---
title: "Weekly AI Worldview | Ex-Baidu Execs’ Genspark Raises $60M; OpenAI Buys Rockset; Ilya Launches SSI"
author: "Unique Research"
sourcePublication: "Unique Research (FFCAP English library)"
originalPublishedAt: "2024-06-24T16:00:00+08:00"
canonical: "https://ffcap.cn/en/research/20240624a05tz000"
source: "https://ffcap.cn/en/research/20240624a05tz000"
language: "en"
cnSourceUrl: "https://view.inews.qq.com/a/20240624A05TZ000"
---

# Weekly AI Worldview | Ex-Baidu Execs’ Genspark Raises $60M; OpenAI Buys Rockset; Ilya Launches SSI

_Unique Research · Weekly AI Worldview · June 24, 2024_

One week of global AI funding, events, and people. CN charts — attach on ingest (19 images).

## Funding

-   **San Francisco AI Factory** — $15M (Sequoia etc.), valuation >$100M, ~$20M cumulative; Lux, Hugging Face, Databricks CEO, The Chainsmokers. Product “Droids” automates features, review, vuln fixes; selling to Bubble, Podium, Stord. Geoffrey Hinton as board advisor. Competitors Poolside / Magic / Cognition already $100M+ raised.
-   **Genspark** — $60M seed led by LanChi Ventures; valuation **$260M**. Two ex-Baidu execs; AI search with “Sparkpage” structured topic pages; **200k** Sparkpages created. (TechCrunch)
-   **Aim Security** — $18M Series A, Canaan lead, YL Ventures. Founders Matan Getz & Adir Gruss (2022); AI-native security for leakage/model attacks vs. reactive chat-tool risk. (Aim Security)
-   **Decagon** — $35M Series A led by Accel after $5M a16z seed. CEO Jesse Zhang & CTO Ashwin Sreenivas; generative AI agents for enterprise support beyond shallow chatbots. (Decagon)
-   **Proofs** — $2.6M pre-seed, Earlybird Digital East lead. Bartek Pucek & Zbigniew Sobiecki; AI agents cut API-first POCs from months to minutes at hundreds of dollars — aiming to democratize SaaS sales. (Proofs)

## Events

-   **NVIDIA** market cap **$3.335T** briefly above Microsoft ($3.317T); quarterly revenue $26B, >3× YoY; Huang on “AI factories.”
-   **Butterflies** social app exits 5-month beta to iOS/Android; $4.8M seed (Coatue, SV Angel, ex-Snap angels); user-made AI “Butterflies” that post/interact. Founder Vu Tran (ex-Snap).
-   **New Computer Dot** on App Store — free trial / $12/mo; remembers conversations as a relational companion. Founders Jason Yuan (ex-Apple design) & Sam Whitmore; $3.7M from Lachy Groom, OpenAI Startup Fund, angels.
-   **OpenAI acquires Rockset** (Jun 22) — nine-figure stock deal; enterprise search/analytics + real-time / vector search for customers & developers. COO Brad Lightcap cited. (OpenAI)
-   **Huawei Cloud Pangu 5.0** at HDC 2024 — full series, multimodal, stronger “thinking”; billion→trillion params; 10K ultra-HD; STCG for industry multimodal; chain-of-thought + policy search. CEO Zhang Pingan.
-   **Alibaba Cloud Shanghai AI Summit** — multi-agent “AI programmer” on Tongyi; demo built Olympic schedule app in ~10 minutes. Xu Dong: minute-level app era / “super individuals.”
-   **Apple × China AI** — WSJ (Jun 20): talks with Baidu, Alibaba, Baichuan to localize AI for China devices after slower progress importing global LLMs; Greater China ~18% of Q1 revenue.
-   **DeepMind V2A** — video-to-audio from pixels + text prompts (SFX, music, dialogue); autoregressive + diffusion; SynthID anti-abuse work ongoing.
-   **Amazon Alexa** — rumored GenAI overhaul and paid “Remarkable Alexa” at ~$5–10/mo; target upgrade before August; 500M+ Alexa devices. (Global Times Tech)
-   **Runway Gen-3 Alpha** (Jun 17) — higher-quality ~10s clips; joint training for structure/style/art direction; not yet public. (Runway)

## People

-   **Ilya Sutskever** launches **Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI)** with Daniel Gross (ex-YC) & Daniel Levy (ex-OpenAI) — safe superintelligence first, no rush to products; offices Palo Alto & Tel Aviv. (Cailian)
-   **Stability AI** names ex-Weta Digital CEO **Prem Akkaraju** as CEO amid >$30M Q1 loss, debt, ~$1B valuation, Stable Diffusion 10M+ downloads; seeking fresh capital. (The Information)

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Editorial English edition published on UniqueCapital: https://ffcap.cn/en/research/20240624a05tz000
On-site reading page: https://ffcap.cn/en/research/20240624a05tz000