Reddit inks $60M deal to sell user data to train AI

Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: Reddit inks $60M deal to sell data to train AI + Softbank plans $100Bn AI chip venture in effort to challenge NVIDIA

💰 Funding: Magic AI gets $100M+ from GitHub’s Nat Friedman to build an AI Software Engineer

⚡️ Top News Stories:

1.Reddit secures $60M deal to license user content to train AI models, as it eyes IPO.

• Reddit has entered into a licensing deal with an unnamed large AI company to sell access to its user-generated content.

• The deal is reportedly worth about $60M annually, significantly higher than similar deals in the industry, all of which is part of Reddit's efforts to secure a stable financial footing ahead of its planned IPO. 

• Historically, AI companies have used data from the open web without permission, a practice now facing legal challenges.

• Advisors have suggested that Reddit seek a $5Bn valuation for its IPO, half of what it might have achieved in a previous attempt to go public in 2021.

2. SoftBank's Masayoshi Son eyes $100B AI chip venture to rival Nvidia, leveraging Arm collaboration.

• The venture, code-named Izanagi, plans to collaborate with Arm, a chip design company that SoftBank spun out as a public entity but still owns approximately 90% of.

• SoftBank intends to secure about $70Bn of the funding from Middle East-based institutional investors, contributing the remaining $30Bn itself.

• OpenAI's Sam Altman is also engaging with investors, including those in the UAE, to raise between $5T and $7T for a separate AI chip project.

• The Izanagi project is distinct from Altman's initiative, indicating a broadening landscape of competition and innovation within the AI chip sector.

• The company's move into AI chips is part of a broader strategy to recover from significant losses in its Vision Fund and capitalize on the growing demand for AI technologies.

3. Meta AI unveils V-JEPA, a groundbreaking AI model that learns from watching videos

• The Video Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA) model, advancing towards Yann LeCun's vision of advanced machine intelligence with a more grounded understanding of the world.

• V-JEPA excels in detecting and understanding detailed interactions between objects in videos, representing a significant step in AI's ability to interpret physical world dynamics.

4. OpenAI's valuation soars to $80Bn w/ a new deal, tripling in under 10 months, indicative of AI's booming market.

4. Anthropic introduces Prompt Shield to combat election misinformation, redirecting users to verified voting resources.

5. Microsoft announces significant investment of about $3.5Bn in Germany to expand its data center capacities for AI and cloud computing over the next two years.

6. Google launched an internal AI model named Goose, designed to assist employees with coding faster by leveraging 25 years of engineering expertise.

7. Air Canada ordered to refund customer due to misleading information from its AI chatbot, setting a precedent for AI accountability.

8. Singapore announces plans to invest over $740M in AI over the next five years, aiming to strengthen its position as a global business and innovation hub

9. Stanford's AI breakthrough reveals significant sex-specific brain organization, advancing personalized medicine for psychiatric disorders

💰 Top Funding News:

1. Magic AI, a startup developing an advanced AI system aimed at automating software development, raised a $117M Series B, led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross’s NFDG Ventures, w/ CapitalG and Elad Gil.

2. Scribe, which uses AI to automate the creation of visual step-by-step guides, raised a $25M Series B, led by Redpoint Ventures, w/ Amplify Partners, Tiger Global, and XYZ Ventures.

3. Flower Labs, a leader in federated and decentralized AI, focusing on a new AI paradigm that utilizes larger amounts of training data and is less dependent on GPUs, raised a $20M Series A led by Felicis, w/ First Spark Ventures, Factorial Capital, Beta Works, Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, Mozilla Ventures, and notable angels like Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue and GitHub co-founder Scott Chacon.

4. Armilla AI, an assurance platform that safeguards against the risks of AI models through product verification and warranties to ensure reliable performance, raised a $4.5M Seed Round, led by Mistral Venture Partners, w/ Greenlight Re, Chaucer, MS&AD Ventures, SixThirty Ventures, Morgan Creek Digital, and Y Combinator.

5. Dili, which aims to automate due diligence and portfolio management for private equity and VC firms using AI, raised $3.6 M from investors including Allianz Strategic Investments and Rebel Fund.

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