E89: 5/30/25
Amazon deal with the New York Times, UW's new AI certificate, Google and Meta AI usage spikes, Veo 3 shockwaves, and more
PNW AI News:
Amazon signed a deal with the New York Times to license the newspaper’s content for AI platforms and LLM training
The UW’s Allen School of Computer Science is beginning to offer a new graduate certificate in modern AI methods, to upskill Seattle workers with how to use Ai tools effectively
Growth-stage marketing startup Invoca acquires Symbl.ai, a Seattle startup with $28.5M in TFTD, that uses AI for conversational intelligence. The terms/valuation of the acquisition weren't disclosed
Key AI Product/Research Updates:
Meta’s AI ambitions now extend across scale and strategy, with its assistant quietly crossing 1B monthly users across WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger
Meta inked a partnership with Anduril, combining Meta’s AR infrastructure with Anduril’s autonomous battlefield systems, designed to enhance situational awareness without increasing cognitive overload
Anthropic has advanced Claude’s new voice mode, allowing users to verbally interact with their Google Workspace data—Docs, Drive, Calendar, and Gmail—through natural speech
Veo 3 has expanded its userbase rapidly, launching in 71 additional countries shortly after its viral debut at I/O 2025
Google is giving developers deeper visibility into the model’s reasoning process with the Gemini API's “thought summaries”, which now provide concise glimpses into the model’s internal reasoning
They are generated by a secondary summarization AI model that trims down the full chain of thought
Amid the ongoing US/China tightening export controls, NVIDIA is maintaining its foothold in the Chinese market by launching a new, cheaper version of its flagship Blackwell AI GPU
Mistral launched Agents API for enterprise apps, introducing connectors for coding, web search, and image generation alongside memory and multi-agent orchestration
UBS, one of Switzerland’s largest banks, is reportedly using AI avatars of its analysts to streamline research communications with clients, a move aimed at saving time and engaging customers through their preferred channel
Hugging Face unveils a new open source humanoid robot, in a couple of different form factors
Synthesia co-founder Matthias Niessner just unveiled SpAItial, a new startup aimed at creating AI systems capable of generating interactive 3D environments from texts and images
Researchers from UC Berkeley and Yale introduced INTUITOR, an AI training method that enables language models to improve their reasoning using internal confidence signals using Reinforcement Learning from Internal Feedback (RLIF)
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis highlights strides in world models, AI systems that simulate real-world physics, as crucial progress toward AGI
In controlled tests run by Palisade Research, OpenAI’s o3 model circumvented built-in shutdown commands in 7 out of 100 runs, sometimes sidestepping the termination logic altogether, once by redefining the kill command to output “intercepted”
Key AI Business/Investment Updates:
As part of its partnership with OpenAI to build a large-scale data center, the UAE will be offering free access to ChatGPT Plus for its entire population
First sovereign AI chatbot licensing deal. Crazy!
The newly passed 'Take It Down Act' marks a key 'inflection point' in US internet regulation, allowing for automatic takedowns of fraudulent AI-generated content
Super helpful tailwinds for Loti
As artists continue to challenge the use of copyrighted work to train AI, former Meta executive Nick Clegg is pushing back, claiming that requiring companies to obtain permission before training could severely damage the AI industry
Elon Musk's xAI just struck a 1-year deal with Telegram, bringing its Grok chatbot to over a billion messaging app users this summer in exchange for $300M and a revenue-sharing agreement
Meta is splitting its AI department into AI Products and AGI Foundations to speed up development
Elon Musk’s DOGE is reportedly using his company xAI’s Grok model for data analysis, raising privacy and conflict-of-interest concerns
Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei is predicting a mass job extinction coming in the next five years due to AI, taking an aggressive advocation for caution on AI agent automation of labor
He theorizes a 50% wipe-out of entry-level jobs, and unemployment as high as 20%
Salesforce is planning to acquire Informatica, an AI CRM with several $100M in revenue, at a $8B valuation
OpenAI established a legal entity in South Korea and plans to open an office there in the coming months, expanding into its third Asian market after Japan and Singapore
AMD acquired Enosemi, a startup designing custom materials to support silicon photonics product development, under undisclosed terms
Anthropic added Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings to its board of directors, appointed by Anthropic’s independent Long-Term Benefit Trust
PNW AI/ML/CV Fundings:
Karna (Portland, OR) raised $600K in Seed funding from 500 Global and other undisclosed investors
A deepfake detection AI tool designed to bring trust back into online conversations – TFTD $600K
CEO: Rajashree Baskaran