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Trump-Victory Trades - Trump’s shooting boosted perceived ‘Trump-victory trades’ including gun makers, private prison operators and Bitcoin and crypto. DJT and Rumble stocks also soared. Clean energy stocks fell.

Project "Strawberry" - OpenAI is working on a project to enhance the reasoning capabilities of its AI models and enable autonomous internet research — crucial steps for achieving human-level intelligence or AGI.

OpenAI Whistleblowers File - An SEC complaint alleges OpenAI used overly restrictive non-disclosure agreements to prevent employees from reporting concerns to regulators.

Record AUM - Assets managed by BlackRock hit a record $10.65T in Q2 thanks to rising client asset values and inflows of $81.57b driven by its ETFs.

BRICS Coin? - Chair of the Russian Federation Council, Valentina Matvienko proposes BRICS adopt a crypto-based CBDC payment system.

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The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week

Trump’s ex-VC, Pro-AI & Pro-crypto VP Pick

Just days after being shot on-stage, former President Trump has chosen 39-yr-old Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate for the 2024 election. Vance is a former venture capitalist, lawyer and author with close ties to Silicon Valley and is pro-crypto, and pro open-source AI. His addition to the ticket brings much-needed tech savvy and experience to a presidential race currently decidedly lacking in it. He could significantly influence policies affecting the startup and VC ecosystem if the Trump-Vance ticket is elected.

Background in Venture Capital

Trump’s VP announcement celebrated Vance's business background. He worked at Mithril Capital, co-founded by Peter Thiel, still a mentor and major contributor to Vance’s Senate campaign. Vance then joined Steve Case’s Revolution, before leaving to co-found Narya Capital focusing on startups in underserved regions of the US. Presidential candidate and fellow VC, Vivek Ramaswamy, served as a limited partner in Narya. ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Marc Andreessen of a16z both backed Narya.

“The solution is open source”

Vance has made comments suggesting he is critical of big tech-controlled AI and in favor of a consumer-focused and Open Source AI approach. Vance favors a deregulation, or at least a slower regulation approach to AI. This may garner support from companies dedicated to AI, tech, and innovation as well as tech-libertarians. However, his ability to influence Trump, and other members of his team on this agenda is as yet unclear.

Pro Crypto

Vance will be a popular choice among crypto industry leaders. He recently drafted a bill that would revamp how the U.S. regulates digital assets, which sources say will be more crypto-friendly than the bill passed by the House in June. Trump has also been leaning into the crypto space increasingly, speaking at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville this week. So it is likely this policy will have traction, and with Vance at the helm working on the legal details could be a significantly positive development for the sector.

Why Vance Matters

It’s a big deal that Vance is the first former VC on a ticket since Mitt Romney. It will be interesting to watch his approach to antitrust issues. His record as an pro-competition advocate could clash with his desire to give VCs better options for liquidity through M&A than under the current FTC environment. It also could mean more democratized AI and finance with less big-tech domination. The “Hillbilly Elegy” author’s appointment suggests Trump is looking to appeal to anti-woke Silicon Valley and finance, while also strengthening his appeal to both the MAGA and traditional GOP base.

“Very often CEOs, especially of larger technology companies that I think already have advantageous positions in AI will come and talk about the terrible safety dangers of this new technology and how Congress needs to jump up and regulate as quickly as possible. And I can’t help but worry that if we do something under duress from the current incumbents, it’s going to be to the advantage of those incumbents and not to the advantage of the American consumer.“

— J.D. Vance, Trump Vice President Candidate 2024

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Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

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1. Cannabis/Hemp E-comm - New York - The first AI-Powered end-to-end online platform for the hemp industry - 2,000% growth in 2 years. (Seed+)

2. AI Agent Employees - New York - Sophisticated workflow automation for businesses, by a previously-exited founder. Building towards fully autonomous organizations. Backed by Tribe & Kenetic, rolling out to extensive waitlist. (Seed)

3. Outbound B2B Campaign AI Co-Pilot - Lexington, MA - Turn any CRM into an AI optimized sales agent for personalized customer campaigns. Founder previous exit to PE. Notable Angel on board. Top Hubspot App. Post revenue. (Seed)

Trending Tools and Buzzy Tech

Tools

Meta - Llama-3 405B multimodal AI model due on July 23.

Samsung - AI upgrades to Bixby voice assistant will use in-house LLM.

AMD x HP - HP OmniBook to feature AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 processor.

Tech

Moon Cave - Lunar cave could redirect lunar colony and startup plans.

Beijing University - China builds 'world's first' 6G field test network.

Tesla - Sets end-of-year deadline for its 4680 battery cell tech.

Closed Deals:

Genomic Analyzer - San Diego DNA sequencing startup Element Biosciences closed a $277M Series D led by Wellington Management and backed by Samsung, Fidelity, Foresite, T. Rowe Price, and Venrock.

Robotics Automation - New York AI robotic arms startup Standard Bots closed its $63M Series B  led by General Catalyst, and backed by Amazon and Samsung.

Deals to Watch:

Wiz - Alphabet is in advanced talks to acquire Israeli cloud security company Wiz for ~$23b to strengthen its growing cloud business. Wiz recently raised $1b and had $350M in ARR at the time.

Funding Buzz Watch:

[Open Fund] Morgan Creek Digital - In talks with sovereign and institutional investors across the U.S., EU, Middle East, and Asia-Pacific to raise a ~$500M fund focused on early-stage AI, blockchain, chips, and data tech startups. 

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∆ Tech in the News

The Fund Finance Unit - Goldman Sachs is pushing deeper into a risky bet on lending to private funds that has helped drive record revenues in fixed-income financing.

Tracking AGI Progress - OpenAI has unveiled a set of five levels to track its progress toward superintelligent AI and to help us better understand it.

EV Support - The Biden admin unveils a $1.7b plan to boost EV production at U.S. auto factories including funds for legacy automakers.

“A Media and Tech Company“ - New Paramount owner, David Ellison plans to adapt to tech shifts disrupting Hollywood like AI and streaming.

GOP AI Policy - The GOP 2024 election platform includes repeal of Biden’s AI Executive Order and support for AI ‘rooted in free speech and human flourishing’.

Crypto D.C. - 1. A senior Biden adviser met with crypto industry leaders Wednesday. | 2. Donald Trump to speak at the Bitcoin Conference in July.

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The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week

The Robotics GPT-3 Moment Is Coming

Robotics just won’t stop. There are new announcements daily and the pace of adoption is astonishing. The news this week alone will blow your mind - Brain-controlled Teslabots and robotaxis, 100% automated factories, massive robotics raises, and even a Robot WWIII? While it may be scary at times, ultimately the combination of AI and robotics presents some great opportunities to radically transform our world for the better.

The Headlines

In a Neuralink presentation yesterday Elon Musk claimed Neuralink’s coming Telepathy product will allow patients to control Teslabot humanoid robots with their minds. Tesla stock surged recently after news it has two Optimus bots working autonomously in its factories and on further news of its Robotaxi plans (which are now delayed from August until October).

Pittsburgh robotics startup Skild AI just raised a substantial $300M to build a “General Purpose" Robot Brain led by Lightspeed, Coatue, SoftBank, and Jeff Bezos with input from major VCs like Sequoia and Menlo. Skild’s generalist AI model can be used in various robots and scenarios.

In Defense AI, German startup Helsing has raised a $487M Series C led by General Catalyst at ~$5.4b valuation to expand its presence in nations bordering Russia. Helsing is similar to Anduril in the US in that it creates AI software to power weapons capabilities in drones and jet fighters.

So the future of robotics in the west is shaping up with humanoid robotics, robotaxis and military uses, but is China already living in it.

China Living in the Future

Last week Beijing unlocked the use of autonomous robotaxis by online ride-hailing services nationwide. Then, news broke that there are now no humans on Xiaomi’s 100% automated production lines. The world’s 3rd largest smartphone maker’s new facility can diagnose and fix its own problems and even evolve by itself. Oh, and they are also building EVs robotically.

The World Artificial Intelligence Conference took place in China last week showcased ~25 robots including some new advanced humanoid models. A Brookings report states the Chinese military and defense industry is also making significant investments in robotics, swarming, and other AI & ML applications. It has already fielded a growing number of robotic and unmanned systems, as well as advanced missiles with precision guidance.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The military uses of robotics risk dragging us into a robotics arms race, or worse, a robotics WWIII. It may well be time to focus instead on global agreements to limit this aspect, and focus on the more positive applications of robotics that can improve everyday life for all of us.

“A GPT-3 moment is coming to the world of robotics. It will spark a monumental shift that brings advancements similar to what we’ve seen in the world of digital intelligence to the physical world.”

— Stephanie Zhan, Partner, Sequoia Capital.

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1. Lockheed Martin Software Engineer, ex-Rutgers Junior Full Stack Developer. Secret clearance. Expertise in C++, PHP, SQL. Rutgers BA in Computer Science.

2. Meta Technical Recruiter for ML/AI roles, 98% candidate response rate, 70% hire rate. Led training for 135 sourcers.

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

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1. Cannabis/Hemp E-comm - New York - The first AI-Powered end-to-end online platform for the hemp industry - 2,000% growth in 2 years. (Seed+)

2. AI Agent Employees - New York - Sophisticated workflow automation for businesses, by a previously-exited founder. Building towards fully autonomous organizations. Backed by Tribe & Kenetic, rolling out to extensive waitlist. (Seed)

3. Outbound B2B Campaign AI Co-Pilot - Lexington, MA - Turn any CRM into an AI optimized sales agent for personalized customer campaigns. Founder previous exit to PE. Notable Angel on board. Top Hubspot App. Post revenue. (Seed)

Trending Tools and Buzzy Tech

Tools

Wearable Rings - 1. Oura Adviser AI health coach helps users take action| 2. Samsung Galaxy Ring begins with sleep metrics with other AI features.

Samsung Unpacked - Galaxy Watch, “AirPods’-like earbuds, new foldables.

Scale x AWS - Tools to boost enterprise and government AI adoption.

Tech

Google - 1. Self-replicating life created from digital 'primordial soup' of random data. | 2. AI-assisted 3D map of human brain tissue.

Neuralink - To offer Telepathy and then Brain Control of Teslabots.

OpenAI x Los Alamos National Lab - Studying value of AI in science labs.

Closed Deals:

“General Purpose" Robot Brain - Pittsburgh robotics startup Skild AI raised $300M at $1.5b led by Lightspeed, Coatue, SoftBank, & Jeff Bezos, backed by Sequoia, Menlo, General Catalyst, CRV, Amazon, & SV Angel.

Acquires Model Developer - AMD is acquiring Finnish AI model dev startup Silo AI for $665M to boost its AI chip capabilities to take on Nvidia.

Thrive AI Health - Arianna Huffington and Sam Altman’s OpenAI Startup Fund, backed this startup building "AI health coach" assistant tech with an undisclosed seed amount. Partners include Stanford Medicine.

Deals to Watch:

Groq - The AI Chip startup expects to finalize a $300M raise led by BlackRock in the next two weeks, at ~$2.2b pre-money, over 2x its $1.1b valuation in 2021. The deal pends a BlackRock financial audit.

Anduril - California defense AI/tech startup with multiple new defense contracts in FYE 2024. $500k revenue at 150% growth rate in 2023, strong projections. Raising $1.5B Series F at $12.5B pre-money led by Thiel’s Founders Fund and Sands Capital.

Funding Buzz Watch:

Pershing Square USA - Bill Ackman is raising a $20b closed-end US fund offering lower fees, and quicker capital access than traditional hedge funds.

Flagship Pioneering - The MA. bioplatform innovation company raised $3.6b to fund breakthrough companies in health, sustainability, & AI. It has strategic partnerships with Pfizer, Samsung, and Novo Nordisk.

Andreessen Horowitz - The firm’s Oxygen Initiative will accumulate 20,000+ GPUs, including Nvidia H100s, to rent them to portfolio companies to increase AI startup deal flow.

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∆ Tech in the News

Equity Fund Pile-on - Global investors piled ~$15.41b into equity funds last week and ~$21.08b in the prior week, on expectations of U.S. rate cuts, .

Amazon High-end Play - Amazon is taking a minority stake in the merged entity created by Saks's acquisition of Neiman Marcus, to get a foot in the luxury goods market it has failed to crack so far.

Crypto VC Crackdown - The SEC is investigating crypto VC firms for alleged ‘pump and dump’ violations of securities laws, per BlockTower CIO. .

China FSD - Beijing plans to support use of self-driving cars in online ride-hailing services, cites municipal draft rules for autonomous vehicles.

James Dean Lives - ElevenLabs’ Reader app uses AI to resurrect deceased actors' voices to read audiobooks with their estates’ permission.

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The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week

The AI Sector’s $600B Revenue Gap Bubble

Two significant reports just stoked fears of an AI Bubble. One was a Goldman Sachs investor note questioning gen AI’s ROI and value. The other was a Sequoia Report highlighting the massive $600 billion hardware spend of the global AI sector. This data, and other factors including AI’s environmental footprint, is giving rise to very real concerns about the sustainability of AI startup valuations and expectations. So how realistic are the fears, and what are some possible solutions to the problem?

