🔙 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐏𝐚𝐬𝐬: 𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐤

Week 57 | Sep 16 - Sep 22 | AI goes international with Sakana and Qwen 2.5

Solid week in AI - Sakana AI's $200m+ Series A.. Salesforce's new agent strategy..

Here's your weekly AI recap!

Industry:
🚨Salesforce announces they will release Agentforce in October 2024. Agentforce is a new agent-building platform that allows companies to build and manage their own autonomous agents. (see here: https://lnkd.in/gwhHUyEa). Here's another interesting article from Bloomberg on their new AI agent strategy. Of particular interest is the part about charging $2 per conversation held by its new agents. The shift from seat-subscription pricing to usage/volume pricing is something that's likely to upend the SaaS industry (https://lnkd.in/ghp-Pb_w)
🚨Alibaba Group releases Qwen 2.5, an impressive family of open source models that outperforms Llama and Mistral on benchmarks. Qwen is less talked about in the Western world due to their China origins but their open source models consistently top the leaderboards and outcompetes Llama 3.1 405B on many benchmarks. Here's some chatter about their model on reddit: (https://lnkd.in/g_XACwu8). Main announcement: https://lnkd.in/gTQ2NmyJ?
🚨Google DeepMind is bringing their video generative model Veo to YouTube. Early next year, they're making it possible to generate 6 second standalone video clips (https://lnkd.in/gj6Zg-Rc?)
🚨Mistral AI released a free API tier and a new enterprise-grade Mistral Small model (https://lnkd.in/g4ZV92Mf?). They also released Pixtral 12B, their first multi-modal model (https://lnkd.in/gAFEr7MU?)
🚨Runway announces API to integrate it's Gen-3 video-generation model into third-party platforms (https://lnkd.in/gf_TbAwH?)
🚨Snap Inc. introduces an AI video-generation tool for ceators that enables video creation from text and image prompts (https://lnkd.in/gq-x-2D4?)

Financing and M&A:
🚨Sakana AI completes their $200m in Series A fundraising. Translink Capital is a proud investor! Read more about our investment thesis here: https://lnkd.in/gqubHu-k. Official press release from Sakana: https://lnkd.in/gJSuCA2r
🚨Rumors have surfaced that NVIDIA is in advanced talks to acquire OctoAI for a reported $165m. OctoAI has raised $133m total and their latest Series C post-money valuation was $850m. This means any investor after their Series A is likely to be underwater at this contemplated sale price.
🚨Bounti.ai raises $16m in funding led by GV (Google Ventures) to build AI sales and marketing agents. (https://lnkd.in/gt5Cc6T4)

R&D:
🚨1X, the humanoid robotics company releases their World Model, a video generation model that can be used to simulate first person views of robotic activity. (https://lnkd.in/ggqBH_P3?)

Other Interesting Resources:
🚨Evaluating o1 with Cognition and devin:
https://lnkd.in/gR4Ezbag?