---
title: "Weekly AI Worldview | Stable Diffusion Core Team Exits; Microsoft Pays Inflection $650M for Model License"
author: "Unique Research"
sourcePublication: "Unique Research (FFCAP English library)"
originalPublishedAt: "2024-03-25T16:30:00+08:00"
canonical: "https://ffcap.cn/en/research/20240325a06d1q00"
source: "https://ffcap.cn/en/research/20240325a06d1q00"
language: "en"
cnSourceUrl: "https://view.inews.qq.com/a/20240325A06D1Q00"
---

# Weekly AI Worldview | Stable Diffusion Core Team Exits; Microsoft Pays Inflection $650M for Model License

_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

1.  **xAI opens Grok-1** — **314B** params MoE; Apache 2.0 weights/architecture; sets open LLM size record (Mar 18).
2.  **Apple–Google Gemini talks** — Bloomberg: Gemini for generative features in iOS 18; ~2B+ Apple active devices if deal lands (Mar 18).
3.  **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).
4.  **NVIDIA Blackwell on AWS** — accelerates multi-trillion-param inference; AWS–NVIDIA drug-discovery collaboration; customer data control vs third-party model providers.
5.  **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.
6.  **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.
7.  **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).
8.  **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.
9.  **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._

— END —

---

Editorial English edition published on UniqueCapital: https://ffcap.cn/en/research/20240325a06d1q00
On-site reading page: https://ffcap.cn/en/research/20240325a06d1q00