Why it Matters

A new Sequoia Report on the AI industry finds that the sector needs to earn ~$600 billion per year to pay for the massive hardware spend required to run its tech. Goldman Sachs has until now been a vocal cheerleader for AI’s potential as a world changing technology and investment opportunity. The report Gen AI: Too much spend, too little benefit? dialled back some of its prior enthusiasm with a dose of realism. It pointed out that outside of a few leading companies like Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google, Generative AI isn’t generating ROI and value.

It is unclear if it ever will. Sequoia Analyst David Cahn believes we could be witnessing the growth of an AI-fueled financial bubble. He points out even optimistic projections for major tech companies' AI revenues fall well short of breaking even. Cahn believes the industry must temper expectations of quick profits or we face a bust and a possible global economic crisis.

Costs of Doing (AI) Business

Nvidia alone earned nearly $47.5b in datacenter hardware revenue last year from AI and HPC. Companies like AWS, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and xAI are investing heavily in their AI infrastructure. Meta "scorched earth" strategy involves acquiring ~350k Nvidia H100 GPUs in 2024, worth ~$30b (larger than the Apollo Moon Mission). xAI’s planned GPU supercomputer clusters in Tesla's gigafactory will also use 350k Nvidia GPUs at similar cost.

On top of that there are significant power grid and environmental costs involved in generating the energy to run the data centers needed.

More Efficient Solutions

One solution is making AI more efficient. Big tech is investing heavily in this. Google DeepMind just published new research introducing JEST - a method that accelerates model training while reducing computing requirements. Microsoft just unveiled its MInference, tech to accelerate its LM processing by up to 90%, reducing costs and energy use. Startups like Groq and Etched are innovating in AI chip design for efficiency and Baseten is using multiple AI models to offer high efficiency and AI scalability.

Another solution is State-Space Models which are effective for sequence modeling to summarize past information to predict future states or outputs. Stanford & CMU’s Cartesia is pioneering this innovative approach.

On the energy front, Intel just lodged a patent to improve AI energy resource management via a ML model that predicts likely energy emissions in processing tasks and prioritizing renewable energy sources.

“Speculative frenzies are part of tech, and not something to be afraid of. Those who remain level-headed through this moment have the chance to build extremely important companies…”

— David Cahn, Sequoia Analyst

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1. Lockheed Martin Software Engineer, ex-Rutgers Junior Full Stack Developer. Secret clearance. Expertise in C++, PHP, SQL. Rutgers BA in Computer Science.

2. Meta Technical Recruiter for ML/AI roles, 98% candidate response rate, 70% hire rate. Led training for 135 sourcers.

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

Request an intro to founders - invest@thetech.buzz

1. Cannabis/Hemp E-comm - New York - The first AI-Powered end-to-end online platform for the hemp industry - 2,000% growth in 2 years. (Seed+)

2. AI Agent Employees - New York - Sophisticated workflow automation for businesses, by a previously-exited founder. Building towards fully autonomous organizations. Backed by Tribe & Kenetic, rolling out to extensive waitlist. (Seed)

3. Outbound B2B Campaign AI Co-Pilot - Lexington, MA - Turn any CRM into an AI optimized sales agent for personalized customer campaigns. Founder previous exit to PE. Notable Angel on board. Top Hubspot App. Post revenue. (Seed)

Trending Tools and Buzzy Tech

Tools

xAI - Grok to integrate on X to get insights and access via an in-app pop-up.

Apple - New home accessory to get A18 chip to power for Apple Intelligence.

Intel - First fully integrated optical compute interconnect chip to scale up AI.

Kyutai - Moshi ‘real-time’ AI voice assistant beats OpenAI to market, positive reports.

Tech

Tesla/xAI - Tesla 'Gigafactory' expanding to include liquid-cooled AI data centers for supercomputers.

Radboud U. - AI system reconstructs accurate images from brain activity.

Fast-Charging Batteries - World 1st anode-free, sodium, solid-state battery.

Closed Deals:

Document Search - New York startup Hebbia raised a ~$130M Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz to offer AI-powered Document Search for asset management, legal, and professional services firms.

Deals to Watch:

Paramount Global - The film and TV giant looks set to merge with David Ellison’s Skydance concluding a months-long auction for the company’s controlling stake.

Anduril - California defense AI/tech startup with multiple defense contracts in FYE 2024. $500k revenue at 150% growth rate in 2023, strong projections. Raising $1.5B Series F at $12.5B pre-money led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Sands Capital.

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∆ Tech in the News

$10b AI Energy Spend - SoftBank plans to invest $10b+ in energy-related projects to power a large volume of Nvidia GPUs to power AI development.

FTX Fallout - Silvergate will pay the SEC $63M to settle AML and disclosures charges over its bank's missing of suspicious transfers by FTX.

Bull Over? - Bitcoin slid to a two-month low below $57,000 on Thursday as Mt Gox payouts, election uncertainty and government BTC liquidations spook investors.

CBDC Expansion? - The Swiss National Bank said it is open to expanding its pilot central bank digital currency project. It currently includes six banks.

Apple Observer - Apple Fellow and App Store head Phil Schiller will join the OpenAI board in a non-voting observer capacity from later this year.

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The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week

Will Anduril Spark an AI Defense Tech Boom?

For many, Independence Day serves as a reminder of the nation's historical commitment to securing its freedoms through military preparedness and innovation. Many VCs are eager to extend this commitment to funding defense tech and American dynamism. With the rapid innovation in AI, cybersecurity and aerospace it’s a good time to for a recap on recent technological and funding developments in this field.

Funding ‘American Dynamism’

Defense has traditionally been an area VCs are reluctant to touch, but with the AI boom increasingly private capital is stepping up to fund tech innovation in the sector. VC investment into defense tech startups boomed in 2023 after a $1.b round by AI-focused software and hardware defense tech startup Anduril in late 2022 ignited a gold rush in the sector. This year investment was down 74% to $118M in Q1 compared to $459M in Q1 2023 and down 62% in Q2 but…

Anduril is back, with reports it is raising another $1.5B round at a valuation of $12.5B. Meanwhile, investing giant a16z has been putting its ~$42B in AUM to work on AI, defense, and ‘American dynamism’. It is now exploring starting a Private Equity fund to unlock strategic Middle Eastern capital.

Investing in a Shifting Battlefield

AI is significantly impacting aerospace and defense manufacturers, enhancing capabilities and efficiency and changing the focus. Space capacity is emerging as highly important with Space security firm True Anomaly raising $100M in December. Autonomous fighters are gaining attention too, with AI pilot startup Shield AI raising a $200M Series F in October.

Robotics and Infrastructure is increasingly relevant as military recruitment is at all-time lows. In these areas, infrastructure & robotics defense startup Gecko Robotics closed a $173M Series C extension in December.

Cybersecurity is more crucial than ever in today’s National security and defense landscape. In March this year, Colorado open-source AI national security software systems startup Defense Unicorns raised a $35M Series A and in May satellite tracking startup Privateer raised $56.5M.

A Powderkeg Set to Blow?

American Dynamism is likely healthier than the numbers alone may suggest as a huge influx of money has been entering AI startups with strong defense applications and ties. For example OpenAI gave former head of the NSA and retired US Army General, Paul M. Nakasone a board spot. Could Anduril and AI ignite the powderkeg on another defense tech boom?

“Anduril is a technology partner, not an equipment provider Security threats are evolving faster than the DOD can keep pace… To really outmaneuver emerging threats we need to move past just efficiencies and create clear step changes in capability, quickly.”

— Brian Schimpf, Anduril Co-founder and CEO

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Job Candidates (For Employers)

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1. Lockheed Martin Software Engineer, ex-Rutgers Junior Full Stack Developer. Secret clearance. Expertise in C++, PHP, SQL. Rutgers BA in Computer Science.

2. Meta Technical Recruiter for ML/AI roles, 98% candidate response rate, 70% hire rate. Led training for 135 sourcers.

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

Request an intro to founders - invest@thetech.buzz

1. Cannabis/Hemp E-comm - New York - The first AI-Powered end-to-end online platform for the hemp industry - 2,000% growth in 2 years. (Seed+)

2. AI Agent Employees - New York - Sophisticated workflow automation for businesses, by a previously-exited founder. Building towards fully autonomous organizations. Backed by Tribe & Kenetic, rolling out to extensive waitlist. (Seed)

3. Outbound B2B Campaign AI Co-Pilot - Lexington, MA - Turn any CRM into an AI optimized sales agent for personalized customer campaigns. Founder previous exit to PE. Notable Angel on board. Top Hubspot App. Post revenue. (Seed)

Trending Tools and Buzzy Tech

Tools

xAI - Grok-2 will be released in August without training on other models.

Noplace - #1 on the App Store is a MySpace/Twitter mashup for Gen Z.

Cloudflare - Free tool detects and blocks AI bots scraping your websites.

Salesforce - APIGen generates datasets for AI training on real-world tasks.

Tech

The Blob - Robot controlled by a tiny organoid of human stem cells.

Peking U. - Thermal cameras & AI detect chronic disease by facial temp.

SpaceX - Wants to launch Starship up to 120 times p/a from Florida.

Closed Deals:

AI-Powered Legal - San Fran professional services AI startup Harvey is looking to raise $100M at a $1.5b valuation led by Google Ventures after its earlier plan to raise $600M to acquire legal research firm vLex fell over.

Deals to Watch:

Runway - The best-funded AI video startup ($237M raised), is in talks to raise $450M from investors including General Atlantic at a valuation of ~$4b. It plans to use the funds to further scale its efforts in multimodal AI.

Character.ai - The popular conversational AI chatbot unicorn raised $150M recently, but is now exploring both funding and sale options with big tech patrons including Google and Meta.

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∆ Tech in the News

Supreme Power - The Supreme Court gave Trump effective immunity for all acts committed in his role as president, and sent two cases on state social media moderation laws back to the lower courts for 1st amendment review.

Antitrust Wars - The EU charges Meta over its pay or consent model and France prepares to charge Nvidia for anti-competitive practices.

Biggest Ever - SpaceX is doing a tender offer at a $210b valuation, a record tender for an American company and up on its last value of $180M.

BlackRock Indexes - BlackRock acquired U.K.-based VC and markets data provider, Preqin for $3.2b. It now aims to ‘Index the Private Markets’.

Apple Gemini - Apple will integrate at least one other AI model this fall, likely Google’s Gemini models and maybe Anthropic's Claude models.

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The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week

Amazon Acquihires Adept for AI Agents and AGI Strategy

Amazon turns 30 on July 5th. To celebrate it has just passed $2T in market cap as well as making a major AI acquisition to support its AGI and AI agent ambitions. The E-commerce giant changed the online shopping world indelibly. Can it do it again with AI and robotics? The acquisition of Adept AI will certainly help. Amazon has hired Adept’s cofounders to join its AGI autonomy team and licensed key AGI-and-AI agent-related technology.

Why the Adept Deal Matters

Amazon expects to sell ~$554b of goods in the US this year per JPMorgan Chase - a 42% share of all e-commerce. But until recently it has lagged in its adoption of AI compared to other tech giants like Google and Microsoft.

The Adept deal is expected to help change that. Adept’s vision is to create AI agents that enhance productivity and enable creative problem-solving. It does this by navigating systems, extracting information, populating forms, and interacting with various web apps. The tech has potential uses across industries like supply chain management, financial services, and healthcare, which are all areas in which Amazon is aggressively innovating.

The acquisition is significant for several reasons:

1. The tech licensed includes advanced multimodal models and datasets that unlock digital agents for software tasks.

2. This AI agents tech aligns with Amazon's goal of developing practical AI solutions for both consumer and enterprise customers.

3. This strengthens Amazon’s AGI ambitions to build AI systems that can think and operate more like humans internally and in services.

4. It supports product development to enhance Alexa and develop other new AI services and tools like a consumer-focused chatbot.

Amazon Robotics

Another key area Adept’s AI agent systems will likely help with is robotics. To meet its supply chain needs efficiently, Amazon has doubled the number of robots deployed in its fulfillment centers and warehouses over three years to 750,000+, replacing 100,000 jobs. Amazon also began piloting Agility Robotics systems in its warehouses in October 2023. Agility just won an industry-first Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) deal with GXO, the world’s largest pure-play contract logistics provider and Spanx underwear owner. It’s unclear if the Adept deal signals Amazon moving towards an in-house robotics strategy, or if it will continue its Agility partnership.

Catching Up

Amazon is positioning itself to compete more effectively with other tech giants like Microsoft and Google in the AI space. It is making moves to accelerate its AI capabilities in AGI and autonomous agents both internally and for consumers and enterprise. When Amazon moves it moves fast, so this could lead to a radical shake-up in the E-commerce sector and to even more fierce competition in the foundational AI market.

“[Adept’s] expertise in training state-of-the-art multimodal foundational models and building real-world digital agents aligns with our vision to delight consumer and enterprise customers with practical AI solutions.”

