News from the AI & ML world
DeeperML - #funding
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Chris McKay@Maginative
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OpenAI has secured a massive $40 billion funding round, led by SoftBank, catapulting its valuation to an unprecedented $300 billion. This landmark investment makes OpenAI the world's second-most valuable private company alongside TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd, trailing only Elon Musk's SpaceX Corp. This deal marks one of the largest capital infusions in the tech industry and signifies a major milestone for the company, underscoring the escalating significance of AI.
The fresh infusion of capital is expected to fuel several key initiatives at OpenAI. The funding will support expanded research and development, and upgrades to computational infrastructure. This includes the upcoming release of a new open-weight language model with enhanced reasoning capabilities. OpenAI said the funding round would allow the company to “push the frontiers of AI research even further” and “pave the way” towards AGI, or artificial general intelligence. Recommended read:
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Matthias Bastian@THE DECODER
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Anthropic has successfully closed a Series E funding round, securing $3.5 billion and elevating the company's valuation to an impressive $61.5 billion. This substantial financial injection will be channeled towards accelerating Anthropic's research efforts, expanding its compute capacity and infrastructure, and driving the company's international growth strategy. Lightspeed Venture Partners spearheaded the funding round with a $1 billion contribution, underscoring strong investor confidence in Anthropic’s mission.
The financing round also attracted participation from several prominent investors including Salesforce Ventures, Cisco Investments, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, D1 Capital Partners, Jane Street, Menlo Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners. The company's annualized revenue reached $1 billion by December 2024, representing a tenfold increase year-over-year and the company plans to further enhance its AI systems with the new funding. Anthropic aims to advance the development of next-generation AI systems and expand what humans can achieve. Recommended read:
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staff@insideAI News
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Celestial AI, the creator of the Photonic Fabric optical interconnect technology, has announced a successful Series C1 funding round, securing $250 million. The round was led by Fidelity Management & Research Company, bringing the total capital raised by the company to over $515 million. Celestial AI's Photonic Fabric platform aims to speed up data transfer inside servers using light, with plans for new data centers in North America and France. This investment underscores the growing demand for advanced AI models and the development of AI infrastructure.
The company's Photonic Fabric technology allows AI compute to be networked seamlessly, from within processor packages to servers across multiple racks. Celestial AI offers a full suite of products, that include connectivity, switching and packaging solutions which serve as the foundation for optical scale-up networks for accelerated computing. Celestial AI's valuation has now reached $2.5 billion, reflecting investor confidence in its potential to revolutionize AI infrastructure. New investors include funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Maverick Silicon, Tiger Global Management and Lip-Bu Tan, as well as participation from existing investors including AMD Ventures, Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), Temasek, Temasek’s wholly-owned subsidiary Xora Innovation, Porsche Automobil Holding SE and The Engine Ventures. Recommended read:
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Maria Deutscher@SiliconANGLE
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Turing, a prominent coding provider for OpenAI and other large language model (LLM) producers, has successfully raised $111 million in a Series E funding round. This new investment has propelled the company's valuation to $2.2 billion, doubling its previous valuation. Turing, initially an HR tech startup focused on vetting and hiring remote coders, has transformed into a key player in the AI development landscape, assisting in building LLMs and creating generative AI applications for enterprises.
The funding round was led by Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional Berhad, with participation from WestBridge Capital, Sozo Ventures, and several other investors. Turing plans to utilize the funds to expand its business, reach more customers, and broaden its use cases. CEO Jonathan Siddharth emphasized that the company has been profitable for around a year and aims to leverage the investment to fast track the "next generation" of AI model advancement. Recommended read:
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Maria Deutscher@SiliconANGLE
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Defense technology startup Shield AI has secured $240 million in a Series F-1 strategic funding round, pushing its valuation to $5.3 billion. The funding round saw significant investment from strategic investors L3Harris and Hanwha Aerospace, alongside existing investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, U.S. Innovative Technology, and Washington Harbour. This latest investment brings Shield AI's total outside funding to $1.3 billion.
