California partners w/ NVIDIA for significant AI training initiative

Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: California partners w/ NVIDIA for significant AI education and training initiative 

💰 Funding: Anysphere raises $60M+ for its AI coding assistant named Cursor

⚡️ Top News Stories:

1. The State of California is partnering w/ NVIDIA to launch a groundbreaking AI initiative focused on expanding AI tools and resources for at least 100K students, educators, and workers.

• The collaboration aims to train individuals in AI, create jobs, and promote innovation, with NVIDIA providing technical guidance, AI resources, and industry-recognized certifications.

• The partnership will focus on promote AI literacy and application across the states educational institution and industries

• The initiative includes developing AI labs, workshops, and hands-on projects, integrating AI into curricula to prepare students for high-demand sectors.

• California will support early-stage AI startups and create innovation zones to drive economic growth and job creation.

2. A federal judge ruled that Google holds an illegal monopoly in its search business, explaining that exclusive deals with companies like Apple were anticompetitive, and stifled competition from rivals like Microsoft’s Bing. This ruling marked a major legal defeat with potential industry-wide impacts especially w/ the emergence of new AI tech from all major tech companies. 

3. Perplexity AI has seen a 7x increase in monthly revenue and usage, answering 250M queries last month, after making a switch from a subscription to an advertising-based model

4. JPMorgan Chase is introducing an AI assistant for its employees, powered by OpenAI tech, aimed at improving productivity and efficiency across the company by helping with tasks like drafting emails, conducting research, summarizing documents, and streamlining day-to-day operations.

5. Microsoft and Palantir Technologies are partnering to sell AI and cloud-computing tools, to U.S. defense and intelligence agencies by integrating Palantir's software with Microsoft's Azure cloud services and specifically tailoring it for government use, enabling secure, confidential operations that assist defense workers in handling classified tasks such as logistics, contracting, and action planning.

6. Google has launched a new AI-powered feature, "Take notes for me," which automatically takes notes during meetings, highlighting key points and summarizing them for the meeting owner.

7. SingularityNET is launching a global network of supercomputers to accelerate the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI), with the first node coming online in September 2024.

8. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sparked speculation by posting an image of strawberries on X, believed to hint at a rumored new foundation model codenamed "Strawberry," which might be related to the development of OpenAI's next-generation AI model, potentially GPT-5.

9. ElevenLabs has secured deals with estates of iconic Hollywood actors like Burt Reynolds and Judy Garland to create AI voice clones for their new IconicVoices tool, allowing users to listen to these voices via an audiobook app.

10. Google DeepMind has developed a robot capable of achieving amateur human-level performance in competitive table tennis, winning 45% of matches against human players of varying skill levels, thus marking a significant milestone in robot performance vs humans. 

💰 Top Funding News:

1. DevRev, which enhances customer support and product development through AI-powered agents that manage and analyze structured and unstructured data stuck in legacy systems, raised a $100M+ Series A led by Khosla Ventures and Mayfield Fund.

2. Anysphere, which has developed an AI-powered coding assistant called Cursor that is designed to help developers write code more efficiently, raised a $60M+ Series A, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Thrive Capital.

3. UptimeAI, provides an AI-driven Operational Excellence platform that improves the profitability of process and manufacturing operations by optimizing reliability, efficiency, and maintenance costs, raised a $14M Series A led by WestBridge Capital, w/ Emergent Ventures and Aditya Birla Ventures.

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