Unique Research · Weekly AI Worldview · March 25, 2024
Editors: Ranran, Qiuping · Proof: Qiuping
This week’s AI funding
1. Class Companion — $4M
K–12 AI teaching assistant delivering instant personalized feedback. Used by teachers at 10,000+ U.S. schools; landed on the 2024 GSV Cup 50 (late Jan). Founder Avery Pan (education family). Seed from Index, OpenAI, Andrej Karpathy and angels — $4M.
2. Inkitt — $37M Series C
German AI-personalized fiction platform; valuation ~$400M. Expands into games, audiobooks, video adaptations. AI for personalized novel versions, reader analytics, narrative tools, multilingual publishing, covers. IP protection and sustainable growth themes; industry debate on AI displacing editorial roles.
3. Hippocratic AI — $53M Series A
Healthcare generative AI; valuation $500M; total raised $120M. First product entering Stage-3 safety testing — “hire” genAI agents for low-risk, non-diagnostic patient-facing ops. Led by Premji Invest & General Catalyst; SV Angel, Memorial Hermann, existing investors.
4. Draftwise — $20M Series A
Ex-Palantir + lawyers building end-to-end contract drafting/negotiation AI over firm data sources. Led by Index Ventures (Mar 14, 2024). Workflow: data unification, knowledge application, sharing. Legal LLMs still mostly Copilot-class amid hallucination limits.
AI headlines
- xAI opens Grok-1 — 314B params MoE; Apache 2.0 weights/architecture; sets open LLM size record (Mar 18).
- Apple–Google Gemini talks — Bloomberg: Gemini for generative features in iOS 18; ~2B+ Apple active devices if deal lands (Mar 18).
- Tongyi Tingwu — Alibaba AI study/work assistant adds long A/V Q&A (“Xiao Wu”); multi-lang query, long-doc understanding, RAG; campus giveaway 500 hours transcription for mainland faculty/students; 1M+ users; ~2B chars/day processed (Mar 19).
- NVIDIA Blackwell on AWS — accelerates multi-trillion-param inference; AWS–NVIDIA drug-discovery collaboration; customer data control vs third-party model providers.
- Inflection founders join Microsoft — Mustafa Suleyman (EVP & CEO of Microsoft AI, consumer AI org, reports to Nadella) and Karén Simonyan (chief scientist) plus colleagues; DeepMind co-founder / CNN architecture lineage noted; MSFT keeps deep OpenAI tech partnership.
- Stable Diffusion core research team exits — Forbes: Stability AI cash burn (~$8M/month opex), revenue shortfall, fundraising stress; SD3 open-source path uncertain a month after SD3 launch.
- Tencent GiiNEX — GDC game AI engine: generative + decision AI across game lifecycle; UGC level tools; Tencent AI Lab + Honor of Kings “Kaiwu” research platform (Mar 20).
- VtripGPT filed — tourism vertical LLM by Shilv Tech (founded Nov 2021 by ex-Alibaba VP Li Shaohua et al.; ¥100M-class angel from Gaorong/Xianfeng); among Hunan’s first genAI filings; first tourism-industry LLM claim.
- Microsoft → Inflection ~$650M — ~$620M for exclusive AI model license + ~$30M for Inflection to waive legal rights around MSFT’s large hiring (acquihire-like, not classic acquisition) — confirmed Mar 22.
People
- Kai-Fu Lee at Lanzhou Tech: AI 2.0 passes Turing-ish bar at ~2–3× human intelligence level; platform shift (infra → tools/APIs → apps); multimodal robots; won’t fund “AI sprinkled on”; AIGC apps to dominate in ~3 years; AI natives to hit 100M users faster than mobile.
- Tim Cook in Shanghai — generative AI / LLM investment in China; more genAI plans later in 2024; Apple MM1 multimodal paper; new Macs marketed around AI.
- Jensen Huang at GTC 2024 — keynote + AI transformation panel; see companion F2AI Focus “36 must-know points.”
15 CN images; attach on ingest.
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