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Week 55 | Sep 2 - Sep 8 | $1b pre-seed for safe AI
A lot of big financing rounds last week - SSI, Sakana, Applied Digital, You.com... Here's your weekly AI recap!
Industry:
๐จOpenAI is reportedly considering subscription prices as high as $2k/month for the company's upcoming LLMs (https://lnkd.in/gJvnMUqU)
๐จxAI completes Nvidia 100k H100 training cluster, the largest in the world. There are plans to double the size to 200k (50k H200s) in a few months. (https://lnkd.in/gtTeEzpr)
๐จReplit announces Replit Agent, an automated software developer (https://lnkd.in/gCkxspsd)
Financing and M&A:
๐จIlya Sutskever's new company Safe SuperIntelligence (SSI) raises $1B on a $5B valuation. The company's mission is to develop safe intelligence systems that outpace human capabilities. On one hand, that seems like an outrageous valuation for a pre-seed round. On the other hand, Ilya's status as an AI legend means they will undoubtedly attract the best researchers and engineers. Viewed from that perspective, I understand why the deal got done at those terms. (https://lnkd.in/gmjyqGTC?)
๐จSakana AI raises $100M Series A. Sakana has already announced several R&D breakthroughs such as their recent AI research scientist and model merging. More on our involvement later! (https://lnkd.in/gJSuCA2r?)
๐จApplied Digital (NASDAQ: APLD) raises $160m in a private placement financing from a group of institutional investors and Nvidia. This news caused the company's stock price to soar more than 60% the day after. (https://lnkd.in/g9AxG_4A)
๐จYou.com raises $50m led by Georgian Partners, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Nvidia and others. You.com is building an AI agent collaboration platform. (https://lnkd.in/gQMtfeZN?)
R&D:
๐จAlibaba.com new Qwen2-VL is a multi-modal model for enhanced visual and video understanding (https://lnkd.in/gdjCfMBs?)
๐จTogether AI published a paper presenting a speculative decoding technique to increase throughput in the long-context and large batch regime. (https://lnkd.in/gYT7ifW5?)
Other Interesting Resources:
๐จComprehensive review of on-device language models, released by Nexa AI (https://lnkd.in/gMm9cAZ4)
๐จInteresting article from SemiAnalysis comparing Google and OpenAI's infrastructure plans (https://lnkd.in/gubsttRd?)