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  • The AI Rundown by Lightscape Partners – 04/29/24

The AI Rundown by Lightscape Partners – 04/29/24

Tesla doubles down on compute power, Moderna roles out ChatGPT Enterprise in new partnership, and the Rabbit R1 hits consumers hands.

Author

Ted Wagner
April 29, 2024

Credit: Rabbit, Inc.

Good morning, happy Monday, and welcome back to another edition of The AI Rundown.

Last week in AI:

  • Tesla announced during its earnings call that the company has spent $1 billion on AI infrastructure in the first quarter of this year. The spending includes increasing H100 GPUs to 35,000.

  • Moderna and OpenAI agree to a new partnership and will begin rolling out ChatGPT Enterprise across all verticals and to all employees at the biotech company.

  • The viral Rabbit R1 is finally in the hands of a few consumers and initial reviews are out. The handheld LLM-powered computer has a lot of potential but still has a ways to go before overtaking mobile phones.

If you’d like a quick refresher on industry terms and the current landscape of AI, skip to the bottom.

Otherwise, let’s get into it.

Top AI Stories of the Week

Tesla spotlights AI in a much-anticipated earnings call. Link.

  • The EV company spent $1 billion on AI infrastructure in Q1 2024.

  • AI compute hardware more than doubled as Tesla claims they are no longer compute-constrained.

  • Tesla now has 35,000 H100 GPUs, up from ~15,000 in December 2023, targeting 85,000 by the end of the year.

Moderna and OpenAI partner to accelerate the development of life-saving treatments. Link.

  • Moderna will deploy ChatGPT Enterprise to every team across the country.

  • The two companies have been in partnership since early 2023, but now ChatGPT Enterprise is involved.

  • The partnership highlights the impact of generative AI across all industries.

Initial Rabbit R1 reviews come back with mixed opinions. Link.

  • After going viral at CES 2024, the Rabbit R1 has finally made its way into a few consumers’ hands.

  • Initial reviews are more optimistic than Humane’s AI Pin but reflect the same underwhelmed opinion.

  • The gadget retails for $199.

Hardware

Micron is set to receive $13.6 billion in grants and loans from the US Chips Act. Link.

  • The investment will support the construction of two fabs in Clay, New York, and one fab in Boise, Idaho.

  • Micron is investing $125 billion across the two states over the next two decades.

Robotics

Sanctuary AI debuts their next-gen humanoid, Phoenix. Link.

  • Phoenix Generation 7 has improved human-like range of motion.

  • The new design will significantly improve build time.

  • Task completion has improved by 50x.

  • The robotics startup has raised almost $90 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

LLMs

China-based model SenseNova 5.0 outperforms GPT-4. Link.

  • The new model focuses on knowledge, mathematics, reasoning, and coding capabilities, according to the company SenseTime.

  • Chairman Xu Li claims SenseNova outperforms GPT-4 in enterprise applications, Chinese-language usage scenes, and other metrics.

Venture

6-month-old Cognition Labs hits $2 billion valuation. Link.

  • The startup developing an artificial intelligence software engineer named Devin has started speaking with investors about raising another funding round at up to $2 billion valuation.

  • If completed, the startup’s value would increase 6x in just weeks.

  • The startup was valued at $350 million earlier this year and has yet to generate any significant revenue.

xAI closes in on $6 billion in funding. Link.

  • The OpenAI competitor is raising $6 billion at a $18 billion pre-money valuation.

  • The deal’s terms are quickly changing, with reports last week that the raise was around $3 billion at a $15 billion pre-money valuation.

  • xAI’s Grok-1 chatbot architecture was open-sourced about a month ago.

  • The fundraise emphasizes the capital required to build solid foundation models.

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Image credit: SONYA HUANG, PAT GRADY, Sequoia Capital

Thank you for reading the AI Rundown by Lightscape Partners. Please send any questions, comments, or suggestions to [email protected].