The funds will be used to scale Hivemind Enterprise, Shield AI's AI-powered autonomy developer platform, which enables fighter jets and drones to fly autonomously. Hivemind Enterprise is designed to empower the robotics and drone industrial base to rapidly develop and deploy resilient, high-performance autonomy for intelligent machines across various industries. The platform includes an integrated autonomy factory, industrial-grade middleware, a rich autonomy catalog, and seamless mission control. Recommended read:
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Michael Nuñez@AI News | VentureBeat
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AiThority
, AI News | VentureBeat
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AI security startup Hakimo has secured $10.5 million in Series A funding to expand its autonomous security monitoring platform. The funding round was led by Vertex Ventures and Zigg Capital, with participation from RXR Arden Digital Ventures, Defy.vc, and Gokul Rajaram. This brings the company’s total funding to $20.5 million. Hakimo's platform addresses the challenges of rising crime rates, understaffed security teams, and overwhelming false alarms in traditional security systems.
The company’s flagship product, AI Operator, monitors existing security systems, detects threats in real-time, and executes response protocols with minimal human intervention. Hakimo's AI Operator utilizes computer vision and generative AI to detect any anomaly or threat that can be described in words. Companies using Hakimo can save approximately $125,000 per year compared to using traditional security guards. Recommended read:
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Matthias Bastian@THE DECODER
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venturebeat.com
, THE DECODER
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Anthropic has successfully closed a $3.5 billion Series E funding round, elevating the AI company's valuation to an impressive $61.5 billion. This substantial financial injection, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with a $1 billion contribution, underscores investor confidence in Anthropic's potential despite the already high valuations in the AI sector. The company's revenue has experienced exponential growth, increasing by 1,000% year-over-year, fueled by strong enterprise adoption of its Claude chatbot and other AI solutions.
The new capital will be strategically allocated to bolster Anthropic's research and development efforts, expand its compute infrastructure, and deepen its focus on mechanistic interpretability and alignment. Anthropic's CFO, Krishna Rao, emphasized that the investment would facilitate the development of more intelligent and capable AI systems. In addition to these advancements, Anthropic has also launched Claude 3.7 Sonnet, an advanced AI model designed with hybrid reasoning capabilities, showcasing the company's commitment to innovation and cutting-edge AI technology. Recommended read:
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@www.pymnts.com
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OpenAI is reportedly in talks for a substantial $40 billion funding round, potentially valuing the company at $300 billion. The round, led by SoftBank, would see the Japanese conglomerate become OpenAI’s largest investor, surpassing Microsoft. This funding would support OpenAI's various initiatives, including its contribution to the Stargate AI infrastructure project and its ongoing business operations. It comes amid increased competition in the AI landscape, particularly with the emergence of new models like DeepSeek's, which is reportedly using substantially less hardware than comparable models.
OpenAI is also facing concerns regarding the use of its AI models by other companies. Allegations have surfaced that DeepSeek may have inappropriately used OpenAI's technology through a process known as "distillation," a technique used to boost the performance of smaller models. OpenAI is actively reviewing these allegations and has indicated it takes aggressive countermeasures to protect its technology. Additionally, OpenAI revealed it is partnering with U.S. National Laboratories, granting scientists access to its latest AI models for scientific research and nuclear weapons security, including working with Microsoft to deploy its tech on the Venado supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Furthermore, OpenAI has used the subreddit r/ChangeMyView to test AI persuasion capabilities. Recommended read:
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@techcrunch.com
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techcrunch.com
, www.cnbc.com
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OpenAI is actively exploring the persuasive capabilities of its AI models, using the r/ChangeMyView subreddit as a testing ground. The company collects user posts and asks its AI to generate replies aimed at changing the poster's original viewpoint. These responses are then evaluated by human testers, with the results being compared to human replies for the same posts. Although OpenAI has a content-licensing deal with Reddit, it claims that this specific evaluation is separate. However, the test highlights the importance of human data in AI model development, as well as the complex ways in which tech companies obtain datasets.
OpenAI has also announced a significant partnership with U.S. National Laboratories, granting them access to its latest AI models for use in scientific research and nuclear weapons security. This collaboration will involve up to 15,000 scientists across the labs and will include deploying an OpenAI model on the Venado supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in conjunction with Microsoft. Furthermore, OpenAI is reportedly seeking a substantial $40 billion in new funding, which could value the company at $300 billion. SoftBank is expected to lead this funding round with investments between $15 and $25 billion. This new funding would support OpenAI’s ongoing research and infrastructure projects such as the Stargate AI venture. Recommended read:
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