E65: 11/15/24

Microsoft partnering with NASA to bring AI/NLP to interact with planetary geospatial data, Stripe releasing AI agent tools, OpenAI's 'Operator', and more!

Hi everyone… A slightly lighter week in the AI world, but still plenty of new product feature announcements, research, and regulation. Enjoy!

PNW AI News:

• Microsoft collaborates with NASA on Earth Copilot, a conversational AI application to query planetary imaging and weather data via natural language

• Amazon attempts to lure AI researchers with $110M in grants and credits to work on "Trainium 2", AWS' in-house custom chip for training AI models, giving them access to 40K+ chip clusters for research

• The Vatican and Microsoft unveiled a digital AI-powered twin of St. Peter’s Basilica created from 400K images, enabling virtual visits and help identifying structural damage ahead of the 2025 Jubilee

Key AI Product/Research Updates:

• OpenAI is preparing to launch "Operator," an AI assistant that can autonomously perform tasks such as coding and travel bookings, set for a Q1 2025 release

• Stripe introduced a new agent toolkit, enabling developers to integrate payments, financial services, and usage-based billing into LLM-powered agent workflows

• Exo Labs has enabled running powerful open-source AI models on local Mac M4 devices with LLMs like Alibaba's Qwen 2.5 Coder-32B and Nemotron-70B, bypassing costly cloud infrastructure

• OpenAI's "Predicted Outputs" feature, now available in the chat completions API, significantly reduces latency for GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini models by providing a reference string

• Google DeepMind just open-sourced its Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold 3 protein prediction model, enabling academic researchers to access both code and training weights for the first time since its limited release in May

  • AlphaFold has already mapped 200M+ protein structures, bringing unprecedented scale to structural bio

• Carnegie Mellon researchers just revealed that AI can now generate poetry that 1.6K surveyed readers not only struggle to distinguish from human-written texts, but actually prefer over works by legendary poets like Shakespeare

• Stanford researchers just introduced the Virtual Lab, an AI research platform where specialized AI agents collaborate with human scientists to tackle complex scientific challenges

Key AI Business/Investment Updates:

• OpenAI’s new policy paper proposes a targeted US AI strategy, urging the creation of AI-focused economic zones to streamline infrastructure projects, from data centers to renewable and nuclear energy

  • The proposed a National Transmission Highway Act to ease energy and data transmission development, attracting private investment through government-backed energy purchases

• The EU publishes the first draft of regulatory guidance for general purpose AI models, laying out guidelines of managing risks in adherence to the EU AI Act signed in August 2024

• Writer, an Enterprise AI platform, raised a $200M Series C at a $1.9B valuation, with the startup set to expand into healthcare, retail, and financial services workflows

• AI sales automation startup 11x secured $50M in new funding at a $320M valuation, as it expands its AI bots that can handle sales tasks in 30 languages

• ChatGPT hits 3.7B website visits in October, as growth accelerates to 115% YOY

• The US Commerce Dept ordered chipmaker TSMC to halt the export of advanced chips for AI applications to Chinese customers starting this week

PNW AI/ML/CV Fundings:

• TestSprite (Seattle, WA) raised $1.5M in Pre-seed funding from Techstars, Jinqiu Capital, MiraclePlus, Hattrick Capital, EdgeCase Capital Partners

  • Developer of AI-powered automated testing platform designed to provide cloud computing infrastructures – TFTD $1.57M

  • CEO: Yunhao Jiao