— Rohit Prasad, Amazon AGI Team Executive

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Job Candidates (For Employers)

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1. Lockheed Martin Software Engineer, ex-Rutgers Junior Full Stack Developer. Secret clearance. Expertise in C++, PHP, SQL. Rutgers BA in Computer Science.

2. Meta Technical Recruiter for ML/AI roles, 98% candidate response rate, 70% hire rate. Led training for 135 sourcers.

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

Request an intro to founders - invest@thetech.buzz

1. Cannabis/Hemp E-comm - New York - The first AI-Powered end-to-end online platform for the hemp industry - 2,000% growth in 2 years. (Seed+)

2. AI Agent Employees - New York - Sophisticated workflow automation for businesses, by a previously-exited founder. Building towards fully autonomous organizations. Backed by Tribe & Kenetic, rolling out to extensive waitlist. (Seed)

3. Outbound B2B Campaign AI Co-Pilot - Lexington, MA - Turn any CRM into an AI optimized sales agent for personalized customer campaigns. Founder previous exit to PE. Notable Angel on board. Top Hubspot App. Post revenue. (Seed)

Trending Tools and Buzzy Tech

Tools

Robinhood - Acquired Pluto’s AI-powered research to add AI trade tools.

Google - Expands Translate with PaLM 2 & launches Gemma 2 models.

Apple - 1. To launch AI features for Vision Pro | 2. Launching AirPods with cameras. | 3. Developing way to more easily replace iPhone batteries.

Tech

Harvard/Tokyo U. - Living robot skin can be manipulated to smile.

Holoconnects - Texas Hospital trials “Holobox” 3D hologram doctor visits.

Agility Robotics - 1st Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) deal for its humanoids.

Closed Deals:

Next-gen Lithium-ion Batteries - Alameda EV Battery company Sila raised a $375M Series G round co-led by Sutter Hill and T. Rowe Price, with Bessemer and Coatue. Scaling production for Mercedes & Panasonic.

Disrupting Employer Health Plans - California health InsurTech startup Sidecar Health raised a $165M Series D led by Koch Disruptive, with GreatPoint, BOND, Cathay, Drive, Duke U, Menlo, & Morpheus.

Deals to Watch:

Cloud-Native HR Platform - Tokyo HR tech startup SmartHR will raise a $140M Series E co-led by KKR and Teachers’ Venture Growth.

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∆ Tech in the News

Free Speech? - The Supreme Court ruled that the government can force social media companies to take down content it deems as misinformation.

"De-orbit" Deal - SpaceX landed an $843M  contract from NASA to "de-orbit" the International Space Station in 2030.

Rivian x VW - Rivian will get a much-needed $5b lifeline from a Joint Venture with Volkswagen in a slowing EV market.

AI Time - Time magazine has signed a multi-year content deal with OpenAI giving the AI giant access to its news archives.

Solana ETF - Investment manager VanEck has filed to list the first U.S. ETF tied to the spot price of crypto token Solana.

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The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week

OpenAI and Thrive Capital Disrupting Hollywood

AI is coming for the entertainment industry as A24 and OpenAI are set to disrupt film and music. Many VCs are making bets on this AI-enhanced entertainment future. The Civil War producer A24 announced yesterday it has raised $250 million at a $3.5b valuation in a round led by Thrive Capital. Thrive — which invested ~$75M itself — is run by Jared Kushner’s brother, Josh Kushner and is one of OpenAI’s biggest investors.

Why it Matters

Thrive appears to be a betting on AI disrupting the industry. Kushner will join the A24 board so will have some sway over the studio’s adoption of AI. The Information’s Kate Clark writes, “The arrangement gives A24 access to a group of venture capitalists that specialize in AI… Kushner’s Rolodex could give A24 a head start over competitors in experimenting with new AI technologies.”

A24 clearly wants to be ahead of the game in making this transition as a pioneer of OpenAI’s Sora AI video generation tools. A24 reportedly plans to use the capital to expand into more IP–driven, big-budget commercial projects and other entertainment verticals like live performance and music. Sora would help significantly with this expansion by reducing manual work and increasing efficiency across various areas of the production process.

Sora AI Hits Cannes Festival

A24 is far from alone in this. Retailer Toys R Us just debuted a short promotional film at the 2024 Cannes Lions Festival, which was created by the retailer’s creative agency using early access to Sora. While the bulk of the film was made with Sora, humans handled corrective visual effects. various other industry insiders are involved as early access Sora users already.

Industry Pushback

Wherever there is disruption there are victims. Earlier this week the Recording Industry Association sued two gen AI music companies - Suno and Udio - over "copyright infringement involving unlicensed copying on a massive scale.” The suits were brought on behalf of music industry heavyweights Universal, Warner Music and Sony in a significant escalation of the fight between the music industry and AI companies.

Also, a major Hollywood workers union, IATSE, just signed a tentative three-year deal on AI-use with top studios. The deal includes agreed worker pay hikes and guardrails against the use of AI in films.

AI Future-tainment

Such rearguard actions may slow the onslaught, but as with any new media technology, they tend to just shift the disruption to more radical emerging players like A24 who attract more capital and outcompete the slow adopters. The VCs are lining up to get their pound of flesh from the AI dream factory.

“In A24, we see a company bringing extraordinary talent and creativity together with business model and technology innovation to reinvent entertainment for the modern age.”

— Josh Kushner, Founder Thrive Capital

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Job Candidates (For Employers)

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1. Lockheed Martin Software Engineer, ex-Rutgers Junior Full Stack Developer. Secret clearance. Expertise in C++, PHP, SQL. Rutgers BA in Computer Science.

2. Meta Technical Recruiter for ML/AI roles, 98% candidate response rate, 70% hire rate. Led training for 135 sourcers.

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

Request an intro to founders - invest@thetech.buzz

1. Cannabis/Hemp E-comm - New York - The first AI-Powered end-to-end online platform for the hemp industry - 2,000% growth in 2 years. (Seed+)

2. AI Agent Employees - New York - Sophisticated workflow automation for businesses, by a previously-exited founder. Building towards fully autonomous organizations. Backed by Tribe & Kenetic, rolling out to extensive waitlist. (Seed)

3. Outbound B2B Campaign AI Co-Pilot - Lexington, MA - Turn any CRM into an AI optimized sales agent for personalized customer campaigns. Founder previous exit to PE. Notable Angel on board. Top Hubspot App. Post revenue. (Seed)

Trending Tools and Buzzy Tech

Tools

Anthropic - ‘Projects’ organizes files, chats, and info in one location.

Figma - AI features include interactive prototypes and AI slide decks.

Synthesia - Full-body AI avatars, AI Video Assistant, translation, + more.

Notion - Notion Sites update offers more polished publishing experience. 

Tech

Neurostimulator Device - World first epilepsy device controls seizures.

Foray Bioscience - Biomanufacturing grows harvest-free plant material.

Consob - Italian market watchdog tests AI for listings & insider trading.

NBC - Plans Olympic highlights with AI-generated Al Michaels narration.

Closed Deals:

Data Connectivity Solutions - Nth Carolina data startup CData Software raised ~$350M in growth equity funding led by PE firm Warburg Pincus.

AI Drug Development - NYC biotech unicorn, Formation Bio closed a $372M Series D led by a16z with Sanofi, Sequoia, Thrive, Emerson Collective, Lachy Groom, SV Angel, & FPV. It recently partnered with OpenAI and Sanofi to develop custom AI drug development solutions.

No-Code CRM Unicorn - Boston startup Creatio raised a $200M growth round at $1.2b led by Sapphire Ventures, & backed by StepStone, Volition and Horizon. Revenue is up 50% y-o-y and it will expand its AI capacity.

Deals to Watch:

Groq - The AI chipmaker released a new “language processing unit,” pre-trained for speech-based applications to developers on GroqCloud. It's also raising a new round led by Blackrock at ~$2.5b, doubling its valuation.

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∆ Tech in the News

Apple x Meta? - The tech giants have discussed the integration of Meta’s Llama AI model into Apple's new AI system for iPhones, per WSJ.

Defying US Curbs? - Nvidia agreed to deploy its AI tech at data centres owned by Qatari telecoms group Ooredoo in five Middle Eastern countries.

AI Personas - Google is working on a conversational consumer chatbot product based on Meta’s ‘personas’ or Character.ai per The Information.

Bitcoin Meltdown? - The once-dominant Japan-based Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox is set to begin repaying creditors ~$9.4b in BTC from July.

Codename "Metis" - Amazon is reportedly working on a conversational AI product, and rolling out a paid ‘Remarkable Alexa’ product.

OpenAI Enterprise AI M&A Tear - 1. OpenAI purchased enterprise-focused, video collaboration startup Multi. | 2. Last week it also acquired database tech firm Rockset to boost its enterprise AI services.

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The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week

A16z Courts Middle Eastern Wealth Funds

Andreessen Horowitz (aka a16z) plans to raise its first private equity fund, the a16z Perennial Private Equity Fund. This is another sign of the leading VC firm’s bold push into new businesses. It’s also a bid to open up capital flows from new markets, notably Middle Eastern Sovereign Wealth Funds.

The information reported in May on the growing traction of a trend of sovereign wealth funds backing U.S. Private Equity and Venture Capital firms with the expectation of attracting investments back to the region to accelerate the shift of the region’s economic base from oil to technology. A16z is uniquely well poised to best take advantage of this trend by tapping into the larger flows available to PE firms and its D.C. connections.

A16z has ~$42B in AUM and is primarily focused on technological futurism. Its recent bets skew heavily towards AI with at least 100 AI-related startups in its portfolio including May’s massive xAI round. Other areas include bio + healthcare, consumer, crypto, enterprise, fintech, games, infrastructure, defense, and ‘American dynamism’. Crunchbase data shows it joined 27 Q1 post-seed rounds, more than any other US VC. It also recently expanded into DC to focus on ‘public investing strategy’ and lobbying policymakers for the tech and finance industries like AI and Web3.

Why it Matters

The move into buyouts is a notable shift for the primarily early-stage VC firm. Based on its name, the new fund may follow a16z’s wealth management arm, Perennial in catering to the family offices it already has relationships with. It’s an unusual approach to run both a family office and VC firm in unison—though Iconiq Capital has done so for a decade.

A16z already has attracted ~19 clients and $822 million of assets as of mid-May. It anticipates in the “near future” a first close of two new funds from its family office division: a real assets fund, investing in real estate, as well as a “diversifying investments” fund, focused on “income-producing and diversifying strategies,” according to the filings.

Show me the money

A16z’s biggest limited partner is Calpers, a California pension plan, with $0.5 billion in assets. The second is a Canadian pension fund with $300 million. However, a16z has been looking further afield with reported talks with Saudi Arabia's $925 billion sovereign wealth fund PIF to partner on a $40 billion fund to invest in AI. It’s likely this deal, and others like it, are behind A16z's move to unlock PE flows in anticipation of a deluge of money from the region into AI and other cutting-edge technologies.

“The threat of not aggressively pursuing global AI dominance is considerable.”

— Marc Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz Co-founder

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Job Candidates (For Employers)

Request an intro to candidates - jobs@thetech.buzz

1. Lockheed Martin Software Engineer, ex-Rutgers Junior Full Stack Developer. Secret clearance. Expertise in C++, PHP, SQL. Rutgers BA in Computer Science.

2. Meta Technical Recruiter for ML/AI roles, 98% candidate response rate, 70% hire rate. Led training for 135 sourcers.

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

Request an intro to founders - invest@thetech.buzz

1. Cannabis/Hemp E-comm - New York - The first AI-Powered end-to-end online platform for the hemp industry - 2,000% growth in 2 years. (Seed+)

2. AI Agent Employees - New York - Sophisticated workflow automation for businesses, by a previously-exited founder. Building towards fully autonomous organizations. Backed by Tribe & Kenetic, rolling out to extensive waitlist. (Seed)

3. Outbound B2B Campaign AI Co-Pilot - Lexington, MA - Turn any CRM into an AI optimized sales agent for personalized customer campaigns. Founder previous exit to PE. Notable Angel on board. Top Hubspot App. Post revenue. (Seed)

Trending Tools and Buzzy Tech

Tools

Anthropic - Artifacts interface for AI edits and project integration.

Endiatx - Tiny pill robot examines internal health with cameras and sensors.

Starlink x Comcast - Partnered on internet service for rural connectivity. 

Tech

Apple - Will automate iPhone factories to reduce workers by up to 50%.

Open Source AI? - No one can agree on a definition of “open source” AI.

EssilorLuxottica - Meta Ray-Ban glasses partner in talks with other firms.

AI Blood Test - Test predicts Parkinson's disease ~7 yrs before symptoms.

Closed Deals:

AI Agent Knowledge Workers - New York stealth AI agent tech startup Emergence raised $97.2M from Learn Capital plus credit lines of $100M+.

Autonomous Warehouses - MA. AI software/robotics startup Vecna Robotics raised a $100M Series C from Tiger Global, Proficio, & IMPULSE.

