E79: 3/14/25
McDonald's rolls out McAI, Google's Gemma 3, Chinese autonomous AI agent 'Manus', Salesforce's AgentExchange marketplace, OpenAI new agent tools, several 9-fig VC rounds, and more!
PNW AI News:
AI2 released OLMo 2 32B, the first fully open model to outperform GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o mini on academic benchmarks while requiring just a third of the training compute used by comparable models like Qwen 2.5 32B
Microsoft debuts a new Copilot assistant for Xbox, built as an AI gaming sidekick to help navigate controls and gameplay
Seattle-based serial entrepreneur Jesse Proudman joins Venice.ai, a "privacy-first, crypto-enabled ChatGPT" founded by prominent Bitcoiner Eric Voorhees, as new CTO
Key AI Product/Research Updates:
Chinese startup Manus AI introduced as ‘world’s first’ first fully autonomous AI agent, integrating Claude 3.5 Sonnet, fine-tuned Qwen models, and open-source frameworks like Browser Use
Competing against OpenAI's Swarm and Google's Mariner autonomous agent plays
Google just released new personalization features for its Gemini AI assistant, allowing the AI to tap into users' Search history and eventually other Google apps to deliver more tailored responses
Google rolls out Gemma 3, a streamlined AI model built for top-tier efficiency on single GPUs and TPUs
Offered in 1B, 4B, 12B, and 27B sizes…beating Llama-405B, DeepSeek-V3, and o3-mini on single-accelerator performance
McDonald's is undergoing a massive AI transformation across its 43K restaurants, introducing new AI-powered systems for everything from equipment maintenance to maintaining order accuracy
Meta just began testing its first in-house AI training chip manufactured by TSMC, hoping to reduce dependence on Nvidia and control its soaring AI infrastructure costs
Salesforce announced AgentExchange, a new marketplace for Agentforce, connecting partners, developers, and customers with hundreds of ready-made AI solutions
iPhone and electronics manufacturer Foxconn just announced FoxBrain, its first LLM with advanced reasoning capabilities
Cohere just unveiled Command A, a new enterprise-focused LLM that matches competitors' performance while running on just two GPUs, with strong multilingual capabilities and a large context window
Google DeepMind has introduced Gemini Robotics and Gemini Robotics-ER, AI models that enhance real-time adaptability and spatial reasoning in robotics
New Bessemer-backed startup Moonvalley introduces a ‘clean’ generative video AI model for cinema and advertising, trained on their own cinematographic data
ElevenLabs cut its pricing on its SOTA Scribe speech-to-text model by 45% in its API, also offering it free via the company’s UI for the next month
OpenAI just launched new tools that let businesses build their own AI agent, enabling custom bots to handle tasks like web browsing and file management
The Responses API and open-source Agents SDK equip developers with modular AI-building blocks, enabling autonomous workflows without complex orchestration
OpenAI’s new research on AI models’ chain-of-thought reasoning revealed that models like o3-mini can ‘reward hack’ or cheat on tasks
Some spicy takes from AI leaders this week:
Former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy predicted that AI will usher in a fundamental shift in web content design, with pages being optimized for LLMs and context windows over human readability
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI will be writing 90% of the world’s code in the next 3-6 months and reaching nearly 100% in the next year
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says all AI models are commodities, and the real battle is full-stack dominance
Key AI Business/Investment Updates:
OpenAI and Google fight constraining US governmental AI restrictions from the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, arguing that restrictive regulations threaten US innovation and economic competitiveness
OpenAI is calling for an outright ban on AI models from DeepSeek and other Chinese firms
Insilico Medicine secured $110M funding for its AI-powered drug discovery platform, which includes multimodal foundation models and a fully automated robotic lab with a bipedal humanoid AI Scientist
Former DeepMind researchers launched Reflection AI with $130M in funding, aiming to build autonomous coding systems as a stepping stone to superintelligent AI
Former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever's startup Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) is reportedly raising $2B at a $30B valuation, despite only having ~20 employees and no product released
ServiceNow acquired Moveworks for $2.85B to begin expanding its AI product playbook
Anthropic has surpassed $1.4B in annual revenue, coming on the heels of Claude powering Manus and the recent Claude Code and 3.7 Sonnet release
OpenAI secured an $11.9B deal with CoreWeave for compute, locking in access to over 250,000 Nvidia GPUs
Salesforce is planning to invest $1B in Singapore to grow AI products in SE Asia
Sony Music had to take down more than 75K AI-generated copies of songs by major artists, seeing a trend in deepfakes beyond images/videos
PNW AI/ML/CV Fundings:
Disputed.ai (Vancouver, WA) raised $1.1M of Seed funding from undisclosed investors
AI-powered Chargebacks platform designed to streamline revenue management for online businesses – TFTD $1.1M
CEO: Shawn Kelley