☕️ OpenAI's Fundraiser Takes Off With BIllions Behind It

OpenAI reaffirms its position as the most backed AI firm in the world by a mile as the Silicon Valley star's long-awaited fundraiser comes to a close, raking in billions and nearly doubling its valuation. Other key takeaways of the week include:

• Microsoft transforms Copilot into a more personalized AI assistant with new voice and vision capabilities

• Anthropic adds another former OpenAI talent to its roster with co-founder Durk Kingma

• Nvidia's NVLM 1.0 family of open-source models turn out to be a surprising competitor for GPT-4o

Join us at AI Tangle as we untangle this week's happenings in AI!

OpenAI's long-awaited fundraiser comes to a close and brings in $6.6 billion to push it to a $157 billion valuation

After a few weeks of speculation and rumors about who is taking part in OpenAI's latest fundraiser and who isn't, OpenAI finally closed its funding round at a final valuation of $157 billion in its Wednesday press release. The company raised roughly $6.6 billion from a wide array of investors and well-known tech companies, including previously reported names like SoftBank, Thrive Capital, Microsoft, and Nvidia, though no names were confirmed in the press release.

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And OpenAI's rapid ascent continues

OpenAI has nearly doubled its valuation from $80 billion earlier this year as the AI poster child continues to bring AI into the hands of the mainstream audience. The company's revenue figures are also up 1,700% since the beginning of the year, raking in $300 million just last month, with OpenAI expecting sales of up to $11.6 billion next year, a massive yet likely necessary contrast in comparison to its 2024 sales projection of $3.7 billion to aid with the roughly $5 billion in projected losses. With ChatGPT bringing in 250 million active users on a weekly basis along with 11 million ChatGPT subscribers and 1 million business users, OpenAI shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

Microsoft redesigns Copilot to give a more personalized AI assistant experience than ever before

Microsoft has introduced a major overhaul of its Copilot AI assistant by adding new voice and vision capabilities for a more personalized and interactive experience. Available on mobile, web, and Windows apps, the revamped Copilot features a card-based user interface similar to Inflection AI's Pi assistant. Copilot now includes voice interaction, allowing users to talk to Copilot in one of its four distinct voices, and Copilot Vision, which can "see" what users are viewing on a webpage. Other additions include things like Copilot Daily for news summaries and Think Deeper for more complex queries.

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Former OpenAI co-founder Durk Kingma joins Anthropic in a series of X/Twitter posts

After scooping up ex-OpenAI safety lead Jan Leike, Anthropic adds another one of OpenAI's former employees to its roster, this time one of the 13 co-founders, Durk Kingma, which he revealed in a series of posts on X/Twitter. Kingma, who previously led OpenAI's algorithms team, said his remote job from the Netherlands at Anthropic will be "contributing to Anthropic’s mission of developing powerful AI systems responsibly," but no specific details were unveiled.

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Nvidia releases a surprise rival to GPT-4o with its NVLM 1.0 open-source family of AI models

Nvidia turned some heads with the launch of its open-source NVLM 1.0 family of large multimodal language models, including the 72-billion parameter NVLM-D-72B, which rivals proprietary ones like GPT-4o, detailed in a research paper. The model excels in both vision and text-related tasks, with notable improvements in the latter's benchmarks. Nvidia has also decided to break the status quo by making the model weights public, thus making the models more accessible.

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OpenAI releases its first large-scale interface evolution for ChatGPT with the introduction of Canvas

Canvas is OpenAI's take on a more collaborative and productive workspace for writers and developers, who, as of the 3rd of October, have access to try out the new beta feature as part of ChatGPT Plus and Teams, as announced in a blog post. Canvas allows ChatGPT to generate drafts or offer suggestions within an editable workspace, saving different canvas versions. Though Canvas is fully functional on desktop, projects are in a "view-only" mode on mobile for now. The company says that Enterprise and Edu users can look forward to trying out Canvas as early as next week.

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Amazon announces its Fire HD 8 tablet packed with generative AI tools

Amazon recently introduced its latest Fire HD 8 tablet, packed with familiar generative AI tools like writing assistance, webpage summaries, and wallpaper generation, which will also roll out to Fire HD 10 and Fire Max 11 tablets later this month. The Fire HD 8 comes with slightly more powerful specs like 3GB of RAM and a 5MP back camera, with prices starting at $54.99 during early sales. Additionally, Amazon may soon unveil updated Kindle e-readers with brighter screens, following a leak from a Spanish retailer listing a budget-level model early.

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Paris-based Poolside raises $500 million to develop code-writing AI bots despite no product releases

Alleged rumors and talks in early September of Poolside raising $500 million were recently confirmed as the company announced the round in a blog post. Co-founded by GitHub Copilot creator Jason Warner and serial AI startup founder Eiso Kant, Poolside is working on developing next-generation foundation models, an AI assistant for software engineers, and an API. Despite the company having yet to release any of the three projects mentioned, investors remain locked in on the AI coding industry.

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How is OpenAI Bleeding So Much Money? (3-min read)

Despite a record-breaking funding round, massive industry support, and the release of o1, OpenAI has been bleeding billions of dollars. What exactly is costing OpenAI so much, and how can the recent company structure changes and surge of capital change its course?

Harvard Students Showcase Scary Data-Exposing AR Glasses (3-min watch)

Two Harvard students have developed AI-powered AR glasses, called I-XRAY, that can instantly pull up public data on anyone you meet on the street. While face recognition tech isn't anything new, their proof-of-concept project paints a chilling picture of AI's potential future uses.