Deals to Watch:

Webtoon Entertainment - An LA online comics platform aims to raise ~$315M at $2.67B at IPO. It connects 24M creators with nearly 170M MAUs in 150+ countries as at March. It lost $145M on $1.28B revenue in 2023.

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∆ Tech in the News

Nvidia’s 15 minutes - The chip giant was briefly the world’s most valuable company as NVIDIA hit $3.34T, surpassing Microsoft before returning to #2.

Ethereum Cleared? - The SEC has closed its investigation into Ethereum 2.0, finally confirming that ETH is not a security and will face no charges.

Trump Shares - Trump Media says the SEC has cleared the way for the resale of certain shares and warrants that may net it $247M in proceeds.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet - Anthropic’s new ‘best-in-class’ model beats GPT-4o on several key AI benchmarks for reading, coding, math and vision.

xAI Updates - 1. X Payments may debut by the end of 2024 | 2. Dell, Nvidia, and SMC will collaborate to build an AI factory for the xAI supercomputer. | 3. Elon predicts AGI will arrive by 2025 or 2026 at the latest.

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The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week

An AI E-Commerce Search Engine Revolution

AI search engine for E-commerce startup Daydream just raised a $50 million seed from Forerunner Ventures and Index Ventures, True Ventures, and GV. This suggests VCs (including Google insiders) see an opportunity in AI’s disruption of the search market, despite a wider funding slowdown in AI VC flow. Why are investors betting on AI search companies and what does it mean for the future of both E-Commerce and search?

The E-Commerce Search Revolution

Daydream was founded by E-commerce veteran and ex-COO of Stitch Fix, Julie Bornstein. It aims to use gen AI, ML, and computer vision to provide personalized shopping results. It and backers included platform will launch in Beta in the U.S. this fall to let shoppers search using natural language and image recognition. It will first focus on fashion with 2K+ top brands on-board including Net-A-Porter, and, Jimmy Choo.

A VC involved in the deal informed us, VCs are betting on Daydream because they believe e-commerce backend infrastructure like Shopify will cease to be the de facto important factor in the future of the sector in the age of AI search. Instead, they predict the focus on headless frontend e-commerce search engines will become far more relevant. Investing in the tech rails for this transition (indexing + AI Agents) could yield benefits.

What Will E-Commerce 3.0 Look Like?

The approach differs to legacy E-commerce players’ use of AI in key ways:

1. AI native: Instead of retrofitting AI into legacy systems, it uses ground-up AI platforms and deep E-commerce/AI integration

2. Highly personalized: It offers an intuitive and personalized search experience and conversational prompts to find what buyers want.

3. Visual AI: Computer vision models allow users to search based on visual attributes to find similar items with custom modifications.

4. Contextual search: the AI is designed to understand the context of the searcher and the search including location, purpose, season.

Wider Market Moves

Beyond E-commerce its been a busy week in AI search. San Fran/Singapore AI search startup Genspark also raised a $60M seed led by Singapore VC Lanchi Ventures at $260M post-money. GenSpark claims to deliver higher-quality results by embracing a ‘more surgical approach’. This raise appears to be a bet on the founding team’s solid tech & record at Google and Baidu.

Perplexing The Doubters

Meanwhile, Perplexity AI just received a $10M investment from Korea’s largest telco provider, SK Telecom (SKT) to integrate the tool into SKT’s ‘A.’ AI personal assistant to provide interactive queries, search result summaries, related search suggestions, and translation services. However, the company has also faced bad PR and potential legal trouble after Forbes sent a letter to Perplexity this week formally accusing the company of stealing text and images in a "willful infringement" of its copyright rights.

“This tech allows us to leverage language and images together in a way that allows you to express, as a consumer, what it is you need.”

— Julie Bornstein, Founder of Daydream

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Job Candidates (For Employers)

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1. Lockheed Martin Software Engineer, ex-Rutgers Junior Full Stack Developer. Secret clearance. Expertise in C++, PHP, SQL. Rutgers BA in Computer Science.

2. Meta Technical Recruiter for ML/AI roles, 98% candidate response rate, 70% hire rate. Led training for 135 sourcers.

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

Request an intro to founders - invest@thetech.buzz

1. Cannabis/Hemp E-comm - New York - The first AI-Powered end-to-end online platform for the hemp industry - 2,000% growth in 2 years. (Seed+)

2. AI Agent Employees - New York - Sophisticated workflow automation for businesses, by a previously-exited founder. Building towards fully autonomous organizations. Backed by Tribe & Kenetic, rolling out to extensive waitlist. (Seed)

3. Outbound B2B Campaign AI Co-Pilot - Lexington, MA - Turn any CRM into an AI optimized sales agent for personalized customer campaigns. Founder previous exit to PE. Notable Angel on board. Top Hubspot App. Post revenue. (Seed)

Trending Tools and Buzzy Tech

Tools

Apple - Halts Vision Pro work to focus on $1.5K Vision headset for 2025.

Google - Video-to-audio (V2A) system generates video soundtracks.

SpaceX - Starlink Mini $599 portable satellite fits in a backpack. 

Tech

New Models - 1. Meta drops 4 new open-source multimodal AI models. | 2. Apple drops 20 new Core ML models and 4 datasets for on-device Apps.

Toyota - PUNYO 1.0 humanoid AI Robot learns 100+ skills fast.

Bayer - Crop Science division turns to AI to fight herbicide resistance.

Closed Deals:

FSD Trucks - Toronto startup Waabi raised a $200M Series B co-led by Uber and Khosla, with NVIDIA, Volvo, Porsche, Scania and more joining.

Online Psychiatry Services - New York startup Talkiatry raised a $130M Series C in equity and debt led by a16z, with support from Perceptive.

AI Carbon Capture - "Godfather of AI" Geoffrey Hinton and Max Welling back Cambridge, MA. AI carbon capture startup CuspAI as it emerges from stealth with a $30M seed led by Hoxton, with Basis Set and Lightspeed.

Deals to Watch:

Factory - San Fran Autonomous SWE ‘Droids’ startup Factory doubled its client base and performed well on AI coding benchmarks. Sequoia led its $15M Series A at $120M backed by Lux Capital and Mantis VC.

Safe Superintelligence Inc - Ex-OpenAI chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, YC partner Daniel Gross, & Daniel Levy launch “the world’s first straight-shot SSI lab”, with one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence.

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∆ Tech in the News

$50M for Gemini Victims - The New York AG recovered $50M from the crypto platform to repay investors defrauded in its Gemini Earn program.

Delayed Recall - Microsoft will delay the roll-out of its "Recall" AI usage tracking tool with its new AI PCs next week amid widespread privacy concerns, opting instead for limited user testing.

No to AI Arms Race - Pope Francis called for a ban on 'lethal autonomous weapons' at the G7 summit in Italy.

aUSDT - Tether, the world's largest stablecoin provider, launched a new synthetic USD stablecoin backed by gold on the Ethereum blockchain.

DOJ vs Adobe - The DOJ filed a lawsuit alleging Adobe deceives users by hiding early-termination fees and making it hard to cancel subscriptions.

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The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week

Is Your Data Safe With OpenAI?

In the space of a week, two major revelations have prompted many to seriously question the direction OpenAI is taking. First, the company announced the addition of former NSA Director reality Paul Nakasone to its board. Then news leaked that the company is considering restructuring to adopt a for-profit model outside of the control of its nonprofit board.

NSAi?

Former NSA employee and domestic mass surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden has called Nakasone’s hiring a mask off moment. “They've gone full mask off: do not ever trust OpenAI or its products, there's only one reason for appointing an NSA director to your board. This is a willful, calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on earth. You've been warned."

So why did they bring him on? The official statement from board chair Bret Taylor was that his “unparalleled experience in areas like cybersecurity will help guide OpenAI in achieving its mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." OK sounds legit right? But bear in mind this guy’s track record. Nakasone was in charge of mass surveillance at the NSA when the NSA outsourced illegal mass spying against Americans to British spy agencies to circumvent US constitutional protections. That move effectively endrun the constitution to give the NSA unlimited spying access to US networks to surveil US citizens. That doesn’t inspire a lot of trust.

Data Gold Rush

Snowden isn’t alone in his critique of this move. Johns Hopkins University cryptography professor Matthew Green tweeted, "I do think that the biggest application of AI is going to be mass population surveillance, so bringing the former head of the NSA into OpenAI has some solid logic behind it.” As Green has also said, putting the former NSA head (and retired general) on the board essentially signals that OpenAI is in fact open to doing business with the intelligence community and Department of Defence. In other words, open to giving the government access to your AI activity.

Not so Open

But its OK because OpenAI has that nonprofit mission of “ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity" right? Ah, maybe not for long. The company has confirmed the nonprofit is “core to our mission and will continue to exist.” Cool story, but its power to protect users’ rights will be exactly zero if users’ AI activity is routed through an entirely separate for-profit entity with all the shareholder and profit motive obligations that entails. The AI era is radically reshaping our online world and has reset the boundaries on data privacy and surveillance law. Companies will need to be increasingly careful about who they entrust their valuable AI-related data to moving forward.

“The intersection of AI with the ocean of mass surveillance data that's been building up over the past two decades is going to put truly terrible powers in the hands of an unaccountable few.”

— Edward Snowden, NSA whistleblower and Privacy advocate

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Job Candidates (For Employers)

Request an intro to candidates - jobs@thetech.buzz

1. Lockheed Martin Software Engineer, ex-Rutgers Junior Full Stack Developer. Secret clearance. Expertise in C++, PHP, SQL. Rutgers BA in Computer Science.

2. Meta Technical Recruiter for ML/AI roles, 98% candidate response rate, 70% hire rate. Led training for 135 sourcers.

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

Request an intro to founders - invest@thetech.buzz

1. Cannabis/Hemp E-comm - New York - The first AI-Powered end-to-end online platform for the hemp industry - 2,000% growth in 2 years. (Seed+)

2. AI Agent Employees - New York - Sophisticated workflow automation for businesses, by a previously-exited founder. Building towards fully autonomous organizations. Backed by Tribe & Kenetic, rolling out to extensive waitlist. (Seed)

3. Outbound B2B Campaign AI Co-Pilot - Lexington, MA - Turn any CRM into an AI optimized sales agent for personalized customer campaigns. Founder previous exit to PE. Notable Angel on board. Top Hubspot App. Post revenue. (Seed)

Trending Tools and Buzzy Tech

Tools

Arc - “Live Calendar” integrates with G-Cal so you never miss appointments.

LinkedIn - AI-drafted cover letters + AI job search + résumé review.

NVIDIA - Nemotron o-s model generates synthetic LLM training data.

Tech

MIT - 1. Portable cancer scanner | 2. 3D brain mapping tech platform.

Stanford - 'HumanPlus' real-time humanoid cloning of human motion.

Harvard/DeepMind - Neuroscientists create artificial brain in virtual rat.

Closed Deals:

Japan’s OpenAI - Tokyo foundational AI LLM startup Sakana AI raised ~$100M at a $1B led by NEA, Khosla Ventures, and Lux Capital.

AI Medicinal Plant Discovery - Boulder biotech startup Enveda Biosciences raised a $55M Series B2 from Microsoft, The Nature Conservancy, and others. This brings its total raised to date to $230M.

Deals to Watch:

SuSea Inc. - The Palo Alto AI search engine startup behind You.com is closing in on raising $50M Series B at $700-$900M to enter the AI Assistant market. It has 1B+ queries to date, and ARR is up 5x since Jan.

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∆ Tech in the News

Apple #1 - Apple reclaimed the world's most valuable company title from Microsoft on Wednesday after finally revealing its generative AI plans.

$3.4B Annualized Revenue - OpenAI has doubled revenue to a $3.4B run rate since December, indicating accelerated growth in its AI tool sales.

Zero Hedges - Major companies like Apple are rushing to buy back stocks ahead of today’s blackout period, which could trigger a bearish downturn.

Musk Legal - 1. Tesla shareholders approved the CEO’s pay package. | 2. Elon sued over Tesla board allowing him to start xAI (claiming it’s a competing company.) | 3. Musk withdrew his lawsuit against OpenAI.

Game On - GameStop raised $2.14B through its at-the-market equity offering of 75M shares. A major short position was also closed this week.

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The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week

AlphaSense Pioneers AI in Financial Services

AlphaSense is a leading market intelligence and search platform. This week’s $650M raise valuing it at $4B is a big deal. It positions AlphaSense as one of the leading AI startups in the burgeoning market research field. It also meant AlphaSense was able to acquire Chicago-based expert research and data company, Tegus for $930M. This deal was important because Tegus holds extensive expert research and financial data on over 35,000 public and private companies across industries.

This data trove combined with AlphaSense's AI-driven market intel will offer financial professionals and investors more comprehensive tailored insights and enhanced research capabilities to help them make more informed decisions with greater speed and confidence.

