E70: 1/10/25
MSFT to invest $3B into Indian AI infra, Anthropic at $60B valuation, NVIDIA's AI agents, a $6M open-source LLM, energy surges, and more.
Hey all, happy 2025. Here's this week's AI newsletter, and we are off to a very hot start!
Continued datacenter/energy challenges, big announcements from MSFT, NVIDIA (including agent frameworks), Elon’s xAi, Anthropic's $60B valuation, and.... Chinese startup DeepSeek beating Meta's open source LLMs with only 2 months and ~$6M. Completely challenges all assumptions about cost+time of OSS model training.
Enjoy!!
PNW AI News:
Microsoft announced a $3B commitment to expand AI and cloud infrastructure in India, with plans to provide AI training to 10M people in the country by 2030
TrueMedia.org, the Seattle-based nonprofit that offered AI tools to identify and combat deepfakes in the lead-up to the 2024 elections, will shut down its online service after Jan 13 and open-source its technology
Microsoft’s Large Action Model (LAM) enables it to execute tasks autonomously rather than merely processing text, which can interpret and act on user commands across text, voice, and images
Microsoft is releasing its Phi-4 model as a fully open-source project with downloadable weights on Hugging Face
Microsoft rolls back its Bing Image Creator model after users complain of degraded quality
Microsoft published a new rStar-Math technique, enabling SLMs to achieve 90% accuracy on advanced mathematics benchmarks despite their size
Key AI Product/Research Updates:
Elon Musk’s xAI launched a standalone app, and with it will be launching an “Unhinged Mode” for its Grok chatbot to push boundaries with responses deemed “objectionable, inappropriate, and offensive"
Reflects Musk’s intention to create an AI that strays from conventional filters
NVIDIA had a slew of announcements at CES:
Blueprints: pre-built templates designed to simplify the creation of autonomous AI agents
GeForce RTX 50-Series GPUs: new line of $1-2K GPUs with ML baked directly into the rendering process
Cosmos: an AI platform set to redefine robotics and autonomous vehicle development
Project Digits: a mini PC in a compact form, packing 1000x more power than typical laptops
Isaac GR00T blueprint: aims to accelerate humanoid robotics development by streamlining synthetic motion data generation
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek just released DeepSeek-V3, a new powerhouse language model that sets new benchmarks in the open-source AI world
The training was completed in just two months for $5.57M, dramatically less than the $500M+ spent on Meta's LLaMA 3.1
No such thing as a head start in open-source LLMs
Hugging Face just released Smolagents, a minimalist open-source framework that allows developers to create powerful AI agents with just a few lines of Python code
Google rolled out ‘Daily Listen’, a new experimental AI feature in Search Labs that transforms users' search interests and browsing data into personalized five-minute podcasts'
Columbia researchers developed General Expression Transformer (GET), an AI model which accurately predicts gene expression in any human cell, potentially revolutionizing the study of biological processes
Adobe Research and Hong Kong University developed TransPixar, an AI system that enables generation of transparent, realistic visual effects to AI-generated videos
Japanese electronics giant Panasonic just announced an AI transformation initiative, alongside a strategic partnership with Anthropic and a new AI wellness app
Key AI Business/Investment Updates:
OpenAI has formalized plans to discard its layered nonprofit-controlled structure in favor of a streamlined for-profit model by 2025
A new Department of Energy report tracking data center power use found that it increased 7% from 2014 to 2018, and then jumped 18% between 2018 and 2023
Demand is expected to increase between 13% to 27% from 2023 to 2028, given the AI boom
Anthropic is finalizing a $2B investment round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners at a $60B post-money valuation
Up >3x from its $18B valuation from its 2024 Menlo Ventures-led round
Donald Trump announced a new $20B AI investment from UAE real estate tycoon Hussain Sajwani, with plans to build out data centers across 8 states over the coming years
Meta deletes its AI-powered Facebook and Instagram profiles following mass criticism
Sam Altman disclosed that OpenAi is incurring losses on its $200-per-month ChatGPT Pro plan, driven by unexpectedly high user engagement for its "o1" reasoning LLM
TikTok parent company ByteDance reportedly plans to invest $7B in Nvidia AI chips in 2025, leveraging overseas data centers to circumvent US export restrictions on China
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang goes viral for his claim that IT Departments will "become the HR of AI agents", managing how they are provisioned within enterprises
NVIDIA acquired Israeli AI startup Run:ai for $700M and announced plans to open-source the company’s hardware optimization software
Alibaba Cloud has begun a race of LLM price cuts, implementing reductions of up to 85%, with its visual language model Qwen-VL seeing the steepest cuts
Part of a broader trend among Chinese tech titans such as Tencent, Baidu, and ByteDance, who are locked in a price battle amid minimal product differentiation
Samsung Electronics just announced a $181M investment into Rainbow Robotics, expanding its presence in humanoid robotics development
ZoomInfo published new data on the state of AI in the workforce, revealing dramatic growth in AI-focused roles across industries and skill levels over the last several years
PNW AI/ML/CV Fundings:
Kamiwaza (Denver, CO/Seattle, WA) raised $8.5M in Seed funding co-led by S3 Ventures and Pioneer Square Labs, joined by Ascend, SVK Capital, FirstMile Ventures, and Greater Colorado Venture Fund
Lets companies run AI models where their data already exists — across cloud, on-premise, and edge locations — and not be tied to a single hardware solution or hosting provider - TFDT $11.0M
CEO: Luke Norris
Oneloop (Seattle, WA) raised an undisclosed Seed round from Lubos Menus
AI workforce tool intended to smoothen the process for early-stage startups and organizations – TFTD $0.5M
CEO: Aahan Sawhney