Altman back as OpenAI CEO - What’s next?

Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: What caused the chaos at OpenAI + Major announcements from Anthropic, Stability AI, Inflection AI, Google’s Bard, and xAI

💰 Funding: AI21 Labs raises additional $53M + advanced generative AI tools for physics, engineering, and protein design. 

⚡️ Top News Stories:

1. Sam Altman is back as OpenAI CEO! But what exactly happened?

• On Nov. 22, OpenAI posted that they have reached an agreement in principle to reinstate Sam Altman as CEO. 

• It will now have a revamped board w/ Bret Taylor (former CTO of Facebook, co-CEO of Salesforce), Larry Summer (former Secretary of the Treasury), and Adam D’Angelo (CEO of Quora). 

• This board’s first task will be to vet and appoint a formal board of up to 9 people. It is expected that Microsoft will be granted board representation, along w/ Altman potentially. 

• The board will also investigate the reasons and circumstances of Altman’s initial firing, to which Altman has agreed. 

• It seems that some of the original turmoil started as Altman was not happy w/ criticism published by ex-board member Helen Toner in The New York Times.

• Another potential cause of the turmoil stems from a secret groundbreaking research project, codenamed Q*, that could be a significant leap forward for AI.

2. OpenAI's employee share sale will proceed as Altman returns as CEO, led by Thrive Capital which plans to purchase $1Bn in stock, valuing OpenAI at $86Bn. 

3. Stability AI introduces Stable Video Diffusion, a new open-source AI model which can transform images into video and soon will turn text into video. 

4. Inflection AI announces Inflection-2, reaching new benchmarks in AI performance, while setting the path to continue building 'Pi', their vision for a personal AI for everyone.

5. Anthropic introduces next version their advanced AI model, Claude 2.1, which features a 200K token context window, allowing it to handle huge documents up to 500 pages. 

6. Google’s Bard now has the ability to understand and summarize YouTube videos natively. 

7. xAI set to launch 'Grok', a witty and unconventional AI chatbot, to X(formerly Twitter) Premium+ subscribers, intensifying competition in the AI chatbot market.

8. NVIDIA postpones launch of its China-compliant AI chip amid U.S. export regulation challenges

9. Pentagon continues to advance AI in the military, balancing ethical concerns w/ aims to match China's progress.

10. U.S. Intelligence is investigating the Emirati AI firm G42 for its connections to large Chinese companies considered security threats by U.S. officials., reflecting global AI security concerns.

11. Sports Illustrated was caught using fake AI-generated authors for articles, sparking ethical concerns about authenticity in journalism in the age of AI. 

12. SAG-AFTRA’s AI agreement is facing significant backlash for potentially displacing actors w/ AI replicas, increasing concerns about the future of content creation and authenticity in Hollywood

💰 Top Funding News:

1.  AI21 Labs, a leading startup building generative AI products, closed a $53M Series C Extension, led by Intel Capital and Comcast Ventures.

2. Vivodyne is a biotech company revolutionizing drug discovery w/ their robotic automation platform that cultivates lab-grown human organs which are then dosed and analyzed to create vast predictive human datasets. They raised a $38M Seed Round led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Kairos Ventures, CS Ventures, MBX Capital, and Bison Ventures. 

3. PhysicsX, a startup building generative AI tools to enable breakthrough engineering in advanced industries including automotive, aerospace, renewables, and materials production, raised a $32M Series A led by General Catalyst, w/ Standard Investments, NGP, Radius Capital, and KKR co-founder and co-executive chairman, Henry Kravis.

4. Cradle, a biotech + AI startup revolutionizing the field of protein design w/ its generative approach, raised a $24M Series A, led by Index Ventures, w/ Kindred Capital and various angels. 

5. AIBOT, a startup building an AI-defined electric vertical take-off and landing (aiEVTOL) aircraft and ecosystem, was awarded a $15M grant from the California Competes Grant Program. 

6. Munch, an AI-powered automation platform for social media that transforms long-form content into short-form clips, raised a $7.2M Seed Round led by A* Capital, w/ Liquid2, Cardumen Capital, and Remagine Ventures. 

7. Phare Health, a startup developing an AI-native financial OS for healthcare orgs, raised a $3.1M Seed Round led by General Catalyst. 

8. Osium AI, a startup leveraging AI for research and development in materials science, raised a $2.6M Seed Round from Y Combinator, Singular, Kima Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Raise Phiture, and various angels. 

9. Defog, an AI company that enhances enterprise data analysis using open-core LLMs, raised a $2.2M Seed Round led by Script Capital and Y Combinator, w/ Hike Ventures, Pioneer Fund, and various angels including Dharmesh Shah (Co-Founder of HubSpot).

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