How it Help Companies

AlphaSense CEO Jack Kokko claims its clients include the majority of the S&P 500 companies, leading banks, investment firms, and consultancies. Clients include German software firm SAP SE, industrial giant 3M, and Google. The addition of Tegus’ client roster will broaden this base even further. With the Tegus deal, users will gain new and enhanced features:

• Expanded private company coverage and content types;

• 100,000+ enhanced expert call transcripts across sectors;

• Improved financial data and modeling including financials, KPIs, and fully drivable models for 4,000+ public companies.

• Streamlined access to SEC and other critical company filings.

• Enhanced GenAI interactions with company transcripts and content.

Big Backers

The AlphaSense round was co-led by investment firms Viking Global and BDT & MSD Partners, with participation from J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, CapitalG (Alphabet's independent growth fund) and Goldman Sachs Alternatives. It almost doubles the company’s $2.5B valuation at its $150M Series E in September 2023. AlphaSense surpassed $200M in ARR in April this year.

Up and Comer

Missed AlphaSense? Check out Brightwave. This New York/Boulder AI financial research assistant startup just raised a $6M seed round backed by angel investors, including OpenAI, Databricks, Uber and LinkedIn execs. Brightwave's platform provides exec summaries, long-form narratives, and deep analysis of financial reports. The company plans to expand its operations and, like AlphaSense, invest in additional data sources. It claims its customer base already includes firms with over $120B in AUM.

“Chat is not enough for finance, Brightwave acts as a thought partner. It checks its work and allows pros to get up to speed quickly on new sectors, and go deep on the topics they know best.”

— Mike Conover, CEO of Brightwave

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Job Candidates (For Employers)

Request an intro to candidates - jobs@thetech.buzz

1. Lockheed Martin Software Engineer, ex-Rutgers Junior Full Stack Developer. Secret clearance. Expertise in C++, PHP, SQL. Rutgers BA in Computer Science.

2. Meta Technical Recruiter for ML/AI roles, 98% candidate response rate, 70% hire rate. Led training for 135 sourcers.

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

Request an intro to founders - invest@thetech.buzz

1. Multilingual Messaging Portal - Sydney, AU - Global, AWS-backed SaaS platform for businesses to communicate with clients without language barriers. $300k secured, seeking $650k for U.S. expansion. (Series A)

2. AI Agent Employees - New York - Sophisticated workflow automation for businesses, by a previously-exited founder. Building towards fully autonomous organizations. Backed by Tribe & Kenetic, rolling out to extensive waitlist.

3. Outbound B2B Campaign AI Co-Pilot - Lexington, MA - Turn any CRM into an AI optimized sales agent for personalized customer campaigns. Founder previous exit to PE. Notable Angel on board. Top Hubspot App. Post revenue. (Seed)

Trending Tools and Buzzy Tech

Tools

Luma Labs - Dream Machine now generates quality, 5-sec video clips.

Yahoo - Desktop app + Yahoo News + Mail get AI-powered features.

WhatsApp - Screen sharing + speaker spotlight + 32-person group calls.

Tech

Unigrid - Raised $12M Series A to explore sodium-ion battery alternatives.

Amazon - Offers $230M in AWS credits to AI startups to power products.

Chips Update - 1. Cerebras Giant Chips challenge supercomputers speed. | 2. Samsung custom AI Chips + ‘turnkey’ AI chip solutions platform.

Closed Deals:

3x Since December - French Foundational AI startup Mistral AI raised a $640M Series B at a $6.2B valuation led by General Catalyst, with a16z, Lightspeed, Nvidia, Samsung, Cisco, and IBM all chipping in.

Cruise Control - GM put down another $850M on autonomous vehicle subsidiary Cruise despite saying it would cut back on funding it this year.

Deals to Watch:

Foundation Robotics Labs - Humanoid robotics startup co-founded by Synapse CEO Sankaet Pathak, Tribe Capital CEO Arjun Sethi, and Cobalt Robotics’ co-founder Mike LeBlancis is closing in on an $11M seed round.

Tenstorrent - Samsung is leading a $300M round into Canadian AI chip startup Tenstorrent at $2B pre-money. CEO Jim Keller is an ex Apple, Tesla veteran. Manufacturing partner LG, and Fidelity, & Hyundai are also joining.

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∆ Tech in the News

Trump Talks Tech - Trump raised $12M at a San Fran tech fundraiser hosted by VCs/podcasters David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya covering AI and deep fakes and pitching himself as a 'crypto president'.

"Common Sense Safety Standards" - The tech industry opposes a California bill that requires AI companies to report safety tests and add a kill switch for their advanced models. Critics believe it will stifle innovation.

Musk Pay Saga - Two major shareholders revealed they will vote against Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s $56B pay package in Thursday’s vote on the matter.

Back-Door - Elon Musk threatened to ban Apple devices at his companies if it integrates OpenAI into its OS, citing privacy and security concerns.

Training Data - Despite strict EU data privacy laws, Meta plans to use public social media posts from its European users to train its LLMs.

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The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week

Apple Brings OS-based AI to Billions!

‘Apple Intelligence’ looks set to test regular people's appetite for AI. It’s a game-changer because it is the first free AI service integrated into a major mobile operating system used by billions of loyal users globally. CEO Tim Cook stressed that this tech goes beyond AI calling it “personal intelligence”, and “the next big step for Apple.” It aims to “understand you and be grounded in your personal context.” And because it’s Apple, of course “it has to be built with privacy from the ground up.”

Key WWDC announcement data:

• Apple Intelligence will roll out across iPhones, iPads, and Macs;

• It will use AI models developed in-house;

• Core tasks will use on-device processing on Apple's server chips;

• A partnership with OpenAI for more complex cloud-based tasks;

• A "private" cloud-based system called Private Cloud Compute;

• Will arrive in updated iOS18 this fall on iPhone 15 Pro series, & iPad and Mac with M1 chips and later.

What is Apple Intelligence?

AI Features Apple is launching include:

• Transcribe phone calls, summarize texts, email, docs, and notes;

• AI-upgraded Siri to execute tasks in emails, calendar, photos, apps;

• “Safari Highlights” summarizes content in web pages;

• Automatic email and text responses;

• OpenAI-powered chatGPT-4o for more complex AI tasks;

• AI-created custom emojis;

• Voice memo transcription, photo retouching, and suggested replies to emails and messages.

The Big Picture

Overall Apple appears to have done well at balancing desire for more AI power than it was ready to offer on-device with a privacy -centric approach. The PCC solution allows it to build secure, trustworthy specialized cloud server hardware in its own data centers to “outsource” heavy AI tasks to. This isn’t an easy task, but Apple is using innovation and best practice to achieve it. The test will be if users trust it, and if these tools become widely used and actually “practical” in reality rather than name.

“This is the LLM moment for the ages, LLMs built into the OS for billions of people… Agentic LLMs with my personal context, will unlock how people use AI with on device processing!

— Alex Volkov (Thursd/AI)

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Job Candidates (For Employers)

Request an intro to candidates - jobs@thetech.buzz

1. Lockheed Martin Software Engineer, ex-Rutgers Junior Full Stack Developer. Secret clearance. Expertise in C++, PHP, SQL. Rutgers BA in Computer Science.

2. Meta Technical Recruiter for ML/AI roles, 98% candidate response rate, 70% hire rate. Led training for 135 sourcers.

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

Request an intro to founders - invest@thetech.buzz

1. Multilingual Messaging Portal - Sydney, AU - Global, AWS-backed SaaS platform for businesses to communicate with clients without language barriers. $300k secured, seeking $650k for U.S. expansion. (Series A)

2. AI Agent Employees - New York - Sophisticated workflow automation for businesses, by a previously-exited founder. Building towards fully autonomous organizations. Backed by Tribe & Kenetic, rolling out to extensive waitlist.

3. Outbound B2B Campaign AI Co-Pilot - Lexington, MA - Turn any CRM into an AI optimized sales agent for personalized customer campaigns. Founder previous exit to PE. Notable Angel on board. Top Hubspot App. Post revenue. (Seed)

Trending Tools and Buzzy Tech

Tools

Apple - VisionOS can now make spatial photos out of 3D images.

Nokia - "Immersive audio and video" 3D spatial sound calling on cellular.

xAI - Grok may launch new image generation and web search capabilities.

Tech

Google - SurfPerch AI tool processes data to monitor coral reef health.

Smell-bot - Robot dog 'sniffs' hazardous gases in inaccessible areas.

OpenCRISPR-1 - AI Gene Editing to modify human DNA in cancer therapy.

Closed Deals:

3D-Printed Orthopedic Implants - Medtech startup Restor3d raised $70M including a $55M Series A led by Summers Value Partners and a $15M debt facility from Trinity Capital.

Deals to Watch:

[IPO] Shein - The China-founded fast fashion giant eyes an IPO with 40% revenue growth and doubled net profit in 2023, with sales of $32.2B.

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∆ Tech in the News

#2 Company Globally - Nvidia's market cap topped $3T to surpass Apple as the world's second most valuable company behind Microsoft’s $3.15T.

AI Antitrust - The FTC and DOJ will launch an investigation into Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia over possible antitrust violations. 

AI ‘Right to Warn’ - Insiders from top AI firms signed an open letter urging more transparency and protections for AI whistleblowers.

Space Race - 1. Boeing's new Starliner capsule docked at the ISS with two astronauts & 760 lb of cargo. | 2. SpaceX successfully test-flew and landed its Starship rocket and booster on Thursday.

First Cuts - The European Central Bank (ECB) cut its key interest rate by 0.25%, in its first rate cut since 2019 as inflation in the eurozone cools.

The Texas Stock Exchange - The NYSE and Nasdaq rival had BlackRock and Citadel backing to raise ~$120M and plans to file with the SEC this year.

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The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week

A Meme Stock Influencer Billionaire?

Meme stock season is back as Youtuber Keith Gill aka Roaring Kitty returns to social media after a three-year hiatus, sparking a massive short-squeezing rally. Gill was prominent in the frenzy on GameStop and other meme stocks in 2021, and on Sunday posted a cryptic image on X hinting at his pending livestreaming return, followed up by two more cryptic posts on Monday.

This sparked speculation and a surge in trading activity, with GameStop's shares jumping over 70% on Monday to more than $30. $GME is now above $65, up over 500% since since May 1st. The KobeissiLetter calculates Gill is set to be a billionaire if $GME opens at or above current levels today, with shares worth ~$325M and options worth ~$700M for a combined ~$1 billion - an $850 million gain on his position. $GME, short sellers on the other hand it calculates have lost $2.1 billion today and counting.

Party Like it’s 2021

This resurgence echoes the meme stock mania of 2021 when Gill and other influencers caused havoc for hedge funds short-selling companies like GameStop with challenging fundamentals. It highlights the growing influence of retail investors in the financial markets with the combination of easier access through platforms like Robinhood, with the viral nature of social media and the “meme culture” of crypto trading. Speaking of crypto, a Solana-based purely meme token (ie not a derivative), GME, is up over 3,000% since mid-May and has a $120M market capitalization.

Game Over?

The 2021 meme stock season led to increased regulatory and legislative interest, with the SEC monitoring the situation closely. It also had a direct impact on Robinhood, with market volatility leading to temporary trading halts and restrictions on meme stocks, which sparked outrage among retail investors and led to further scrutiny of trading platforms' practices. The WSJ reported last week that E*Trade was considering banning Gill amid concerns his social media actions could amount to market manipulation.

So despite 2021’s discussions about market manipulation and the need for regulatory changes, here we are three years later and nothing seems to have changed. E*Trade has already “halted” trading on $GME a number of times, and no changes seem to have been made to protect retail investors’ rights.

“The only logical outcome here is he becomes a Billionaire, gets arrested for market manipulation, riots break out everywhere, the FED cut rates to zero, New President Trump gives him a presidential pardon, he becomes new FED chairman.”

— Anon, X Post

Go Premium to get the Perplexity AI DEEP DIVE featuring:

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Share The Tech Buzz

Job Candidates (For Employers)

Request an intro to candidates - jobs@thetech.buzz

1. Lockheed Martin Software Engineer, ex-Rutgers Junior Full Stack Developer. Secret clearance. Expertise in C++, PHP, SQL. Rutgers BA in Computer Science.

2. Meta Technical Recruiter for ML/AI roles, 98% candidate response rate, 70% hire rate. Led training for 135 sourcers.

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

Request an intro to founders - invest@thetech.buzz

1. Multilingual Messaging Portal - Sydney, AU - Global, AWS-backed SaaS platform for businesses to communicate with clients without language barriers. $300k secured, seeking $650k for U.S. expansion. (Series A)

2. AI Agent Employees - New York - Sophisticated workflow automation for businesses, by a previously-exited founder. Building towards fully autonomous organizations. Backed by Tribe & Kenetic, rolling out to extensive waitlist.

3. Outbound B2B Campaign AI Co-Pilot - Lexington, MA - Turn any CRM into an AI optimized sales agent for personalized customer campaigns. Founder previous exit to PE. Notable Angel on board. Top Hubspot App. Post revenue. (Seed)

Trending Tools and Buzzy Tech

Tools

Asana - "AI teammates" automate work tasks, improve productivity.

Zoom - Wants to create AI "digital twins" to attend meetings for you.

