E45: 6/28/24
High-density batteries for data centers, Seattle-natives raise $120M to take on Nvidia, several >$100M fundraises for drug/protein discovery with AI, Rabbit R1's security disaster, and more...
You've heard me writing about AI deepfakes, the issues with unauthorized content undermining consumers' trust of digital content, etc. for quite some time. So, I'm thrilled to announce we have led Loti's $5M Seed round to solve this for public figures…. the themes of this Substack coming to fruition! :)
Also, not new news, but I really enjoyed reading Goldman Sachs' recent report on AI/data centers' impact on the coming US power demand surge. Data centers are projected to be 8% of US electricity consumption by 2030, up from 3% now! This is why we are seeing trends like:
Funding pouring into novel battery/cooling tech (See Sila note below)
Data centers being detached from the public electricity grid, having their own on-prem power plants (usually liquid natural gas)
Data centers being built closer to the energy source, in new locales (like Seattle-based Omniva)
MSFT building an avg. 6 new data centers per week, according to engineer friends at Azure
If you'd like to read more, Bessemer's State of the Cloud 2024 report also outlines AI's impact on the compute arms race. Now to the main newsletter!
PNW AI News:
Battery startup Sila, focused on new non-graphite silicon anodes for high-density batteries, raised $375M to fund its Eastern Washington manufacturing facility
Outside of EVs, the main use case for high-density batteries is putting on-prem electricity storage in data center for peak-shaving…
I believe batteries (Sila) + cooling tech (Vertiv) are the biggest derivative benefactors of the AI data center boom
Funding coming from existing investors T. Rowe Price, Sutter Hill Ventures, Bessemer, Coatue and many more
Seattle-native Harvard dropout Gavin Uberti's startup Etched raises $120M in Seed funding led by Primary Venture Partners to build AI chips to rival Nvidia
Amazon is reportedly developing a consumer-facing AI chatbot named "Metis", trained on open-source LLMs (likely Anthropic's Claude suite) with retrieval augmented generation (RAG) on Amazon account order/browsing history, for finding new product recommendations
One week after (Seattle/LA/NY-based) DayDream raised a $50M Seed to build personalized shopping recommendation chatbots
Amazon hires the founders from enterprise AI startup Adept, which raised a $350M Series B in Mar 2023, to boost their AGI team
Key AI Product/Research Updates:
NBC is launching an AI-generated version of legendary sportscaster Al Michaels to narrate Olympic highlight reels on Peacock for the 2024 Paris Games
OpenAI has released the official ChatGPT app for Apple Mac computers running macOS Sonoma or later
Google launched Gemma 2, the next gen of its open lightweight AI model series, alongside new upgrades to its Gemini 1.5 Pro model (including a massive 2M token context window)
Gemma 2 has 2.6B (private beta), 9B, and 27B parameter permutations
Rabbit's R1 AI gadget had a security breach, which exposed hardcoded API keys in Rabbit's software providing entry to Rabbit's accounts with services like ElevenLabs and SendGrid
Everything that could go wrong, has gone wrong with Rabbit/Humane AI consumer AI companions
OpenAI is training a new model CriticGPT, to catch bugs in GPT-4’s code and to reduce hallucinations before they are outputted
Google Translate gets 110 new languages with AI's help, bringing the total to 243
The AI has added significant complexity to the data infra stack of most tech companies, so I enjoyed Felicis' market map to visualize it (although they left out Griptape in the RAG Frameworks bucket !!)
Key AI Business/Investment Updates:
Major record labels, including Universal Music Group, Sony, and Warner Music Group, have jointly filed lawsuits against AI music generation platforms Suno and Udio for copyright infringement
TIME just announced a new multi-year licensing agreement and partnership with OpenAI, to train its LLMs on TIME's 101-year archive
Another week, another headline OpenAI news data licensing deal
A union representing Hollywood film and television crew has reached a tentative three-year deal with major studios that includes agreed-on pay hikes and guardrails against the use of AI to displace creative jobs
Ending almost a two-year stalemate about artists' AI-related rights
Anthropic expands Claude AI access for government agencies with AWS Gov Cloud partnership
OpenAI, Microsoft sued by Center for Investigative Reporting as news industry bolsters attack on AI's use of Common Crawl
Formation Bio secured $372M in Series D funding from A16Z, Thrive Capital, Sequoia, and more to advance AI-driven drug development platform
EvolutionaryScale raised $142M in Seed funding led by ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross (NFDG), Lux Capital, Amazon and Nvidia's NVentures, to build AI models that can generate novel proteins for scientific research
Its 98B paramater model ESM3 is designed to mimic millions of years of natural evolution
Perplexity AI, the popular AI search tool, is reportedly raising up to $250M from SoftBank at a $3B valuation
OpenAI will impose stricter API restrictions on unsupported countries, notably China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, after findings by OpenAI highlight the misuse of its AI models by state-backed actors in propaganda/disinformation
Mark Zuckerberg openly criticized closed-source AI competitors as trying to 'Create God', in a recent worth-watching interview
PNW AI/ML/CV Fundings:
Loti (Seattle, Washington) raised $5.1M in seed funding from FUSE, Bling Capital, Ensemble VC, Alpha Edison, and K5 Global
Automated brant protection platform designed for detection and takedown of deepfakes to protect celebrities from unauthorized use of their likeness – TFTD $5.1M
CEO: Luke Arrigoni
Clearbrief AI (Seattle, Washington) raised $4M in additional seed funding from Authentic Ventures, How Women Invest, and Reign Ventures
Microsoft Word Add-In that helps attorneys find, insert, and check facts in their legal writing by instantly generating hyperlinked timelines, exhibits for filing, tables for authorities, and fact sections – TFTD $8M
CEO: Jacqueline Schafer
Solstice Innovations (Seattle, Washington) raised $3.76M in debt funding from undisclosed investors
Saas, cloud-native P&C platform for insurance companies and MGAs, leveraging AI/ML hyper-automation to enable insurance carriers and MGAs to seamlessly phase out legacy systems – TFTD $18.1M
CEO: Travis Pine
Terrantic (Seattle, Washington) raised $3M of seed funding from undisclosed investors
Platform that uses computer vision to manage and optimize shipping, production, and storage of fresh products – TFTD $4.7M
CEO: Krishna Srinivasan
Topicflow (Vancouver, Canada) raised $1.8M of early-stage funding from Ascend and Founders’ Co-op
AI-led performance management application designed to connect with the calendar to make meetings productive and meaningful – TFTD $1.8M
CEO: Amin Palizban
FreightmateAI (Bellevue, Washington) raised $650K in Pre-Seed funding from Wischoff Ventures (LFG Nichole!!)
Next-gen AI freight management system, designed to simplify and streamline global freight forwarding by managing operations 24/7 and boost efficiency and accuracy – TFTD $650K
CEO: Bryan Lacaillade