E90: 6/6/25
Meta's nuclear energy deal, Anthropic and OpenAI go big on enterprise toolsets and integrations, Perplexity ingesting SEC data, Sweden's sovereign AI licensing deal, and more!
Happy sunny Seattle friday!!
PNW AI News:
Amazon announced plans to invest $10B in North Carolina to expand its datacenter infrastructure to support AI and cloud computing capacity
LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky will take on a second role under a new Microsoft org structure, overseeing Office apps like Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Microsoft 365 Copilot AI, while continuing as LinkedIn CEO
Goal of strengthening MSFT's core platforms as it pursues its "agentic web" AI strategy
Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich pushes back on AI vibe coding hype, sees ‘upper limit’ to its true productivity, on a panel this week
Amazon launches new R&D group focused on agentic AI and robotics, based out of Lab126, their hardware R&D division behind Amazon Echo and the Kindle
Key AI Product/Research Updates:
Meta signed a 20-year agreement with Constellation Energy to leverage nuclear power to fuel its energy-intensive AI demands
Meta aims to release tools that eliminate humans from the advertising process by 2026, developing an AI that can create ads for Facebook and Instagram using just a product image and budget
OpenAI announced new business features for ChatGPT, including direct integrations with Google Drive, Dropbox, and other cloud services, meeting recordings, and custom connectors for enterprise customers
Anthropic came out with series of feature rollouts and product expansions:
Claude Pro has been upgraded with three formerly premium-only tools, Claude Code, third-party integrations to Jira/Asana, and a research module
To support long-context workflows, Claude’s “Projects” feature has also gained a retrieval mode that activates automatically when input limits are exceeded
Claude Gov, a model optimized for US defense and intelligence use
Perplexity now has access to SEC data, expanding their use cases as an investors' AI sidekick, as the platform received 780M queries last month
X’s new policy prevents companies and AI crawler bots from using posts to ‘fine-tune or train’ AI models
Perplexity has launched Perplexity Labs, a productivity tool for Pro subscribers ($20/month) that generates reports, spreadsheets, dashboards, and interactive web apps using AI
AI godfather and Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio unveiled LawZero, a nonprofit dedicated to building “safe-by-design” AI systems, also securing $30M in funding to develop "Scientist AI," which prioritizes truth and transparency
ElevenLabs launched Eleven v3, a new text-to-speech preview model featuring emotional audio tags, multi-speaker dialogue, and support for 70+ languages
Google launched a new update preview to its Gemini 2.5 Pro model, with notable jumps on coding, STEM, reasoning, and image understanding benchmarks
Researchers from Sakana AI and the University of British Columbia just introduced the Darwin Gödel Machine, an AI agent that rewrites its own code to get better at tasks, achieving up to 150% performance improvements without intervention
Cambridge startup Heartfelt Technologies developed an AI-powered wall-mounted scanner that monitors ankle swelling, accurately predicting heart failure up to 13 days before patients need emergency care
Mistral AI released Mistral Code, an enterprise-grade coding assistant that combines several of the company’s specialized models to complete development tasks
Google Deepmind's "force prompting" lets AI create realistic video motion without physics engines
Key AI Business/Investment Updates:
Universal, Warner, and Sony are reportedly in talks with AI music leaders Udio and Suno to negotiate licensing deals that could resolve lawsuits and establish standards for how artists are compensated by AI firms
Sweden just deployed Sana Agents across their entire nation, bringing advanced AI to 2.3M students, educators, and public servants in what might be the largest enterprise AI transformation we've seen
Reddit just filed a new lawsuit against Anthropic, accusing the AI startup of illegally scraping its platform data to train AI models without permission or payment
AMC Networks announced a partnership with AI startup Runway to integrate generative AI into its marketing and production processes
CEO Dario Amodei has publicly opposed a proposed 10-year AI regulation moratorium, arguing it would stall both federal and state governance
Anthropic reportedly reached $3B in ARR, tripling from $1B in December 2024, driven by enterprise demand from its code generation capabilities
The Trump-Musk rift has escalated into a full-blown policy crisis, with Trump now threatening to cut federal contracts and subsidies to Elon's firms like xAI and Tesla, citing his public criticism of the GOP’s research-slashing mega-bill
OpenAI detailed the disruption of 10 malicious operations (four tied to China) that utilized ChatGPT for tasks like social media manipulation, espionage, and scams
PNW AI/ML/CV Fundings:
Eavor (Calgary, Canada) raised $64.2M in Series B+ funding from Canada Growth Fund
Scalable and closed-looped geothermal power generation technology that is a clean source of energy for datacenters – TFTD $475.0M
CEO: John Redfern
MIND (Seattle, WA) raised $30M in Series A funding from Crosspoint Capital Partners, Paladin Capital Group, Okta, and YL Ventures
AI-enabled security platform that automates data loss prevention (DLP) and insider risk management (IRM), enabling organizations to identify, detect, and prevent data leaks at machine speed – TFTD $46M
CEO: Eran Barak
Vercept (Seattle, WA) raised $16M in Seed funding from Fifty Years, Point Nine, and AI2 Incubator
AI-driven computer interface that allows users to manage applications and perform tasks using natural language commands – TFTD $16M
CEO: Kiana Ehsani
Nectar Social (Bellevue, WA) raised $8.6M in seed funding from GV, True Ventures, BAM Ventures, Charge Ventures, Faber Ventures, Flying Fish Ventures, Mercury Fund, Trust Fund, and XRC Ventures
AI social platform created for disruptor brand businesses to manage across their different social channels – TFTD $10.M
CEO: Misbah Uraizee