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Daily Digest #399

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Hello folks, here’s what we have today;

PICKS

1. New tutorial is up on Ben’s Bites: Build a marketing analyst GPT⁷²². This one is beginner-friendly and helps you to make smart marketing recommendations from consumer data.

2. Elon Musk is raising $6B for xAI.⁶⁵⁰ Elon Musk's AI startup, xAI, is finalizing a $6B investment round that values the company at $18B. Sequoia Capital is a confirmed investor, and the round is likely to close within a couple of weeks.🍿Our Summary¹⁸ (also below)

3. US Government creates an AI safety board³⁶⁸ with dozens of CEOs, researchers and politicians. Big players like Sam Altman (OpenAI) and the CEOs of Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia are in the mix. This board will team up with the Department of Homeland Security on safe AI deployment.

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TOP TOOLS

• Voice to Voice by Perplexity⁶⁴⁴ - Speak your question, search, and listen to the answers.

• Friend⁵²⁹ - Open source AI wearable recording device.

• Paddle Boat⁴¹² - Perfect your sales pitch with realistic AI roleplays.

• Langtail³³⁴ - Debug prompts, run tests, and observe LLMs in production.

• Express-1 by Synthesia⁴⁰¹ - Video avatars that can express emotion.

• Buglab²⁸⁷ - Spellcheck for UI. Detect bugs and UI/UX discrepancies.

• Layla⁵⁴³ - Baby sleep coach for tired parents.

• micro-musicgen³³⁶ - Super small music generation models.

• 5 winning projects from Anthropic’s Build with Claude⁶⁸⁴ contest.

View more →²²¹

NEWS

• WSJ’s deep dive into Moderna and OpenAI³⁴³’s partnership.

• The great talent dividend and NYC’s AI opportunity.⁴²¹

• Huawei leads¹²³ Chinese effort to compete with Nvidia’s AI chips.

• To the future - Saudi Arabia spends big²⁶⁰ to become an AI superpower.

• Lenovo’s survey says most global tech leaders see their companies as unprepared for AI.¹⁴⁸

• Musk wants to ask Helen Toner²⁴³ about why she left OpenAI, via a subpoena.

• Sanctuary AI unveils Pheonix Gen 7¹⁹⁷, their latest humanoid robot.

• Giving the AI a computer²⁵³ with Rahul Sonwalkar of Julius AI.

View more →¹¹⁵

QUICK BITES

Elon Musk's AI startup, xAI, is finalizing a $6 billion investment round⁶⁵⁰ that values the company at $18 billion. Sequoia Capital is a confirmed investor, and the round is likely to close within a couple of weeks.

What is going on here?

xAI is on the lookout for $6 billion in funding.

What does this mean?

That's the kind of cash that makes you choke on your morning coffee.

This new number is double the previously discussed funding figures for xAI. The last funding round of $1 billion for xAI was primarily financed by Elon Musk, but now external investors (like Sequoia, who back OpenAI too) are joining the mix. Valor Equity Partners and Vy Capital are expected to join as well.

The funding will be used to advance xAI's chatbot, Grok, making it a stronger rival to ChatGPT. xAI is also actively attracting engineers, including some from Tesla.

Why should I care?

With Elon Musk’s name in the mix, $18B feels like a small number but to bring that in context, OpenAI is now valued at $86B and Twitter (X) was bought for $44B. In short, this bet from investors is huge.

And they might not be wrong. A lot of folks wrote Grok off as just a meme-spouting chatbot, thanks to Elon’s marketing. But Grok 1.5 (unreleased) looks like a great AI model and the slick 'X' integration with trending topics is also going well. xAI has great AI talent and a relentless Elon. It’s never a good idea to bet against Elon.

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