E55: 9/6/24

OpenAI and Anthropic agree to US gov inspection of new LLMs, OpenAI hints at GPT-Next, Elon brings his 100K GPU 'Colossus' cluster online, Seattle ranks #2 at AI talent in the US, and wayyy more

Happy Friday! Here’s this week’s action-packed scoop…

PNW AI News:

• Amazon hires the three co-founders of Covariant, the SF-based startup building AI warehouse robotics systems, and will receive a non-exclusive license to Covariant's AI models

  • The latest in the "reverse acquihire" trend like Microsoft/Inflection.io, Amazon/Adept, and more

• Amazon will reportedly use Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude to help power its Alexa voice assistant suite

• Former Nike exec Scott Bouska launches new app using AI to help NFL fans get an edge in sports betting predictions

• UW Professor Dale Durran, a Seattle pioneer in AI weather forecasting, partnered up with NVIDIA to create groundbreaking new weather prediction tool with hyper-local accuracy

• According to a study by data-driven VC firm SignalFire, Seattle ranks #2 in amount of AI engineering talent in the US at both big tech companies and top VC-backed startups

Key AI Product/Research Updates:

• OpenAI is considering a large price hike for ChatGPT using its upcoming models, with rumors of potential fees soaring to $2k/month

  • Driven by the hefty costs of operating ChatGPT, particularly due to its large number of free users and the development of advanced LLMs like Strawberry

• OpenAI hints that its upcoming LLM "GPT-Next" will have 3.5 trillion parameters, more than double GPT-4, and 100x more powerful than GPT-4

• Anthropic's new Claude Enterprise Plan aims to help companies securely collaborate with its AI using sensitive internal knowledge

  • It features an expanded context window of 500K tokens (100+ page documents), increased usage capacity, and native GitHub integration

• Elon Musk's xAI team successfully brought the Colossus 100k H100 training cluster online, which is powered by 100K+ Nvidia H100 GPUs

  • Now holds the title of the world's most powerful AI training setup

• Google DeepMind just unveiled AlphaProteo, an AI system that designs custom proteins to bind with specific molecular targets, potentially turbocharging drug discovery

• Replit just launched an AI-powered tool called Replit Agent that can create software applications based on simple text descriptions

• Groq just launched LLaVA v1.5 7B, a new multimodal AI model that can understand both images and text and reportedly runs 4x faster than OpenAI’s GPT-4o

• Researchers have discovered that making AI systems ‘re-read‘ questions twice, mimicking human behavior, significantly improves their reasoning and problem-solving abilities

• 1X Robotics, in collaboration with OpenAI, has introduced the Neo Beta, a humanoid robot featuring advanced movement and agility designed for in-home assistance like cleaning, cooking, yardwork, etc.

• Tesla is planning to unveil its fleet of robotaxi's at Warner Bros Studio in the coming months

• Coinbase executed its first AI-to-AI cryptocurrency transaction, demonstrating AI agents’ ability to use digital wallets for autonomous trading

Key AI Business/Investment Updates:

• OpenAI is reportedly planning to develop its first in-house AI chips using TSMC’s advanced 1.6mm A16 process node, potentially partnering with Broadcom, Marvell, or Apple for the chip design

• OpenAI and Anthropic just signed a groundbreaking agreement with the US AI Safety Institute to allow government access and testing of their AI models before public release

• The US Department of Justice reportedly issued a subpoena to NVIDIA, escalating its antitrust investigation into the company’s domination in the AI chip market

  • Shares fell >11% on Tuesday, slashing market cap by $279B, an all-time record one-day loss for any company

• Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI, has raised $1B in Seed funding for Safe Superintelligence (SSI), from NFDG, Andreesen Horowitz, Sequoia and more, at a $5B valuation upon founding of the company

  • The CEO is Daniel Gross, counterpart to Github founder Nat Friedman in the VC firm NFDG that co-led this round

  • The largest Seed round in history??

• A US man raked in over $10M in royalties from AI-generated songs played by artificial bots he created on streaming platforms

• North Dakota leads race for hundreds of billions of $ in AI computing projects, expected to win primary bids for both Microsoft and Google mega-data centers

  • They have most available permissioned land, colder weather for cooling, and renewable energy via dams/wind turbines

  • One of the few states in the US that produces more energy than it consumes

• Australia's federal government plans AI rules on human oversight, transparency to protect consumer data

• Sakana AI raised $100M in Series A funding and announced a collaboration with NVIDIA and Khosla to advance AI research and infrastructure in Japan

  • Seeing a new trend in "Sovereign AI", where AI models are trained on governmental archive data

PNW AI/ML/CV Fundings:

• OpConnect (Portland, OR) raised a $5.26M Series A from undisclosed investors

  • Operator of an AI-driven electric vehicle charging management system intended to reduce greenhouse gases caused by transportation – TFTD $13.03M

  • CEO: Dexter Turner

• ZipBio (Seattle, WA) raised a $4M seed round led by NFX, joined by MoreVC

  • Develops next-gen gene therapies using ML, protein engineering, and molecular materials – TFTD $4M

  • CEO: Roee Farber

• UpSight (Beaverton, OR) raised an undisclosed Seed round undisclosed investors, according to an SEC filing

  • Developer of a security software designed to protect users from AI-assisted phishing attacks – TFTD Unknown

  • CEO: Tracy Camp

• Hello Wonder (Portland, OR) raised a $2.1M Seed round from Andreessen Horowitz, Designer Fund, Ground Up Ventures, and Chasing Rainbows

  • An AI companion that creates a secure online environment for kids, utilizing advanced content filtering and monitoring technologies – TFTD $2.1M

  • CEO: Seth Raphael