Unique Research · Weekly AI Worldview · May 6, 2024
One week of funding, events, and people. Charts attach on ingest (16 images).
Funding
- CoreWeave — $1.1B Series C; valuation $19B. GPU cloud pioneer; funds global expansion and supercomputer build-out for surging AI compute demand; deep NVIDIA partnership. Coatue’s Philippe Laffont: CoreWeave is becoming a backbone of large-scale HPC infrastructure. (CoreWeave)
- Blaize Inc. — $106M round; seven institutions including Mercedes-Benz and Franklin Templeton. Edge + data-center AI chips (Blaize 1600 series; compute modules and PCIe cards); funds R&D, commercialization, and auto / CV / inference / generative markets. (Blaize Inc.)
- Lamini — $25M Series A, Amplify Partners lead. Enterprise GenAI to customize and deploy LLMs on proprietary data; tools include LLM memory evaluation and efficient fine-tuning; partners include AMD and Snowflake; funds tech, team, and global GPU cloud. (Lamini)
Events
- Apple ≈ OpenAI — talks restarted to put ChatGPT / OpenAI tech into iOS 18; prior talks with OpenAI and Google had stalled; Gemini also still on the table. Tim Cook: iOS 18 a milestone with GenAI at the core. Apple also open-sourced OpenELM for mobile; keeps multi-partner options for tech, safety, and liability. (Bloomberg)
- Lanma Tech × CAICT — Lanma leads drafting China’s first Agent standard guide Agent Technical Requirements & Evaluation Methods: Platforms and Tools (platform mgmt, DevOps, API services). (Lanma Tech)
- Financial Times × OpenAI — Apr 29 content-licensing partnership; FT content to train models with attribution back to originals and publisher revenue; part of OpenAI’s broader publisher deals. (Financial Times)
- Microsoft Indonesia — $1.7B over four years for cloud and AI infrastructure; AI skills path for 840,000 Indonesians; deepens “Berdayakan Indonesia” after 2021 first data center; Indonesia is Asia-Pacific’s third-largest GitHub developer community. Local AI economic potential cited at $366B by 2030. (Microsoft)
- Amazon Q — May 1 launch: Amazon Q Business (enterprise text/analysis; 40+ business tools) and Amazon Q Developer (codegen, agents, vuln scan, AWS optimization); Amazon Q Apps for non-coders (preview, free). Pricing: Business $20/mo, Developer $25/mo. (Amazon)
- Anthropic Team plan — enterprise paid tier with higher Claude 3 access, admin/user controls, higher usage, upcoming collab tools, flexible billing; Claude 3 iOS app with free + Pro/Team upgrade and web sync. (Anthropic)
- Microsoft × Coca-Cola — 5-year, $1.1B cloud + AI deal (up from $250M in 2020); Azure OpenAI for chatbots and GenAI process innovation; Coke fully on Azure. Quotes from CIO Niraj Tolmare and CFO John Murphy. (Microsoft)
- BNU Zhuhai AI HPC — Apr 30 filing for Cross-Intelligence Supercomputing Center AI Big-Science Infrastructure Platform; total investment ¥496M; all-domestic tech on existing rooms; target world-class world models, multi-agent collab, research compute networks. Prior 400× NVIDIA A800 cluster already awarded at HPC events. (AI headlines)
- NVIDIA ChatRTX 0.3 — image search, Whisper speech recognition, Gemma + ChatGLM3-6B support; OpenAI CLIP–style; needs RTX 30/40 with ≥8GB VRAM; adds voice/video input. (NVIDIA)
- Kimi “Kimi+” — late-night update: smart product recs, stronger language/creation, multi-function chat with @ calls for multi-task in one window; modular composition for different work scenes. (Kimi)
- Douyin Flow — “星绘” AI camera app (3 selfie shots → AI avatar in Jurassic / snow scenes etc.); overseas Picpic app (prompt-driven styles: pixel, cyberpunk, anime). (Douyin)
- Atlassian Rovo — AI search / chat / agents over Jira, Confluence, and third-party files; GenAI workflow agents; respects file permissions; beta waitlist for customers. (Atlassian)
People
- Fei-Fei Li (“AI godmother,” Stanford CS; ex-Google Cloud AI chief scientist) — founding a startup focused on spatial intelligence (3D visual reasoning like humans); seed backed by a16z and Radical Ventures. TED Vancouver: teaching computers intelligent action in 3D across vision and robotics. (Reuters)
- OpenAI exits — VP People Diane Yoon and nonprofit/strategy lead Chris Clark resign; Julia Villagra succeeds Yoon; Clark’s successor TBD; Yoon stays briefly as advisor. Founding member Andrej Karpathy left in February. (OpenAI)
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