findings that its fine-tuning reduces hallucinations by 90%. Founded in 2022, Lamini aims to simplify the process of creating, fine-tuning, and deploying custom LLMs for businesses.
Greg Diamos, CTO and co-founder of Lamini, accepted the award at Transform, expressing the company’s mission to make generative AI accessible to every enterprise.
Generative AI Visionary
This award honors an individual who has made significant contributions to the field of generative AI through their thought leadership, research, or work building foundational technologies. John Pasmore, founder and CEO of Latimer, accepted the award. Latimer is an LLM designed with deep empathy and a commitment to reducing bias, leveraging a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) model architecture.
Pasmore expressed his honor in receiving the award and highlighted the company’s goal of making AI as inclusive as possible.
Generative AI Diversity and Inclusion
This award recognizes the company, organization, or individual that has done the most to promote diversity and inclusion in the generative AI field. Maryam Rezapoor, who works on product development for Amazon AGI, accepted the award. She built the AWS AI and ML Scholarship, in collaboration with Intel and Udacity, to provide resources for high school and college students from underserved and underrepresented communities.
Rezapoor thanked her team and leadership at AWS, sharing her personal journey and the importance of diversity in innovation.
Generative AI Open Source Contribution
This award highlights the person, team, or company that has made the most significant contribution to open-source tools, datasets, or other resources to help advance generative AI. Our winner is Hugging Face. This leading AI company and platform provides a comprehensive ecosystem for machine learning practitioners, researchers, and developers. Hugging Face is renowned for its significant open-source contributions, particularly in advancing natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) technologies.
Congratulations to all our winners and nominees.