AI Weekly Backward Pass

Week 92

Note: I decided that I’m going to start posting weekly AI recaps on Substack. I hope it’s helpful for everyone.

OpenAI is at $10b ARR, Meta makes massive $14b investment into Scale... here's your weekly AI news:

🔙 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐏𝐚𝐬𝐬: 𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐤
Week 92 | June 9 - June 15
What's bigger than Megascale? METAscale!

Industry:
🚨Meta invest $14.3b in Scale AI for a 49% stake in the company. CEO Alexandr Wang along with a small number of Scale AI employees will also join Meta as part of the agreement (https://lnkd.in/gVT4hsvD). Concurrently, Zukerberg is forming a "superintelligence" lab aimed at outperforming the other LLM players.
🚨OpenAI announces that they're slashing prices on o3 by 80%. They also introuduced o3-pro which is 10x the price of o3. (https://lnkd.in/gk9Knnxd). OpenAI has also reportedly hit $10b in ARR (https://lnkd.in/gf9ZV6yX?)
🚨ByteDance (parent company of Tiktok) releases a new model called Seedance 1.0 that beats both Google's Veo 3 and OpenAI's Sora (https://lnkd.in/gNbqyDxw?)
🚨Apple released new on-device models powering Apple Intelligence. The foundation models are 3B parameters in size and optimized to run efficiently on Apple silicon (https://lnkd.in/gXw_YzVr?)
🚨Mistral AI releases new reasoning models (https://lnkd.in/gQuNdH2J?) and announces they're going into the compute game (https://lnkd.in/g3BHyTRD?)

Financing/M&A:
🚨Glean, an enterprise search company, raises Series F $150m at $7.2b valuation, led by Wellington Management (https://lnkd.in/gJWFV6Uh)
🚨 Laurel a platform for time management for professional services firms, today announced it has raised $100 million in Series C funding led by IVP (https://lnkd.in/gbdsV7K2)
🚨Linear a software platform that competes with Atlassian, raises Series C $82m at $1.25b valuation, led by Accel (https://lnkd.in/gNMbruke)
🚨Ellipsis Health, a company that uses AI for care mangaement, closes a $45 million series A funding round led by Salesforce Ventures, Khosla Ventures and CVS Health Ventures (https://lnkd.in/gSrQy2-W)

R&D:
🚨Interesting paper out of Apple Research that reveals reasoning models collapse while solving complex problems. (https://lnkd.in/gZiFnHS3?)
🚨Sakana AI's Darwin Godel Model - AI that continuously improves itself. (https://sakana.ai/dgm/?)
🚨Meta introduces a new physical world model called V-JEPA 2. The world model, trained on video, enables robots and other AI agents to understand the physical world and predict how it will respond to their actions. (https://lnkd.in/gBavC-Vx?)

Other Interesting Resources:
🚨A16z's new report on AI changes in the enterprise (https://lnkd.in/g6rKtGmM?)
🚨New essay from Sam Altman on how much energy ChatGPT uses (https://lnkd.in/gU5Uipgb)