🔙 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐏𝐚𝐬𝐬: 𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐤

Week 50 | July 28 - August 4 | Nvidia's delayed rollout

Industry:
🚨According to several sources, NVIDIA's Blackwell chips are in production delays (https://lnkd.in/gAqvgjk5?). Here's a more technical look at it: https://lnkd.in/g2JpZj53
🚨Google announces several new additions to the Gemma models. (1) Gemma 2 2B – a brand-new version of the popular 2b parameter model, (2) ShieldGemma – a suite of safety content classifier models and (3) Gemma Scope – a new model interpretability tool (https://lnkd.in/g5CdVSeK?)
🚨 Perplexity announces their publishers' program, which includes a revenue sharing program with content publishers. This comes after several highly publicized deals involving OpenAI and publishers (https://lnkd.in/gH2HP4CG)
🚨 Apple says its AI models were trained on Google's TPU chips. (https://lnkd.in/gsFefzyu?)
🚨 OpenAI announces a temporary prototype of SearchGPT, a new AI search feature that gives serach answers with clear and relevant sources (https://lnkd.in/gFFSmQpB)
🚨Character.AI CEO Noam Shazeer returns to Google, alongside co-founder Daniel De Freitas and other employees from the startup. Google is also signing a non-exclusive agreement with Character.AI to use its tech. (https://lnkd.in/gv4P3XCN?). This news comes after reports that Musk's xAI was interested in purchasing the company. This deal is part of a growing trend where big tech is gobbling up AI startups such as Microsoft/Inflection AI and Amazon/Adept AI.
🚨Based on Microsoft's latest earnings call, GitHub Copilot is more than $300m ARR and growing at 40% q/q.

Financing and M&A:
🚨Black Forest Labs raises $31M in seed financing led by A16z. The startup is led by the original co-creators of the Stable Diffusion series of models. (https://lnkd.in/gep5zz3H)
🚨 Chinese generative AI startup Moonshot AI has reportedly raised $300m in a new funding round at a $3b valuation (https://lnkd.in/gpSMRvpc)
🚨 Altana a supply chain management startup, locked up a $200m Series C investment at $1b valuation
(https://lnkd.in/gvb79Hhu).
🚨Protect AI raises $60m in Series B financing to secure AI and ML from security risks (https://lnkd.in/gG_FgjeH)
🚨 Credo AI, a startup in the AI governance space, raises $21m
(https://lnkd.in/gp5qNEcr)

Research & Development:
🚨 Meta releases Segment Anything 2 (SAM 2). SAM 2 can segment any object in any video or image, even for objects and visual domains it has not seen previously. (https://lnkd.in/gDwiMQXG?)
🚨 Interesting paper that shows the repeated use of smaller models can yield consistent improvements vs. one large model (https://lnkd.in/gS997SXT)

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