Unique Research · Weekly AI Worldview · June 17, 2024
One week of global AI funding, events, and people. CN charts — attach on ingest (19 images).
Funding
- Mistral AI — €600M Series B (equity €468M + debt €132M ≈ $500M + $140M), General Catalyst lead; valuation $6B. Ex-Meta / DeepMind founders; open Mistral 7B / 8x7B / 8x22B (Apache 2.0); proprietary Mistral Large API; Le Chat; Codestral (limited commercial). (Mistral)
- SHANMU (杉木) — tens of millions RMB Pre-A; Songlin Group lead; Gengxin Capital & Wanwuwei follow; Gengxin FA. Micro digital-microfluidic optical urine sensor (“Perception” series); NMPA done, FDA/CE filing; London-founded team (Google / Columbia Med backgrounds). (SHANMU)
- Linq — $6.6M (InterVest, Atinum, etc.); AI agents automate financial research; clients Samsung Financial Network, KPMG US; expanding Americas/Asia/Middle East; profitable at ~2 years. (Linq)
- Particle — $10.9M Series A, Lightspeed lead + Axel Springer; AI multi-angle news reader by ex-Twitter eng; Reuters collab; prior $4.4M seed in April. (Particle)
- Danelfin — €2M; AI stock-picking / portfolio tools for retail investors. (Danelfin)
Events
- Samsung Foundry AI strategy — SF2Z / SF4U; backside-power 2nm prep by 2027; optical-shrink 4nm next year; 1.4nm in 2027; full “one-stop” foundry+memory+OSAT. (Samsung)
- Hugging Face × Argilla — $10M acquisition (4th deal); 13 staff keep operating; HF valued $4.5B after $235M raise; CEO Delangue hears ~10 acquisition pitches/week. (Hugging Face)
- ByteDance Malaysia — ~$2.13B AI center + $320M data-center expansion (MITI minister / Reuters); Alibaba, Ant, Google, Microsoft also investing in Malaysia digital infra.
- Tenstorrent — Samsung leading ≥$300M round → ~$2B valuation (The Information); prior $100M with Samsung Catalyst; Jim Keller CEO since 2023; chips at Samsung Foundry (not TSMC).
- NVIDIA Taiwan R&D — ≥1,000 engineers in five years; TSMC talent-drain concern; AMD also building TW R&D; Huang willing to pay TSMC more. (Economic Daily)
- NVIDIA Nemotron-4 340B open-sourced Jun 15 — base / reward / instruct for synthetic data; with NeMo + TensorRT-LLM stack. (NVIDIA)
- Xiaomi XiaoAI × ByteDance Doubao — live on multiple Xiaomi products; SU7 first; Doubao cited ~120B text tokens/day + 30M images; live search via Toutiao-aligned plugin. (Volcengine)
- Microsoft Copilot GPTs — shuts Jul 10, 2024 (~3 months after launch); GPT Builder removed; user data cleared Jul 10–14; focus enterprise. (Microsoft)
- 360 AI Search / Browser — multimodal/multitask search; million-character long context (5M in beta); Zhou Hongyi as AI “chief experience officer.” (360)
- Apple market cap — three-day rally ~+11% / +$323.9B; $3.285T edged Microsoft $3.282T; first #1 since January. (China Economic Net)
- WWDC Apple Intelligence — on-device + cloud with OpenAI; Cook cites $100B AI R&D spend. Highlights: Siri 2.0 deeper context / Apple-ecosystem awareness and further feature list in CN boards.
People
- OpenAI — Sarah Friar (ex-Nextdoor CEO / Square CFO) as CFO; Kevin Weil (ex-Meta) as CPO; Altman targets >$2B revenue in the coming year; Peter Deng / Peter Welinder product bench noted. (OpenAI, Jun 10)
- Elon Musk at Tesla 2024 AGM — 10–30B humanoid robots globally; robot:human ≥2:1 (or 1:1); Optimus 100M units/year aiming ~10% share; up to $1T annual profit / $20T Optimus-only valuation at 20–25× — plus FSD upside. (Tesla AGM)
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