๐ ๐๐ก๐ ๐๐๐๐ค๐ฐ๐๐ซ๐ ๐๐๐ฌ๐ฌ: ๐๐๐ฏ๐๐ซ๐ฌ๐ข๐ง๐ ๐๐ก๐ซ๐จ๐ฎ๐ ๐ก ๐ญ๐ก๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ค
Week 47 | July 7-14 | Itโs not you, itโs the regulators
Microsoft and Apple give up OpenAI board observer seats, another robotic startup raises $300m, new version of FlashAttention... here's your weekly AI digest:
Industry:
๐จMicrosoft and Apple decides to give up their board observer seats on OpenAI's board. This is amid regulatory scrutiny facing OpenAI. (https://lnkd.in/gYqXnYG7)
๐จAnthropic adds a prompt playground to Claude. Developers can generate, test and evaluate prompts inside Claude directly. (https://lnkd.in/g_z5tsRF)
๐จ A16z is winning deals by securing thousands of H100s and renting them out to portcos. I guess that's one way to win deals these days.. (https://lnkd.in/gAyxN32w)
๐จStability AI changes their license agreement, making it free for anyone with less than $1m in ARR (https://lnkd.in/gyWtwnuh)
Financing and M&A:
๐จSkild AI raises $300m at a valuation of $1.5B to build general purpose intelligence for the physical world. The round was led by Lightspeed, Coatue, Softbank, and Jeff Bezos. CEO and Founder Deepak Pathak was previously an assistant professor at CMU.
๐จ Hebbia raises $130m in a Series B led by a16z at a $700m valuation. Hebbia is an enterprise search/knowledge management product that targets the financial industry. It's currently at $13m ARR and grew revenue 15x over the past 18 months.
๐จCaptions raises $60m at a $500m valuation, led by Index Ventures. Caption offers AI-powered tools for the creator economy.
๐จ EnsoAI raises $6m seed to build a suite of AI bots for SMBs (https://lnkd.in/gVxDkBSF)
๐จHuffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and Sam Altman join forces to fund a customized, hyper-personalized AI health coach (https://lnkd.in/gAKdZUB6?)
Research & Development:
๐จ FlashAttention got a new upgrade. The new techniques uses up to 75% of an H100 GPUโs maximum capabilities, up from just 35% before. Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/gtMEbZHD?
๐จResearch from Meta - MobileLLM: Optimizing sub-billion parameter LLMs for on-device use case (https://lnkd.in/gErRPZAu?). Edge AI is still early but we're seeing dramatic improvements on both the architecture and hardware front.
Interesting Resources:
๐จ Kevin Zhang did an excellent deep dive on AI inference startups (https://lnkd.in/gYqXnYG7)
๐จI shared this report from Goldman Sachs a few weeks ago, but wanted to post it again because I do think it's quite good. (https://lnkd.in/gaHZaci8?)