New privacy focused AI tools from DuckDuckGo

Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: DuckDuckGo launches new privacy focused AI tools + Mistral launches AI-powered OCR tool

💰 Funding: Revolutionary Scientific Superintelligence Platform raises $200M

⚡️ Top News Stories:

1. DuckDuckGo has launched new AI features, including Duck.ai, an anonymous chat platform providing access to AI models from OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, and Mistral, along with expanded AI-generated search answers that offer customizable frequency settings while maintaining strong privacy protections.

2. Mistral AI has launched Mistral OCR, a cutting-edge optical character recognition (OCR) model designed to process complex documents, including images, tables, mathematical expressions, and LaTeX formatting.

3. Manus, an autonomous AI agent developed by a Chinese startup, has gone viral for its ability to independently perform complex real-world tasks, including automating social media management, generating reports, and developing websites, bridging the gap between AI conception and execution.

4. Microsoft is developing MAI, an in-house family of AI models potentially rivaling OpenAI and Anthropic, with industry-leading performance in complex reasoning tasks and potential integration into Copilot to reduce reliance on external AI providers.

5. xAI, has acquired a 1 million-square-foot property in Southwest Memphis to expand its AI data center operations, part of an aggressive growth strategy that includes a $700M Atlanta data center and a $5Bn deal with Dell for GPU servers.

💰 Top Funding News:

1. Lila Sciences, launched by Flagship Pioneering (Moderna’s venture firm) with $200M in Seed funding from investors including General Catalyst and ADIA, is pioneering the world’s first scientific superintelligence platform by integrating generative AI with autonomous laboratories to revolutionize experimentation across multiple scientific fields, including life, chemical, and materials sciences. 

• The company has already demonstrated success in generating novel antibodies, developing new carbon capture materials, and discovering cost-effective catalysts for green hydrogen production, cutting research timelines from years to months.

• Lila Sciences' A.I. learns from scientific papers, documented experiments, and real-time lab data, functioning as an autonomous researcher capable of designing and executing experiments.

2. Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence (SSI) has raised $2Bn at a $30Bn valuation, operating in extreme secrecy with just 20 employees and a mission to develop true AI super intelligence before releasing any products.

3. Reflection AI, a superintelligence startup founded by ex-Google DeepMind researchers, raised $130M in seed and Series A funding co-led by Sequoia Capital, CRV, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with backing from Nvidia and Reid Hoffman, to develop autonomous AI coding agents and advance AI-driven automation.

4. OpenAI has signed a five-year, $11.9Bn deal with CoreWeave, securing access to AI-optimized cloud infrastructure while also receiving $350M in equity in the company, ahead of CoreWeave’s planned IPO.

5. Anysphere, the AI-powered coding startup behind Cursor, is in talks to raise $100M+ at a valuation close to $10Bn, led by Thrive Capital, following explosive growth that saw it surpass $100M in annual recurring revenue within a year.

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