• Wednesday • November 20, 2024

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    Wall Street Journal

    Elon Musk’s xAI Startup Is Valued at $50 Billion in New Funding Round

    The Artificial-Intelligence Company Has More Than Doubled its Valuation Since the Spring

    Elon Musk’s artificial-intelligence startup, xAI, has told investors it raised $5 billion in a funding round valuing it at $50 billion—more than twice what it was valued at several months ago.

    Qatar’s sovereign-wealth fund, Qatar Investment Authority, and investment firms Valor Equity Partners, Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz are expected to participate in the round, according to people familiar with the matter. The financing brings the total amount xAI has raised to $11 billion this year.

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  • Friday • August 30, 2024

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    The Verge

    Amazon’s new Alexa voice assistant will use Claude AI

    Its Own In-House Generative AI Models Reportedly Struggled by Comparison

    The improved version of Alexa that Amazon’s expected to release this year will primarily be powered by Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence model, according to Reuters. The publication reports that initial versions of Amazon’s smarter, subscription-based voice assistant that used the company’s own AI proved insufficient, often struggling with words and responding to user prompts.

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  • Wednesday • August 28, 2024

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    Wall Street Journal

    OpenAI in Talks for Funding Round Valuing It Above $100 Billion

    Thrive Capital and Microsoft are Among Investors Putting Several Billion Dollars Into ChatGPT Maker

    OpenAI is in talks to raise several billion dollars in a new funding round that would value the startup behind ChatGPT above $100 billion. Venture-capital firm Thrive Capital is leading the round and will invest about $1 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. Microsoft MSFT -0.63%decrease; red down pointing triangle is also expected to put in money.

    The new funding round would be the biggest infusion of outside capital into OpenAI since Microsoft invested around $10 billion in January 2023. Since then, an arms race has developed in Silicon Valley to build the most advanced artificial-intelligence systems in an effort to dominate an industry many say will revolutionize the economy.

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  • Tuesday • August 27, 2024

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    Reuters

    Cerebras launches AI inference tool to challenge Nvidia

    The Inference Portion of the AI Market is Expected to be Fast-Growing and Attractive

    Cerebras Systems launched on Tuesday a tool for AI developers that allows them to access the startup’s outsized chips to run applications, offering what it says is a much cheaper option than industry-standard Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab processors.
    Access to Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) – often via a cloud computing provider – to train and deploy large artificial intelligence models used for applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT can be difficult to obtain and expensive to run, a process developers refer to as inference.

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  • Friday • August 23, 2024

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    The Verge

    ElevenLabs’ AI Reader app can now narrate text in 32 languages

    The App Has Been Released Globally Following Its Initial Debut in the US, UK, and Canada

    AI audio startup ElevenLabs has now made its text-to-speech Reader app available across the world, adding support for 32 different languages — including Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Mandarin, and Hindi.

    The app, which is available on both iOS and Android, was first released in June in the US, UK, and Canada. It allows users to listen to PDFs, articles, newsletters, ePub files or “any other text content” according to the developer, but that support seemingly doesn’t extend to files from Kindle or Apple Books.

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  • Wednesday • August 21, 2024

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    Techcrunch

    Anthropic’s Claude surpasses $1M in mobile app revenue

    Nearly Half of That Revenue Has Been Generated by Users in the U.S.

    It’s taken 16 weeks to get there, but Anthropic’s AI app Claude has hit a notable milestone: It crossed $1 million in gross mobile app revenue across iOS and Android. Nearly half of that revenue has been generated by users in the U.S., according to new data from app intelligence firm Appfigures.

    However, Claude is still ranking far behind top rival ChatGPT, which is No. 1 by overall downloads and No. 26 by revenue in the U.S. on iOS. Claude is only 95th in the Productivity category by downloads and 68th in that category by revenue.

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