E84: 4/20/25
Monster week of announcements for OpenAI, SSI raised at $32B post, Google giving their AI away for free to universities, Perplexity's deal with Samsung/Motorola, and more.
Happy Easter everyone!!! Enjoy.
PNW AI News:
Microsoft announced a new 'computer use' capability in Copilot Studio, enabling users and businesses to build AI agents that can directly operate websites and desktop applications
Microsoft Research introduced BitNet b1.58 2B4T, a hyper-efficient 2B parameter 1-bit AI model built to run efficiently on CPUs, rather than GPUs
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy published his annual shareholder letter, saying that generative AI will "reinvent virtually every customer experience we know"
Ascend, a Seattle-based early stage VC firm actively investing in AI infrastructure and app startups in Seattle, filed for their Fund III fundraise
Key AI Product/Research Updates:
OpenAI is reportedly working on a social network that could leverage ChatGPT's massive user base to take on social media platforms like X and Meta
OpenAI has released three new models—GPT-4.1, 4.1 mini, and 4.1 nano—exclusively through its API:
OpenAI released o3 and o4-mini, its smartest reasoning models yet that are now equipped with full agentic access to all ChatGPT tools and the ability to "think with images”
They also added the "Flex" API for o3 and o4-mini models, offering a 50% reduction in costs for non-critical tasks like data enrichment and model evaluation
Profluent announced ProGen3, a new family of AI models that can design complex proteins from scratch, trained on 3.4B different protein sequences
The results mark the first evidence of AI scaling laws in biology, proving larger models and more data create stronger results
Google is offering US college students free access to its $20/month One AI Premium plan until Mid-2026, joining Anthropic and others on their free higher-ed plans
ByteDance introduced Seaweed, a hyper-efficient 7B-parameter video generation model that is competitive against much larger models
Anthropic unveiled upgrades to Claude, introducing autonomous research capabilities and Google Workspace integration to allow the assistant to search both the web and user files
OpenAI introduces Codex CLI, an open-source tool enabling users to interact with code directly via terminal, offering multimodal reasoning and local system integration
Google has launched Gemini 2.5 Flash, a lighter AI model that lets developers adjust how much reasoning the model performs via a token-based “thinking budgets”
Meta’s FAIR research arm just published five new open-source AI research projects focused on perception and reasoning, with advances in computer vision, 3D understanding, and collaborative AI capabilities
OpenAI has released a practical guide for creating LLM agents capable of real-world tasks, covering agent architecture (single vs. multi-agent setups), tool integration, and prompt design
Key AI Business/Investment Updates:
OpenAI is reportedly acquiring Windsurf (formerly Codeium) for $3B, to strengthen its positioning in "vibe coding" space, enabling developers to write code using natural language prompts
Prior to this, OpenAI attempted to acquire rival code-gen tool Cursor (by Anysphere), but was declined
Perplexity reached a deal with Motorola and is reportedly in talks with Samsung to integrate its AI search platform into their phones as the default assistant or an app
Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, just raised $2B at a post-money valuation of $32B led by Greenoaks and Lightspeed,
One of the highest-valued startups just months after launch, despite no product released yet
OpenAI’s $500B Stargate project is considering expanding beyond the US to build AI datacenters in countries like the UK, Germany, and France
NVIDIA announced its first-ever US AI manufacturing effort, partnering with TSMC, Foxconn, and others to begin chip and supercomputer production in Arizona and Texas
NVIDIA said in a filing that it expects to take a $5.5B hit from US export license requirements for shipping its H20 AI chips to China
NATO selects Palantir's AI analytics system Project Maven for European use cases
AI code-gen tool Cursor apologizes after AI support agent invents/hallucinates a policy that causes user uproar, viral on Hacker News
Google suspended 39.2M malicious advertisers in 2024 by using AI monitoring techniques
PNW AI/ML/CV Fundings:
IUNU (Seattle, WA) raised $20M of Series B+ funding led by S2G Investments, joined by Lewis and Clark Capital, Farm Credit Canada, and more
AI-enabled greenhouse management platform designed to connect plants, facilities, and people through a single interface – TFTD $94.2M
CEO: Adam Greenberg
Loti (Seattle, WA) raised $16.5M in Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures, joined by FUSE, Bling Capital, Ensemble, Alpha Edison, and K5 Tokyo Black
AI brand protection platform designed to protect celebrities from unauthorized use of their likeness – TFTD $23.9M
CEO: Luke Arrigoni
Potato (Seattle, WA) raised $4.5M in Seed funding led by Draper Associates, joined by Dolby Family Ventures, Boost VC, Ensemble VC, Silicon Badia, Alumni Ventures, Defined and The FounderVC
A fully-autonomous science research AI agent designed to run science code efficiently – TFTD $5.5M
CEO: Nick Edwards
Tensor9 (Seattle, WA) raised $4M in Seed funding led by Wing VC
Cloud-hosted platform designed to ensure data privacy for software and AI vendors – TFTD $4M
CEO: Michael Ten-Pow