X - New ‘video-only’ feed to target TikTok, Youtube, Reels

Meta - To test Whatsapp AI assistant for businesses to sell products.

Tech

World's Largest Supercomputer - xAI’s unit to be located in Memphis.

Antibiotic Resistance - AI model predicts ~1M new potential antibiotics.

Humane - Recalled its AI Pin device’s charging case due to fire safety risk.

Closed Deals:

$5B Valuation - Canadian Enterprise AI startup Cohere raised $450M  from Nvidia, Salesforce, Cisco, & Canadian pension fund PSP Investments.

Laser Nuclear Fusion - Denver startup Xcimer Energy raised a $100M Series A backed by Breakthrough Energy, Prelude, & Emerson Collective.

Deals to Watch:

ByteDance - Aims to raise between $700M - $800M for its online auto marketplace business, Dongchedi, ahead of an IPO. The round is led by HongShan (fka Sequoia Capital China) joined by KKR and General Atlantic.

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4. Unlimited warm introductions to founders and job candidates

5. Up to 50% OFF advertising in The Tech Buzz

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∆ Tech in the News

Musk v SEC - Elon Musk agreed to testify in the SEC investigation of whether his 2022 Twitter acquisition broke securities laws.

Dark Side - China's Chang'e-6 lander successfully touched down at the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the far side of the moon on Sunday.

Swedish AI Deal - Microsoft will invest $3.2B to expand its AI and cloud infrastructure in Sweden powered by 20k GPUs with Nvidia & AMD chips.

xxxAI - Elon Musk’s X platform will now allow pornography, including AI-generated porn, so long as it is labelled and “consensually produced”.

Crypto Bytes - 1. Pres. Biden vetoed a bill to overturn an SEC policy requiring firms to record customer holdings as liabilities. | 2. State Street is rebuilding its digital assets team, plans to offer crypto custody services.

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The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week

Nvidia’s $100 Trillion AI Industrial Revolution Prediction

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote at Computex 2024 in Taiwan outlined the $100 trillion opportunity being unlocked by AI and accelerated computing in what he calls the "next industrial revolution" that will radically transform every industry globally.

Huang outlined how Nvidia's AI platform spanning silicon, software and services puts it in a unique position to capture value as companies and countries build out the AI infrastructure and applications to drive this economic and social revolution.

A series of announcements demonstrate Nvidia's ambition and momentum to maintain its lead in the market in this transition:

• Another next-gen AI chip architecture Rubin, due in 2025

• A rapid annual update cadence for new AI chip family releases.

• "AI factories" optimized for accelerated computing and AI at scale.

• Transforming manufacturing with AI and Digital Twins - by partnering to build robotic factories and AI-optimized operations.

The Competition

Nvidia rival AMD also announced new AI chips for data centers and PCs and stated AI is its "number one priority." AMD will adopt an annual update cycle for its advanced accelerators with its next update, the Instinct MI325X, due later this year. AMD's Ryzen processors will also launch in "Copilot+" AI PCs from Microsoft, HP, Lenovo, and Asus.

The CEO of British chip firm Arm aims to capture 50% of the Windows PC market in five years as Microsoft and other hardware partners will also tap Arm’s tech for their upcoming AI PCs. Arm has already seen success from Apple’s use of its designs in its "M Series" processors proving out its approach with its long battery life and rapid performance.

AI is Good for Business

BofA predicts the semiconductor bull run will peak in mid-2026 and will benefit three major industry themes: cloud computing, cars, & complexity. Nvidia led global companies in market cap gains in May, buoyed by strong revenue forecasts that reinforced investor confidence in demand. AMD expects AI chip sales to hit $4B this year, $500M over previous estimates.

While other companies may be taking a share of the PC market, Nvidia is winning the 3D chess game by positioning itself as an integral part of the integration of AI into the physical world with its multi-faceted “Three S” Silicon, Software, services approach and Industrial Revolution ambition. BofA’s other top picks to leverage the coming industrial semiconductor surge include Broadcom, NXP Semiconductors, and KLA Corp.

“The days of millions of GPU data centers are coming.”

— Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO

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Job Candidates (For Employers)

Request an intro to candidates - jobs@thetech.buzz

1. Lockheed Martin Software Engineer, ex-Rutgers Junior Full Stack Developer. Secret clearance. Expertise in C++, PHP, SQL. Rutgers BA in Computer Science.

2. Meta Technical Recruiter for ML/AI roles, 98% candidate response rate, 70% hire rate. Led training for 135 sourcers.

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

Request an intro to founders - invest@thetech.buzz

1. Multilingual Messaging Portal - Sydney, AU - Global, AWS-backed SaaS platform for businesses to communicate with clients without language barriers. $300k secured, seeking $650k for U.S. expansion. (Series A)

2. AI Agent Employees - New York - Sophisticated workflow automation for businesses, by a previously-exited founder. Building towards fully autonomous organizations. Backed by Tribe & Kenetic, rolling out to extensive waitlist.

3. Outbound B2B Campaign AI Co-Pilot - Lexington, MA - Turn any CRM into an AI optimized sales agent for personalized customer campaigns. Founder previous exit to PE. Notable Angel on board. Top Hubspot App. Post revenue. (Seed)

Trending Tools and Buzzy Tech

Tools

Third Thumb - 3D-printed robotic wearable thumb controlled by the toes.

ElevenLabs -  Text to Sound Effects tool generates effects, soundscapes.

Google - Veo video gen tool can generate video from a single image.

SpaceX - Musk plans to launch Starlink Satellite Cellular service this fall.

Tech

Digitizing Smell - AI is working to give computers a sense of smell.

World's 1st Bioprocessor - More efficient processors run on brain cells.

OpenAI - Relaunching robotics team to focus on models over hardware.

Closed Deals:

First Foreign Backer - Leading Chinese AI startup Zhipu AI raised $400M at a $3B valuation. A contribution from Saudi Aramco's venture fund Prosperity7 is the first outside investor to back a major chinese AI firm.

AI Design Concepts - Swiss startup Neural Concept raised a $27M Series B to apply AI to help companies including Airbus, Bosch, & GE etc speed up EV design processes by 75%.

Online Industrial Metals - Atlanta e-commerce marketplace startup Reibus, raised $30M debt & equity from Canaan and Nosara.

Deals to Watch:

Webtoon - LA Online Comics Platform turned profitable in Q1 and grew revenue by 5% with 170M MAU, it revealed in a recent U.S. IPO filing.

Perplexity - The leading AI Search startup is in talks to raise $250M led by Bessemer at $3B post-money, which is 3x higher than its last valuation.

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Paying members get access to the rest of this post and other subscriber-only content and more. Subscribers get:

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2. Access to exclusive content

3. Unlimited access to ‘Open Deals’ & ‘Startup Directory’

4. Unlimited warm introductions to founders and job candidates

5. Up to 50% OFF advertising in The Tech Buzz

6. 0% management fee on Buzz Capital syndicate investments

Read more

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∆ Tech in the News

‘Chip Sovereignty.’ - Beijing has raised a $47.5B fund to boost its domestic semiconductor industry in response to US sanctions and subsidies. 

Agent Siri - Apple plans to improve Siri in 2025 with advanced AI, allowing app control via voice commands.

'Extended Reality Ecosystem' - Google and augmented reality (AR) startup Magic Leap are partnering to increase immersive experiences.  

Amazon Air - The FAA approved the Prime Air drone program to operate beyond the pilot's line of sight, opening up US delivery expansion.

Crypto Update - 1. Mastercard launches Crypto Credential P2P pilot. | 2. PayPal USD stablecoin goes live on Solana. | 3. BlackRock's ETF becomes the largest bitcoin fund globally with $20B AUM.

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The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week

PWC’s OpenAI Enterprise Deal… is it worth it?

‘Big four’ accounting firm stalwart PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) just signed a first-of-its-kind deal with OpenAI to resell ChatGPT Enterprise globally as part of its $1B commitment to AI. The multinational professional service consultancy will offer Enterprise to its 100,000+ US and UK staff making them OpenAI’s largest customer. The tools will assist the team to review tax returns, generate proposal responses, assist with software development, monitor dashboards, compose reports and more.

Moreover, PwC can now sell the gen AI Enterprise service to its 178,707+ clients globally, and upsell its own customized AI services for accounting and business use. PwC will develop custom GPTs based on OpenAI models to complement its auditing, taxation, and consulting services.

Why Would Companies Choose PwC?

• Extensive experience in adopting AI across its own internal operations (PwC claims it has identified over 3,000 AI use cases.)

• Experienced business consultants will help them plan, ideate, and make a roadmap for effective AI use.

• Holistic approach and ability to leverage deep industry experience

• OpenAI’s enterprise LLM is the most powerful on the market to date

What is Enterprise AI?

ChatGPT Enterprise launched in 2023 and is tailored toward large business users with “enterprise-grade security,” data privacy, unlimited access to GPT-4, extended context windows, customization options, and company oversight capabilities. OpenAI claims to have 600,000+ enterprise clients including 93% of the Fortune 500. Other leading rivals include Cohere, Anthropic’s Scale AI partnership, Microsoft Azure’s Copilot service, and Amazon Bedrock.

Is it Worth it?

Based on known ChatGPT Enterprise rates, PwC is likely shelling out tens of millions a year and its certainly arguable that for this amount it could have built its own custom services internally using open-source models. However, this is clearly a strategic move to position itself alongside likely AI winners in OpenAI. Further, the potential revenue boost from reselling and upselling custom AI services to clients may pay for the initial outlay… and some. PwC isn’t alone in thinking this way. Rival firm Accenture partnered with Cohere in March to bring its LLMs and search capabilities to enterprises.

“We have our own customer success team that supports customers in the deployment of their GenAI solutions, but we have limited capacity, that’s really where the partner ecosystem comes into play.”

— Richard Hasslacher, Head of alliances & partnerships, OpenAI.

Go Premium to get the Perplexity AI DEEP DIVE featuring:

• Full AI search market analysis

• Full Business case and competition comparison

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Share The Tech Buzz

Job Candidates (For Employers)

Request an intro to candidates - jobs@thetech.buzz

1. Lockheed Martin Software Engineer, ex-Rutgers Junior Full Stack Developer. Secret clearance. Expertise in C++, PHP, SQL. Rutgers BA in Computer Science.

2. Meta Technical Recruiter for ML/AI roles, 98% candidate response rate, 70% hire rate. Led training for 135 sourcers.

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

Request an intro to founders - invest@thetech.buzz

1. Multilingual Messaging Portal - Sydney, AU - Global, AWS-backed SaaS platform for businesses to communicate with clients without language barriers. $300k secured, seeking $650k for U.S. expansion. (Series A)

2. AI Agent Employees - New York - Sophisticated workflow automation for businesses, by a previously-exited founder. Building towards fully autonomous organizations. Backed by Tribe & Kenetic, rolling out to extensive waitlist.

3. Outbound B2B Campaign AI Co-Pilot - Lexington, MA - Turn any CRM into an AI optimized sales agent for personalized customer campaigns. Founder previous exit to PE. Notable Angel on board. Top Hubspot App. Post revenue. (Seed)

Trending Tools and Buzzy Tech

Tools

Mistral AI - Codestral code-generating model trained in 80+ languages.

Google - New suite Gemini AI features for $350 Chromebook Plus laptops.

Skej - AI assistant loops into emails/calendar to schedule your meetings.

Tech

Metafuels AG - Methanol-to-jet synthetic jet fuel tech for airline emissions.

Precision Neuroscience - Neuralink rival claims record 4,096 electrodes.

China - Investing $830M+ in next-gen solid-state battery tech R&D.

Closed Deals:

Cooling for AI Chips - San Jose air-jet electronics cooling tech startup Frore Systems raised an $80M Series C led by Fidelity, with Prosperity7, Mayfield, Qualcomm Ventures, Stepstone, MVP, Addition, and Alumni.

B2B Construction Materials Marketplace - Indian startup Infra.market raised $50M at a $2.5B pmv to leverage tech to improve quality and supply chain visibility.

Deals to Watch:

Low-code Fintech - BlackRock led Romania-founded banking modernization software startup FintechOS’s $60M Series B extension. It saw 40% y-o-y revenue growth in ‘23 and expects to be in profit in H1 ‘24.

Perplexity - The leading AI Search startup is in talks to raise $250M led by Bessemer at $3B post-money, which is 3x higher than its last valuation.

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∆ Tech in the News

Fintech Collapse - VC-backed banking-as-a-service startup Synapse is liquidating under Chapter 7, severely impacting 10 Million customers and other fintech startups like Copper, Juno and Mainvest.

Silk Road Pardon - Donald Trump pledged to commute Silk Road creator, Ross Ulbricht’s life sentence on Day 1 of his new term.

‘Project Greymatter’ - Apple will focus on “Practical AI Tools” for core apps like Safari, Photos, and Notes at June’s WWDC.

Manual Overview - Google continues to manually remove AI Overviews that offer misinformation on specific searches as they emerge.

