E83: 4/11/25

Meta, X, Bytedance, and Google LLM announcements, Mira Murati's $2B Seed round, A16Z's $20B AI megafund, Shopify's AI mandate, and more

The biggest week in AI in a very long time… not even including the tarriff stuff.

PNW AI News:

• Amazon enters real-time AI voice race with Nova Sonic, a unified voice model that senses emotion and can deliver more natural interactions

• Google Cloud and AI2 have partnered with the Cancer AI Alliance (CAIA), a consortium of cancer research institutions and technology companies, to harness AI in the fight against cancer

• Microsoft Research published a study revealing that AI agents still struggle with most software debugging tasks that human programmers routinely solve

• Microsoft cancels planned $1.1B data centers in Ohio, despite already having secured land, obtained construction approvals, and negotiated tax incentives… hm

• The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) released OLMoTrace, a tool that links AI-generated text to training data, aiming to improve transparency and accountability in AI by going further to show how the data used to train LLMs may influence what they generate

  • Reducing hallucinations

• FUSE portco Avante, a Seattle startup using AI to disrupt how enterprises utilize their employee benefits portfolio, just released their product into GA

• Proprio, a Seattle startup using AI for improved surgical precision, received its second major clearance from the FDA to include measurements taken during operations

• Seattle cybersecurity startup Dropzone AI launched a new free tool that aims to give security analysts an AI co-worker in their browser

Key AI Product/Research Updates:

• OpenAI is preparing a multi-pronged rollout with GPT-4.1, an enhanced multimodal model building on GPT-4o, with scaled-down variants like o4-mini, o4-mini-high, and nano versions

  • It has a 1M-token context window, and live memory, taking into context an entire conversation history

• Meta just announced its Llama 4 family with multimodal capabilities and industry-leading context length, including a huge 2T parameter 'Behemoth' model and 400B 'Maverick' with a 1M-token context window as well^

• Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, launches an API for Grok 3, at pricing between $3-5 per million input/output tokens

• Google announced a handful of new tools and models focused on agentic computing, cost efficiency, and full-stack app development, at their 'Cloud Next 2025' conference:

  • Agent Development Kit (ADK) is now open source, providing a framework for building hierarchical, multi-agent systems

  • Agent2Agent, a new open protocol that enables AI agents from different developers and frameworks to communicate and collaborate

  • Gemini Code Assist enters preview with agentic capabilities. These agents can now autonomously translate code, generate apps from specs, manage Kanban-style workflows, run tests, conduct reviews, and handle migrations

  • Firebase Studio enables in-browser, no-setup app development with multilingual frameworks and Git repos

  • Gemini 2.5 Flash, a reasoning-optimized model, balances performance with low latency and cost

  • The seventh-generation Ironwood TPU, optimized for inference and designed to run AI models, available in 256-chip and 9216-chip clusters

    • Former OpenAI founder Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence (SSI) is using these TPU chips to power its R&D efforts

• TikTok parent ByteDance announced Seed-Thinking-v1.5, a reasoning model with 20B active parameters, that beats DeepSeek R1

• NVIDIA and Stanford researchers just unveiled "Test-Time Training," an AI technique that enables longer video generation than previously possible

• Samsung and Google partnered up to launch Ballie, a soccer ball-sized home robot with Gemini AI models under the hood

Key AI Business/Investment Updates:

• Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke released an internal memo mandating AI proficiency for every employee, declaring that teams must prove AI can’t do the job before seeking additional resources and making AI a “baseline expectation.”

• Andreessen Horowitz seeks to raise $20 billion megafund amid global interest in US AI startups

• OpenAI released its EU Economic Blueprint, calling for a €1B AI accelerator fund and foundational training for 100M Europeans by 2030

• The US Gov halted planned restrictions on NVIDIA’s H20 AI chips to China, following CEO Jensen Huang’s promises of new US investments

• Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's stealth startup Thinking Machines Lab is in talks to raise $2B in SEED FUNDING at a valuation of “at least” $10B

• OpenAI is reportedly in advanced talks to acquire io Products, a stealth-mode AI hardware startup founded by ex-Apple design guru Jony Ive, at over $500M valuation

  • OpenAI going into the consumer devices space

• OpenAI countersued Elon Musk, citing a pattern of harassment and asking a federal judge to stop him from any “further unlawful and unfair action”

• The NO FAKES Act was reintroduced to Congress, with YouTube, OpenAI, IBM and others joining entertainment leaders in support of legislation to combat AI deepfakes

PNW AI/ML/CV Fundings:

• Brinc Drones (Seattle, WA) raised $75m in Series C funding from led by Index Ventures, joined by angel investors like Mike Volpi and Dylan Field (Figma founder)

  • Swarm of indoor and outdoor drones, guided by CV, designed to aid tactical teams and first responders in barricades, hostage, and active shooter situations in the service of public safety – TFTD $157.2M

  • CEO: Blake Resnick

• Friday Harbor (Seattle, WA) raised $6M in Seed funding led by undisclosed investors, joined by AI2

  • Underwriting AI platform designed to streamline the mortgage origination process – TFTD $7.5M

  • CEO: Theo Ellis

• Atomic Elevator (Red Lodge, MT) raised $100K in Pre-Seed funding from undisclosed investors

  • AI-driven tool software designed to streamline operations and enhance client engagement – TFTD $100K

  • CEO: Keith Lauver