Unique Research · Weekly AI Worldview · June 3, 2024
One week of global AI funding, events, and people. CN boards — attach on ingest (21 images).
Funding
- xAI — $6B Series B; valuation $18B; Valor Equity, Vy Capital, a16z et al. Training Grok 2.0 on ~20k GPUs; next Grok aiming audio/video; Musk cites a “supercomputing factory” with up to 100k GPUs. (xAI)
- AniML — $2M (Adjacent seed + Nat Friedman / Daniel Gross AI Grant); Doly iPhone 3D capture → cloud 3D via Gaussian / NeRF for marketplace & Instagram ads. (AniML)
- AiPPT.cn / 爱设计 — B1 led by Visual China; Xinglian + 36Kr; AI auto-PPT; R&D, copyright, global markets. (AiPPT)
- Shengjing Tech (生境) — tens of millions RMB angel (HK X Tech et al.); Shenzhen 2023; ~40 people, profitable in year one; floorplan → full design + quote + furniture mall; partners Goldenhome, Wanhua. (Shengjing)
- Jingzhunxue (精准学) — ¥200M, Alibaba lead; from AI wrong-question sets to “Xinliu Zhijing” LLM; June “Bong” AI tutor device — emotion/state-aware personalized resources + parent app. (Jingzhunxue)
- Qingmao Intelligent (清昴) — tens of millions RMB Pre-A+, Qifu + Fortune Capital lead, MiraclePlus follow; on-device / domestic-chip model deploy (Ascend toolchain); Tsinghua / Huawei / Alibaba talent. (Qingmao)
- EthonAI — CHF 15M (~$16.5M) Series A, Index Ventures lead; GC, Earlybird, Founderful; Inspector surface-defect AI; Siemens, Lindt; semiconductor yield analytics. CEO Julian Senoner. (EthonAI)
Events
- Snowflake acquires TruEra — ML test/debug/monitor into Data Cloud; full team joins. (Snowflake)
- China Mobile — 3 ultra-large + 12 regional intelligent-compute centers this year; upgrade 1,500 edge nodes; train:infer ≈ 1:10; “Jiutian” AI base (10k-card compute, 100B-class multimodal, ecosystem). (China Mobile)
- WPP Open × Anthropic Claude (Opus/Sonnet/Haiku) via Amazon Bedrock; 114k marketers. (WPP)
- China Big Fund III — ¥344B (~$47.5B); MoF 17%, CDB Capital 10%; five major banks ~6% each; SMIC, Hua Hong, YMTC prior beneficiaries. (Global Times Finance)
- AWS China Summit — Baichuan2-7B & Yi-1.5 onto SageMaker JumpStart China. (AWS)
- Quark → iSlide — 25% stake, #2 shareholder; LLM × document/PPT ecosystem. (Cailian)
- OpenAI — Safety Committee (Altman, Brett Taylor et al.); 90-day process review; next-gen model training beyond GPT-4. (OpenAI)
- Arm — Cortex-X925 (+36% single-core, +41% AI vs prior) + Immortalis G925 (+37% graphics, +52% ray tracing, +34% AI, −30% power); up to 12-core “PC-class” laptops; MediaTek Dimensity 9200 path (vivo X90 / Oppo Find X6 cited). (Arm)
- Tencent Yuanbao — Hunyuan-based AI assistant live May 30; search/summarize/write; multi-engine + AI quality; >65% users need work/study info tools. (Tencent)
- ElevenLabs Sound Effects — text→SFX/music clips; Shutterstock-licensed training; 10k free chars ≈60 SFX. (ElevenLabs)
People
- Fu Ruiji — exits Kuaishou (knowledge graph & LLM Agent lead); HIT / USTC postdoc; ex-iFlytek AI Institute VP; built “Kuaizhi” 100M-scale multimodal short-video KG and KwaiAgents; starting own AI venture. (Dongfang Finance)
- Yang Hongxia — leaves ByteDance AML (reported to Xiang Liang); ex-Alibaba DAMO M6 tech lead (10B→trillion params); Seattle LLM work; preparing AI startup. (Sina Tech)
- Mira Murati at Asia Tech Summit (Singapore, video) — GenAI’s economic impact “just beginning”; GPT-4o collapsing text→video creation; competition + safety push reliability. (Bloomberg)
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