Nuclear AI - Sam Altman-backed nuclear startup Oklo signed a contract to supply 100MW to power Hyperscale Wyoming’s AI data center.

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The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week

xAI’s $6B AGI Supercomputer Mission

Elon Musk let slip on Twitter that he predicts Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will be reached by ‘next year’ in response to a post from Google’s Logan Kilpatrick. He also just raised one of the biggest AI funding rounds ever, with $6B for xAI, and announced plans for a new AI supercomputer. Does he know something we don’t? Sure, Musk has a history of failing to meet Tesla delivery deadlines, but it seems xAI is going all-in on reaching AGI before rivals OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind.

$24 Billion Valuation!

xAI just announced it has raised a $6B Series B funding round from Sequoia, Valor, Lightspeed, and Andreessen Horowitz, at a huge pre-money valuation of $18B. Still, compared to OpenAI’s $86B valuation, there is a lot of upside room for xAI. xAI is led by former DeepMind, Microsoft, and Tesla Execs, and will use the funds to bring initial products like Grok 2.0 to market, build advanced AI infrastructure, and accelerate R&D.

‘Gigafactory of Compute’

To further this infrastructure mission, Musk also announced plans for a massive xAI ‘Gigafactory of Compute’ supercomputer with 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. This would be at least 4x larger than the biggest AI clusters currently, supercharging the compute power of its products like the Grok 2.0 chatbot currently in training. Musk aims to have the supercomputer operational by Fall 2025. Oracle is seen as a potential partner with news the companies are negotiating a $10B multi-year cloud server lease deal.

xAI’s ’Work Optional’ OpenSource Vision

xAI’s vision to "connect the digital and physical worlds" and integrate with Musk's other companies hints at the scale Musk is working on. Integrating Tesla’s Robotaxi and Optimus home robots, the X ‘Everything App’ with banking, calling, social media, betting, Neuralink, SpaceX and more, xAI could easily become the most utilised AI company globally. Musk also said last week that the rise of AI will make all jobs ‘optional’, with the combination of AI and robots providing ‘any goods and services you want’.

And for the Musk naysayers, xAI is far more “open” and transparent than OpenAI or even Meta. xAI released an open-source version of Grok earlier this year. On Sunday, Musk doubled down on this OS mission in a Q&A, with a huge commitment to always releasing an AI model that beats the best open source model for the benefit of the AI community.

“Probably none of us will have a job, AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want… I do think there’s perhaps still a role for humans in this – in that we may give AI meaning…”

— Elon Musk, xAI Founder, CEO

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Job Candidates (For Employers)

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1. Lockheed Martin Software Engineer, ex-Rutgers Junior Full Stack Developer. Secret clearance. Expertise in C++, PHP, SQL. Rutgers BA in Computer Science.

2. Meta Technical Recruiter for ML/AI roles, 98% candidate response rate, 70% hire rate. Led training for 135 sourcers.

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

Request an intro to founders - invest@thetech.buzz

1. Multilingual Messaging Portal - Sydney, AU - Global, AWS-backed SaaS platform for businesses to communicate with clients without language barriers. $300k secured, seeking $650k for U.S. expansion. (Series A)

2. AI Agent Employees - New York - Sophisticated workflow automation for businesses, by a previously-exited founder. Building towards fully autonomous organizations. Backed by Tribe & Kenetic, rolling out to extensive waitlist.

3. Outbound B2B Campaign AI Co-Pilot - Lexington, MA - Turn any CRM into an AI optimized sales agent for personalized customer campaigns. Founder previous exit to PE. Notable Angel on board. Top Hubspot App. Post revenue. (Seed)

Trending Tools and Buzzy Tech

Tools

Iyo - Google spinout’s Bluetooth GenAI earbuds out this winter for $599.

Canva - Radical AI and UX overhaul aims to destroy Office & Workspace.

AWS x Hugging Face - Custom Inferentia2 AI chip enables os models.

Suno - v3.5 will let you generate longer songs with specific sounds.

Tech

Mastercard - Update integrates AI pattern-ID into fraud-prediction tech.

Warp Speed - Possible to build physical warp drive within rules of physics.

Unitree G1 - 4'2" tall foldable humanoid robot for just $16k.

Synthetic Diamonds - Scientists grow diamonds from scratch in 15 mins.

Closed Deals:

SaaS ID Management - San Francisco software startup Lumos raised a $35M Series B led by Scale VPs with support from a16z, Harpoon Ventures, & Neo.

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∆ Tech in the News

ETH ETFs - The SEC has approved Spot Ethereum ETF trading in an abrupt policy about-face after previously considering ETH to be a security.

Limiting Political Deepfakes - The FCC proposed that political ads on radio and TV be required to disclose any AI-generated content they use.

$2.3T Market Cap - Nvidia’s Q2 earnings beat estimates with a $14.9B profit and it forecasts strong growth of 107% more sales than Q3 2023.

Biden vs Crypto - The Administration opposes an industry-backed GOP-driven bill to establish a new legal framework for cryptocurrencies.

AI Acts - As the EU AI Act comes into force, the U.S. Congress prepares to draft its AI Act, with industry players ramping up DC lobbying efforts.

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The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week

$4B in AI Startup Sales: Exit Via the Thrift Shop

Four well-funded AI startups are exploring sale options after experiencing low revenue, high costs and competition from tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

Adept AI Agents

Former OpenAI/Google AI dev-founded AI Agent R&D lab startup Adept is in talks with Meta and others over a sale or strategic partnership. Adept has raised $413.9M to date, most recently a $350M Series B in Feb 2023 at $1B. However, it can’t help that this month OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Microsoft’s Copilot Agents and Google’s Project Astra AI agent/digital assistant apps all landed.

Meta hasn’t yet to announce AI agents, so this deal makes sense. Adept has strong fundamentals and team with a solid tech research base. The founders are credited in the development of the crucial AI transformer architecture, first proposed in 2017. Adept will continue to build on this architecture to build AI agents, and eventually, they hope, AGI.

Humane’s AI Hardware Fail

The AI wearable startup is also seeking a buyer, asking for $750M to $1B. This is just weeks after its much-hyped "Ai Pin" launched to poor  reviews. Humane’s issue is more fundamental, with AI rapidly coming on-device via Google’s Pixel and Samsung Galaxy and OpenAI’s partnership with Apple, and Siri 2.0 on the way. With smartphones becoming AI devices, its unclear what role a $699 AI hardware with poor battery life will serve.

Stability AI Mismanagement

Stability helped fund the AI image generator Stable Diffusion. Stability recently raised over $100M from VCs but is now exploring both sale and a lifeline raise from a group of investors. Stability has faced a number of management issues; Three key researchers who developed the tech quit in March. It doesn’t own the SD software creating challenges monetizing it, and it now owes AWS on bills. Then there are accusations its CEO mis-led investors and even ongoing creator copyright legal issues.

The Takeaway

Times are tough for AI startups and many now appear to be targeting “Inflection-like deals” as the best exit option. The problem, Inflection’s exit was not the outcome investors had hoped for as they only barely got their investment back. We expect to see more of this trend as AI consolidates. The companies with strong fundamentals and teams like Adept and Inflection will likely come out better than many others. For every Inflection, there will be many Rekas. The LLM training startup’s talks with previous backer Snowflake on a $1B sale just broke down, making a deal unlikely.

“Unlike models that are trained on text only, we're training it on actions on a computer… we believe this is actually the most practical and safest path to general intelligence”

— David Luan, Co-founder and CEO at Adept

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Job Candidates (For Employers)

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1. Lockheed Martin Software Engineer, ex-Rutgers Junior Full Stack Developer. Secret clearance. Expertise in C++, PHP, SQL. Rutgers BA in Computer Science.

2. Deloitte VP Strategy, ex-FedEx Kinko's Sr Director, ex-Bain Sr Associate Consultant, ex-Goldman Sachs Jr Advisor. Led $25B+ M&A. UCLA Econ BS.

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

Request an intro to founders - invest@thetech.buzz

1. Multilingual Messaging Portal - Sydney, AU - Global, AWS-backed SaaS platform for businesses to communicate with clients without language barriers. $300k secured, seeking $650k for U.S. expansion. (Series A)

2. AI Agent Employees - New York - Sophisticated workflow automation for businesses, by a previously-exited founder. Building towards fully autonomous organizations. Backed by Tribe & Kenetic, rolling out to extensive waitlist.

3. Outbound B2B Campaign AI Co-Pilot - Lexington, MA - Turn any CRM into an AI optimized sales agent for personalized customer campaigns. Founder previous exit to PE. Notable Angel on board. Top Hubspot App. Post revenue. (Seed)

Trending Tools and Buzzy Tech

Tools

Microsoft - 1. Partnered with Truecaller AI phone assistant to filter calls in your own voice. 2. Unveiled Copilot Agents, its AI business assistants.

Perplexity - To visualize search answers with shareable graphs & charts.

Amazon - AI-upgraded Alexa to get conversational voice chat abilities.

Spreadsheet Data Analysis - 1. Google unveils Gemini Spreadsheet tool. 2. OpenAI rolls out ChatGPT data analysis tools.

Tech

SpaceX - Demos starlink-powered direct-to-cellular video calling.

IBM - Open-sources Granite LLMs and partners with Saudi Arabia.

BrainBridge - AI-driven robotic head transplants onto a donor body.

B&B - World 1st hybrid boring-blasting machine - 30% efficient tunnelling.

Closed Deals:

AI Data-Labeling - SF AI data startup Scale AI raised a $1B Series F, doubling its valuation to $13.8B, led by Accel, with Amazon, Meta, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, & more top VCs piling on.

AI-Based Translation - German startup DeepL raised a $300M round at $2B pmv & offers translation services for Nikkei and Zendesk. The deal was led by Index Ventures, with Iconiq Growth pitching in.

Foundation Model Leader - French AI startup H, (formerly Holistic AI) raised a $220M seed from Accel, Amazon, Samsung, and others.

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∆ Tech in the News

Not Her - Scarlett Johansson has lawyered up after OpenAI used a similar voice for the GPT-4o voice assistant after she declined to license hers.

"Proactive Intelligence" - Apple and OpenAI are set to announce at WWDC in June a partnership to bring Chat-GPT tools to iOS 18

Genesis Settles - The Crypto lender agreed to pay up to $2B to investors the New York AG's office alleged were defrauded by its fund managed by the Winklevoss twins.

Going Deeper - The FDA approved Neuralink to implant the brain interface in a second patient. The chip will be implanted deeper to prevent the neural connection threads from retracting as they did last time.

Driving EU AI Growth - Google will invest $1.1B to expand its renewables-powered data center in Finland to drive EU AI business growth.

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The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week

Can AI Make the PC Cool Again? Microsoft Thinks So

AI PCs are the next big thing!! Microsoft is leading this trend via its new "Copilot+ PCs" with built-in AI hardware and minimum spec requirements sufficient to run small multi-modal language models locally. Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo, & Samsung are all launching Copilot+ PCs with Intel and AMD processors with Microsoft predicting 50M units sold over the year. Apple is expected to unveil its own AI-ready series at June’s WWDC event.

So What is an AI PC?

To brand itself as "Copilot+" a PC must have 16GB of RAM, 256GB of SSD storage, and a neural processor capable of powering on-device AI tasks. What sort of abilities are we talking here?

• Inbuilt new version of Copilot Assistant for Windows;

• Upgraded Windows Search to answer requests or perform tasks;

• Recall feature logs every action taken with "photographic memory";

• Recall ensures privacy by processing data locally not in the cloud;

• Copilot+ coaches users in real-time tasks (eg Playing Minecraft).

AI Powering Growth

Market analyst firm Canalys predicts that 19% of all PCs shipped this year will be AI-capable, 60% by 2027, and 100% by 2030. Microsoft will also offer AMD's AI chips through its Azure cloud service, providing an alternative to Nvidia’s GPUs and Google’s TPUs in the data center AI chip market.

What it means for investors: Satya Nadella’s decade as CEO has seen Microsoft 10x its value. He is now betting it all on AI to continue this growth via AI PCs, an OpenAI partnership and backing promising AI startups.

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“When the paradigm shifts, do you have something to contribute? There is no God-given right to exist if you don’t have anything relevant.”

— Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft

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Job Candidates (For Employers)

Request an intro to candidates - jobs@thetech.buzz

1. Lockheed Martin Software Engineer, ex-Rutgers Junior Full Stack Developer. Secret clearance. Expertise in C++, PHP, SQL. Rutgers BA in Computer Science.

2. Deloitte VP Strategy, ex-FedEx Kinko's Sr Director, ex-Bain Sr Associate Consultant, ex-Goldman Sachs Jr Advisor. Led $25B+ M&A. UCLA Econ BS.

3. Software Engineering Leader, providing AI solutions. Ex-StoneRiver Enterprise Architect, Arthur Andersen Sr Manager. Arizona State CS degree.

