Unique Research · Weekly AI Worldview · April 8, 2024
One week of funding, events, and people. Charts attach on ingest (8 images).
Funding
- FundGuard (Israel; AI investment-ops platform for asset managers, banks, and service providers covering mutual funds, hedge funds, pensions, and other vehicles) — $100M Series C led by Key1 Capital; new investors Euclidean Capital and funds managed by Hamilton Lane (HLNE.O); existing strategics incl. Citi and State Street; early financial backers Blumberg Capital and Team8 also participated. Israeli media put post-money valuation as high as $400M. Founded 2018; cumulative raise >$150M; new customers; offices in Boston, London, Toronto. Cloud-native + AI to modernize investment accounting ops and migrate workflows to the cloud. (Reuters)
- Podcastle (Yerevan, Armenia; podcast / A-V creation & publishing for creators, indie founders, marketers, educators) — $13.5M Series A led by Mosaic Ventures. Founded 2020; team includes alumni of Canva and Prezi. AI features: generative voice-clone Revoice, Magic Dust AI audio cleanup, TTS, Hosting Hub for publish/share. (Podcastle)
Events
- ChatGPT usable without an account — OpenAI opened GPT-3.5 web use without registration to lower the barrier; registered users keep more features; additional content safeguards on the no-login path. Expected to lift activity and broaden access. (OpenAI)
- Samsung Bixby → ChatGPT-style GenAI — Samsung Mobile EVP Won-joon Choi said Bixby will gain ChatGPT-like generative AI. Bixby has been Samsung’s assistant since Galaxy S8 (2017): voice, translation, search, customization; hub across phones, tablets, wearables, and appliances. (Samsung)
- Google VLOGGER multimodal video model — research model generates talking / richly animated person videos from an image + speech. Multi-stage diffusion: stochastic diffusion for body motion (expression, pose, gaze, blinks), then spatiotemporal diffusion combining motion with a reference image. No per-person retraining; no face-detection crop required; targets realistic communication scenes (visible torso, varied identities). (Google)
- Yahoo acquires Artifact — AI news app from Instagram co-founders Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom; price undisclosed. Tech acquisition (not an acqui-hire): Krieger and Systrom become special advisors, not joining Yahoo full-time. Artifact said in January it would shut down for insufficient market opportunity; tech personalizes feeds, summarizes news, rewrites clickbait titles, highlights best content — to be integrated into Yahoo News and related products. (Yahoo)
- FlowUs × Volcano Engine / ByteDance Lark (Skylark) LLM — deepen AI for efficiency / docs on Volcano Ark’s Skylark (云雀) model. Promo: Apr 4–10 “AI free carnival week” — all FlowUs AI products unlimited free for all-end users. (FlowUs)
- SK hynix $3.87B HBM plant in Indiana, U.S. — next-gen HBM production targeted for 2H 2028; R&D ties with Purdue and local institutes; first overseas plant for SK hynix’s AI-critical HBM. Signing at Purdue with Indiana, Purdue, and U.S. government stakeholders; >1,000 local jobs expected. (SK hynix)
- Quantinuum × Microsoft quantum breakthrough — most reliable logical qubits with active syndrome extraction, years ahead of some expectations. New Quantinuum machine created four logical qubits with logical error rates up to 800× lower than physical; 14,000 independent error-free circuit instances in tests. U.S./UK Quantinuum teams with Microsoft Quantum; path toward useful fault-tolerant quantum computing for materials, drug discovery, etc. (Quantinuum)
- OpenAI new fine-tuning APIs — announced ~Apr 5: epoch-based checkpoints, Playground updates, third-party integrations, fuller validation metrics, hyperparameter controls, fine-tuning dashboard improvements — for GPT-4 / Turbo, GPT-3.5, and related. Thousands of orgs have trained hundreds of thousands of custom models via the fine-tuning API; e.g. Indeed used GPT-3.5 Turbo fine-tunes for personalized jobseeker recommendations, sharply raising monthly message volume. (OpenAI)
- Saudi PIF × a16z ~$40B AI fund (reported) — Saudi sovereign wealth exploring a large AI-focused fund with a16z, first surfaced at last month’s Los Angeles Montgomery summit; scale could rival Saudi’s ~$45B stake in SoftBank Vision Fund. Sanabil (PIF’s VC arm, >$100B AUM) has been on a U.S. tour pitching AI goals. (The Information)
People
- Sam Altman cedes formal control of OpenAI Startup Fund — OpenAI confirmed to TechCrunch that CEO Sam Altman transferred formal control of the eponymous VC fund to Ian Hathaway. Fund launched 2021 with Altman as designated controller; OpenAI said the original GP structure was temporary, and Altman made no personal investment and took no economic interest (Axios had reported earlier). Hathaway joined OpenAI in 2021 and led investments incl. Ambience Healthcare, Cursor, Harvey, Speak. SEC filing: commitments $175M last year; NAV $325M; LPs include Microsoft and other externals; focus early AI in healthcare, legal, education. PitchBook: at least 16 other startups supported, incl. Descript (val $553M last year) and Ghost Autonomy. (TechCrunch)
- Jony Ive × Sam Altman AI hardware startup fundraising — reports that the ex-Apple designer and OpenAI CEO’s mysterious company is in talks to raise up to $1B for an AI-powered personal device (not a phone). Discussions with Emerson Collective, Thrive Capital, and others; early valuation expected high on names alone; no product yet. Device could support a broader OpenAI hardware / server-chip push competing with NVIDIA; wearable AI hardware peers also rising. (The Information)
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