Unique Research · Weekly AI Worldview · June 11, 2024
One week of global AI funding, events, and people. CN boards — attach on ingest (23 images).
Funding
- Pika — $80M round; co-founders Demi Guo & Chenlin Meng (ex-Stanford AI Lab PhDs) pushing AI video vs OpenAI/Google. Q1 2024 AI/ML VC cited at $25.9B. (Pika)
- Shengshu Tech (生数科技) — hundreds of millions RMB Pre-A; Beijing AI Industry Fund + Baidu lead; U-ViT / UniDiffuser; Tsinghua-collab video model Vidu. (Shengshu)
- Thoughtly — $3M seed (Afore, Greycroft, Expansion); GenAI voice agents for contact centers / CCaaS. CEO Torrey on high churn & inefficiency of legacy CCaaS. (Thoughtly)
- Praktika — $35.5M Series A, Blossom Capital lead; AI virtual language tutors; >1.2M MAU / ~100 countries; ARR approaching $20M; R&D in Eastern Europe & UAE; angel Patrick Evra. (Praktika)
- Lightwheel (光轮智能) — tens of millions RMB Pre-A, Matrix Partners China lead; GGV Star / Chentao follow; GenAI + simulation synthetic data for AV long-tail; open LightwheelOcc at CVPR; CEO Dr. Xie Chen. (Lightwheel)
- Tektonic AI — $10M seed, Point72 Ventures + Madrona lead; GenAI + symbolic automation for quotes/renewals etc.; co-founder Nic Surpatanu (ex-Tanium/UiPath/Microsoft); aims SaaS in 3–5 years. (Tektonic)
Events
- Saudi Aramco / Prosperity7 → Zhipu AI — ~$400M; Zhipu valuation cited ~$3B; FT report; first major international check into China GenAI at this scale (unofficial at time of writing). GLM family. (Financial Times)
- NVIDIA FY2025 Q1 — revenue $26B; top two customers >24% of revenue; China ~$2.491B. UBS: Microsoft likely largest customer, ~$11.5B run-rate. H100 + Blackwell demand. (NVIDIA)
- NVIDIA × Hon Hai — Kaohsiung software park compute center targeting 2026; GB200 servers — 64 racks / 4,608 CPUs; smart manufacturing, EV, smart city; Omniverse digital twins. (Lianhe Zaobao)
- Stanford Llama3-V plagiarism row — accused of copying Tsinghua / ModelBest MiniCPM-Llama3-V 2.5; authors Siddharth Sharma & Aksh Garg apologized Jun 4 and pulled the model; ModelBest CEO Li Dahai & co-founder Liu Zhiyuan responded. (The Paper)
- NVIDIA Taiwan — new R&D center in 5 years, >1,000 engineers (Taipei/Tainan/Kaohsiung); second AI supercomputer center like Taipei-1. (COMPUTEX 2024)
- Kunlun Skywork-MoE open-sourced Jun 3 — 200B-class sparse MoE with full MoE Upcycling; runnable on 8× RTX 4090; Skywork-MoE-Medium 146B total params ≈70B dense quality at ~1/3 infer cost; commercial use allowed. (Kunlun)
- Musk GPU reallocation — ~12,000 H100s reportedly shifted from Tesla to X Corp / xAI; stock reaction; Musk cited no place to install at Tesla yet. (Wall Street Insight)
- Microsoft Aurora — AI weather model; ~5,000× faster extreme-weather prediction; atmospheric chemistry/pollution. (Microsoft)
- ChatGPT ~8-hour global outage — site/app/desktop; API/platform claimed unaffected; Claude / Gemini / Perplexity spiked (Gemini search ~+60%). (Cailian)
- KT × Microsoft — Korea AI/cloud strategic partnership; multi-year billions investment; GenAI for finance ops; KT Lumada path toward $18.9B 2024 revenue goal. (Yonhap)
- Kuaishou Kling (可灵) — text-to-video; 1080p / up to 2 min / 30fps / multi aspect; Sora-like stack + own tech; invite via Kuaishadow AI; joins Kuaiyi LLM & Ketu image. (Kuaishou)
- Meta NLLB-200 — 200-language translation with low-resource focus; +44% avg quality vs prior; LASER3; sparse MoE gating; FLORES-200 (90% pass per language). (Meta)
People
- Jensen Huang at NTU — Blackwell Ultra AI chip targeted 2025; next platform “Rubin”; Earth-2 & Isaac; COMPUTEX supply-chain dinners. (COMPUTEX 2024)
- Xianyuan Tech (衔远) — Tsinghua-line LLM startup leadership churn after founder Zhou Bowen stepped back from day-to-day; partners/sales/solutions exits; commercialization lag cited. (Sina Tech)
- TSMC — Mark Liu retires; C.C. Wei becomes chairman; market cap cited ~$803.6B under Wei’s presidency (~2×); AZ still largest overseas bet; no near-term buyback/spin. (Huanqiu)
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