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

Request an intro to founders - invest@thetech.buzz

1. Multilingual Messaging Portal - Sydney, AU - Global, AWS-backed SaaS platform for businesses to communicate with clients without language barriers. $300k secured, seeking $650k for U.S. expansion. (Series A)

2. Digital Twins - Miami, FL - Applying proprietary digital twinning tech to remote patient monitoring and therapy. Over $1 million revenue projected in 2024. Grants received for DoD applications. Raising $2 million in SAFEs with 25% discount for angels and 20% discount for VCs and family offices.

3. Homepage for Founders and Investors - Irvine, CA - A platform for investors to meet founders and for founders to grow their businesses with access to high-value community members, vendors, securitization tools, and capital. (Seed)

4. AI Agent Employees - New York - Sophisticated workflow automation for businesses, by a previously-exited founder. Building towards fully autonomous organizations. Backed by Tribe & Kenetic, rolling out to extensive waitlist.

5. Outbound B2B Campaign AI Co-Pilot - Lexington, MA - Turn any CRM into an AI optimized sales agent for personalized customer campaigns. Founder previous exit to PE. Notable Angel on board. Top Hubspot App. Post revenue. (Seed)

Trending Tools and Buzzy Tech

Tools

Vertex AI - Google Cloud’s Gemini 1.5 Pro-powered GenAI app dev site.

IDEA Research - DINO 1.5 detects and ID objects in images and videos.

Synthesia/ElevenLabs - Bring natural voices and voice cloning to videos.

Tech

Automated Vehicles - The U.K. approves driverless cars on road by 2026.

Conceivable Life Sciences - Uses robots/AI in the IVF process to save $.

Brain Freeze - Frozen human brain tissue works perfectly when thawed.

$2M Deepfake Scam - UK company suffers one of biggest-ever scams.

Closed Deals:

AI Cloud Infrastructure - Nvidia-backed startup CoreWeave secured a $7.5B debt facility from BlackRock and others, to double its global data centers by year-end. Coatue led a $1.1B equity round this month at $19B.

Collaborative Data Analytics - San Fran computing startup Sigma closed a Series D at $200M at a 60% valuation bump to $1.5B co-led by Avenir Growth and Spark Capital.

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∆ Tech in the News

$32 Billion AI Bill - A bipartisan coalition of senators proposed massive U.S. annual emergency spending on AI to continue outcompeting China.

Major Tariff Hikes - The U.S. announced tariffs on ~$18B worth of Chinese imports, including EVs, semiconductors, batteries, and solar cells.

$10B of AI Compute - Elon Musk's xAI startup is negotiating a $10B multi-year deal to rent cloud server capacity from Oracle.

Build 2024 - Microsoft’s dev conference next week in Seattle could bring new Surface hardware with on-device AI/ML and Copilot AI updates.

Market Highs? - The Nasdaq, Dow, and S&P indexes all hit new records on growing expectations of easing inflation and rate cuts.

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The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week

Google’s Astra is the first “AI-for-everything” agent

At I/O 2024 this week Google announced “Project Astra” a multimodal AI assistant, as it pushes to be a universal assistant integrated into every aspect of our work and home lives. Astra is a prototype AI agent and the bleeding edge of Google’s efforts to infuse autonomous reasoning and action capacity across Search, Gemini Live, and their entire ecosystem. The array of AI features announced was overwhelming, and the boundaries between them are pretty blurred, but Astra showed it is a serious contender in the accelerating digital assistant battle with OpenAI’s GPT-4o.

The main features of the Astra and Gemini Live reveal:

• Can see, hear, and take actions on your behalf

• Can use your phone's camera and audio to analyze environments

• Near real-time conversational AI through video and audio

• Capable of advanced reasoning and recall

• ‘AI teammates’ are agents that can answer questions on emails, meetings, and other data within Workspace.

• May also power a future pair of AR glasses as teased (Samsung?)

• Google Lens visual search tool will enable video footage.

• Astra public access is expected through the Gemini app late 2024

Google’s new Trillium chips are also coming to make it easier for clients to run AI applications based on this tech. The sixth-gen TPU will boast 4.7x better performance than the 5th and is customized to power LLMs. Google is second only to NVIDIA in the AI data center market, but it’s yet to be seen if this upgrade can help close the gap on the latter’s ~80% share.

To enhance Search, Google also rolled out "AI Overviews" to all U.S. Search users, its largest overhaul in years. The feature uses Gemini AI to summarize answers to complex questions at the top of search results. It also unveiled a conversational search chatbot and ‘multi-step reasoning’ to speed up results. Will it be enough to see off challengers like Perplexity?

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“Imagine agents that can see and hear what we do, better understand the context we’re in, and respond quickly, making the pace and quality of interaction feel much more natural.”

— Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google Deepmind

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Job Candidates (For Employers)

Request an intro to candidates - jobs@thetech.buzz

1. Lockheed Martin Software Engineer, ex-Rutgers Junior Full Stack Developer. Secret clearance. Expertise in C++, PHP, SQL. Rutgers BA in Computer Science.

2. Deloitte VP Strategy, ex-FedEx Kinko's Sr Director, ex-Bain Sr Associate Consultant, ex-Goldman Sachs Jr Advisor. Led $25B+ M&A. UCLA Econ BS.

3. Software Engineering Leader, providing AI solutions. Ex-StoneRiver Enterprise Architect, Arthur Andersen Sr Manager. Arizona State CS degree.

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

Request an intro to founders - invest@thetech.buzz

1. Multilingual Messaging Portal - Sydney, AU - Global, AWS-backed SaaS platform for businesses to communicate with clients without language barriers. $300k secured, seeking $650k for U.S. expansion. (Series A)

2. Digital Twins - Miami, FL - Applying proprietary digital twinning tech to remote patient monitoring and therapy. Over $1 million revenue projected in 2024. Grants received for DoD applications. Raising $2 million in SAFEs with 25% discount for angels and 20% discount for VCs and family offices.

3. Homepage for Founders and Investors - Irvine, CA - A platform for investors to meet founders and for founders to grow their businesses with access to high-value community members, vendors, securitization tools, and capital. (Seed)

4. AI Agent Employees - New York - Sophisticated workflow automation for businesses, by a previously-exited founder. Building towards fully autonomous organizations. Backed by Tribe & Kenetic, rolling out to extensive waitlist.

5. Personalized Talent Marketplace - Delaware - Hiring platform with a focus on personalization and tailored guidance through an AI feature set. Founder experienced in recruiting and talent acquisition, seeking $300k. (Pre Seed)

Trending Tools and Buzzy Tech

Tools

Apple - Built-in eye tracking for hand-free navigation of iPhones and iPads.

Anthropic - Claude AI assistant launched in Europe in multi-language.

ElevenLabs - Its first consumer app is the Reader: AI Audio audio reader.

Hume AI - ”Chatter“ interactive voice AI podcast offers daily news updates.

Tech

Intel - Aurora Supercomputer claims the fastest AI System in the world.

Google - Opens API access to smart home platform w/ 600M+ devices.

NVIDIA - 9 new Grace Hopper-powered 200 exaflop AI supercomputers.

MIT - “SuperLimbs” Exoskeleton supports astronauts in low gravity.

Closed Deals:

Immunology Therapeutics - Penn. Biotech startup Uniquity Bio emerged from stealth with $300M from Blackstone Life Sciences to treat immunology & inflammation indications.

RestaurantTech Unicorn - Irvine restaurant management tech startup Restaurant365 raised $175M at a $1B+ pmv led by ICONIQ Growth.

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∆ Tech in the News

AI Safety Talks - U.S. and Chinese officials meet in Switzerland today to begin talks on AI risks and safety agreed to during APEC 2023.

Pixie? - Google’s annual I/O devcon today “will be all about AI,” and could include Android integration, the "Pixie," digital assistant, & genAI search.

Arming Up - SoftBank's UK-based Arm chipmaker plans to launch AI chip products by 2025, possibly via a TMSC manufacturing partnership.

Winning Semiconductor "War" - U.S. ally South Korea is preparing a support package worth over $7B for its domestic chip production industry.

Vive L’AI - Amazon and Microsoft both announced multibillion-dollar investments in France’s cloud and AI sectors at the Choose France summit.

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The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week

“O” is for “Omni” as AI Assistants Arrive

OpenAI announced GPT-4o, its latest AI model with text, vision, and audio capabilities in a shift towards a true digital assistant interface. While the “GPT-4-level” model improves multi-modal capabilities, the main innovation here is the first major step forward in the ease of use of OpenAI’s tools since its launch. GPT-4o will be accessible to all ChatGPT users in a staged roll-out, including those on the free version, so it’s also a move to “open up” OpenAI’s tools to more users and encourage lock-in. This reflects the heavy competition likely to emerge in this vertical from its big tech rivals.

A Conversational AI Digital Assistant

The model is available via a new web UI with a “more conversational” home screen and layout. It also includes a desktop version on macOS with keyboard shortcuts for questions or screenshots (windows version due later in year). It’s a supercharged upgrade to OpenAI voice mode with “real-time” responsiveness and low latency, resulting in a “conversational assistant” like Siri or Alexa but capable of much more complex tasks including:

• Persisted streamed media input so it watches, listens along;

• Vision capabilities to explain “What’s going on” from media input;

• Better ability to detect and mimic human emotional nuance;

• Ability to stop and recalibrate when interrupted;

• Ability to instruct in real time on tasks - so long tutoring business;

• Real-time language translation if prompted;

• API access for all users to build their own applications off this base.

Pixie, Siri, and Camerabuds

Google is expected to announce similar digital assistant functionality today in its “Pixie” multimodal Google Assistant replacement. Yesterday right as OpenAI showed off GPT-4o, it teased a camera-powered AI feature that lets users ask what’s in the camera frame in real-time.

Apple plans to upgrade Siri with on-device AI to make it “more conversational and versatile", likely a huge priority for them now.

Meta is developing its "Camerabuds" AI-powered earphones with cameras that can identify objects and translate languages + its AI Smart glasses.

Apple and Google still have a huge lock-in advantage in that they already own the native voice assistants on your phone. OpenAI has moved fast to beat them to the drop on this, hoping its first-mover status will be enough.

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"This could become the AI agent product with a billion users from the get-go. The FSD for smartphones with a Tesla-scale data flywheel.”

— Dr Jim Fan, NVIDIA Sr. Research Manager & Lead of Embodied AI (GEAR Lab).

Go Premium to get the Perplexity AI DEEP DIVE featuring:

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Share The Tech Buzz

Job Candidates (For Employers)

Request an intro to candidates - jobs@thetech.buzz

1. Lockheed Martin Software Engineer, ex-Rutgers Junior Full Stack Developer. Secret clearance. Expertise in C++, PHP, SQL. Rutgers BA in Computer Science.

2. Deloitte VP Strategy, ex-FedEx Kinko's Sr Director, ex-Bain Sr Associate Consultant, ex-Goldman Sachs Jr Advisor. Led $25B+ M&A. UCLA Econ BS.

3. Software Engineering Leader, providing AI solutions. Ex-StoneRiver Enterprise Architect, Arthur Andersen Sr Manager. Arizona State CS degree.

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

Request an intro to founders - invest@thetech.buzz

1. Multilingual Messaging Portal - Sydney, AU - Global, AWS-backed SaaS platform for businesses to communicate with clients without language barriers. $300k secured, seeking $650k for U.S. expansion. (Series A)

2. Digital Twins - Miami, FL - Applying proprietary digital twinning tech to remote patient monitoring and therapy. Over $1 million revenue projected in 2024. Grants received for DoD applications. Raising $2 million in SAFEs with 25% discount for angels and 20% discount for VCs and family offices.

3. Homepage for Founders and Investors - Irvine, CA - A platform for investors to meet founders and for founders to grow their businesses with access to high-value community members, vendors, securitization tools, and capital. (Seed)

4. AI Agent Employees - New York - Sophisticated workflow automation for businesses, by a previously-exited founder. Building towards fully autonomous organizations. Backed by Tribe & Kenetic, rolling out to extensive waitlist.

5. Personalized Talent Marketplace - Delaware - Hiring platform with a focus on personalization and tailored guidance through an AI feature set. Founder experienced in recruiting and talent acquisition, seeking $300k. (Pre Seed)

Trending Tools and Buzzy Tech

Tools

X - ‘AI Audience’ lets advertisers target, define user segments to focus ads.

Pixel 8A - Google's best budget phone yet overshadows Pixel 8.

Venice AI - Privacy-centric GenAI w/ blockchain payments & web 3 data.

IBM - Just open-sourced its Granite LLMs with full commercial rights.

Tech

Brain-Reading Device - Implants best yet at decoding ‘internal speech.’

World’s brightest X-rays - China builds next-gen synchrotron X-ray tech.

UAE’s AI Model - Open source Falcon 2 series could rival big tech models.

Meta - "Camerabuds" AI-powered earphones recognize objects & translate.

Closed Deals:

House Cleaning Bots - San Francisco startup The Bot Company, by the cofounder of autonomous vehicle startup Cruise, raised $150M at a $550M pmv from Spark Capital and Nat Friedman.

Edge Computing AI Chips - South Korean startup DeepX raised a $80M Series C led by SkyLake to create AI chips for low-power edge devices.

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