Unique Research · Weekly AI Worldview · May 13, 2024
One week of funding, events, and people. Charts attach on ingest (26 images).
Funding
- Shexu Tech (设序) — nearly ¥100M Series A+, Amoeba / Yonghua / Lenovo Capital co-lead. “Flash Design” geometric+AI sketches in minutes; 10×+ design efficiency. (Shexu)
- Wayve — $1.05B Series C, SoftBank lead + NVIDIA, Microsoft; UK AI record. Learning-based AV (vs HD-map heavy). (Wayve)
- Quilt — $2.5M seed, Sequoia lead; ex-Sequoia/a16z partner Daniel Chen. Knowledge / questionnaire / answers AI for enterprise. (Quilt)
- Easel AI — $2.65M seed (Unusual, f7, Corazon + Stanford angels); Snap alums; Stable Diffusion stickers inside iMessage. (Easel)
- Altera — oversubscribed $9M seed (First Spark, Patron); MIT Robert Yang; social-emotional game agents (Minecraft companion first). (Altera)
- NooksAI — $22M Series A; sales automation / dialer parallelization. (Nooks)
- DEEPX (Korea AI chip) — $80M Series C; val $529M (~8×); 259+ patents; edge LLM path. (DEEPX)
- Yellow — $5M, a16z lead; ex-Google LLM/CoreML PM Mandeep Waraich; 3D character gen. (a16z)
- Mistral AI — $600M at $6B val (3× in ~6 months); team 3→60 in a year; GC / Lightspeed expected. (WSJ)
Events
- Oracle × Accenture — finance GenAI assistant; claims ~70% time save on text/analysis/close tasks. (Oracle)
- Microsoft MAI-1 — secret LLM under Mustafa Suleyman; ~500B params; Inflection data angle; Build rumor. (The Information)
- 01.AI “Wanzhi” — free CN office AI (meetings/docs/PPT); Cao Dapeng lead; Kai-Fu Lee chief experience officer; 10s long-doc Q&A. (01.AI)
- Docusign × Lexion — $165M all-cash; AI contract / IAM. (Docusign)
- Stack Overflow × OpenAI — OverflowAPI into ChatGPT. (Stack Overflow)
- X “Stories on X” — Grok-powered topic digests for Premium. (X)
- Google Cloud — hundreds of AI sales/engineers for Gemini; Q1 cloud +28%. (The Information)
- OpenAI DALL·E detector — 98.8% of DALL·E 3 images; C2PA; audio watermark R&D. (NYT)
- Apple iPad Pro 2024 — M4 (2nd-gen 3nm); NPU 38 TOPS; CPU +50% / GPU 4× vs M2. (Apple)
- Baidu × Guangmo Tech — strategic stake; internet data services; capital ~¥1.00M→¥1.14M. (Tianyancha)
- TikTok — first major platform to auto-label AI-generated content via C2PA Content Credentials. (FT)
- Apple ≈ OpenAI — ChatGPT into iOS 18 talks; Gemini also explored; WWDC Jun 11. (Bloomberg)
People
Fei-Fei Li (SF tech summit w/ Emily Chang): cautious on doomer hype; data not the bottleneck she stresses; space-intelligence startup details withheld; public-sector compute gap (Stanford NLP); gender/race equity; warns CA bills that could chill open source / research. (SF summit)
— END —