Amazon licenses Covariants robotic foundation models and hires founders

Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: Amazon ‘reverse acquihires’ founders of AI robotics startup Covariant while licensing their foundation models

💰 Funding: Yale announce $150M initiative to invest in AI

⚡️ Top News Stories:

1. Amazon hired the founders of AI robotics startup Covariant, (along w/ ~25% of the staff), while signing a non-exclusive license to use Covariant’s robotic foundation models, in what’s becoming known as a "reverse acquihire", while Covariant will continue operating independently under new leadership.

2. Alibaba Cloud launched Qwen2-VL, an advanced vision-language model that excels in video comprehension, visual understanding, and multilingual text-image processing, that makes it a leader in video analysis, offering real-time summaries and insights, making it suitable for applications like live tech support and other dynamic operations.

3. Amazon's upcoming Alexa update, set for an Oct release, will primarily use Anthropic's Claude AI models to launch their "Remarkable" Alexa version with advanced gen-AI capabilities, charging $5 to $10 per month, while the classic version will remain free.

4. Meta’s Llama models have seen explosive growth, with nearly 350M downloads to date, a 10x increase since 2023, making them the leading open-source AI model family.

5. Stanford Medicine has developed a customizable AI tool, nuclei.io, to help pathologists identify diseased cells more accurately and efficiently.

6. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced the first crypto transaction fully managed by AI agents, where tokens were used to purchase other tokens, marking a significant milestone in the integration of AI and blockchain technology and demonstrating the potential for AI to engage in complex financial transactions without human intervention.

7. Democratic lawmakers urged the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to regulate the creation of AI-generated deepfakes, citing concerns over potential voter misinformation, following controversies surrounding Grok, the AI chatbot on X, which allowed users to generate uncensored and potentially misleading depictions of public figures.

💰 Top Funding News:

1. Yale announces a $150M initiative to lead in AI research, focusing on interdisciplinary collaboration and ethical development.

2. SparkLabs, known for backing AI startups like OpenAI, has closed a $50M fund to invest in AI startups globally, w/ 35% of the fund to support startups in the AIM-X acceleratorin Saudi Arabia, while 65% will target Series A and B investments in AI ventures, especially in the U.S.

3. Magic.dev, which specializes in creating ultra-long context AI models for software development, raised a total of $465M from notable investors including Eric Schmidt, Jane Street, Sequoia, Atlassian, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Elad Gil, and CapitalG.

4. Codeium, the AI-powered code acceleration platform that enhances software development by making coding faster, smarter, and more intuitive, raised a $150M Series C, led by General Catalyst, w/ Kleiner Perkins and Greenoaks.

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