Runway launches a new image generation model

Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: Runway launches a new image generation model + OpenAI’s latest video generation model leaks 

💰 Funding: Pony AI has a successful IPO + OpenAI sells $1.5Bn in shares to Softbank

⚡️ Top News Stories:

1. Runway has launched Frames, an image generation model offering unmatched stylistic control and visual fidelity, allowing users to set specific aesthetics, create consistent variations, and build detailed visual worlds with unique atmospheres for diverse applications.

2. Claude.ai now enables users to personalize responses with tailored styles, offering preset options like Formal, Concise, and Explanatory, while also allowing customization through sample content or specific instructions to adapt to evolving communication needs.

3. ElevenLabs has introduced GenFM, a feature in its ElevenReader app that transforms text-based content like articles, eBooks, and newsletters into personalized AI-generated podcasts, hosted by ultra-realistic AI co-hosts tailored to match the tone and style of the material.

4. A group called "Sora PR Puppets" leaked access to OpenAI's unreleased video generation API, protesting alleged exploitation of artists in the early access program, prompting OpenAI to suspend the program after the leak allowed users to generate 10-second videos via a Hugging Face front-end for three hours, with OpenAI defending the voluntary nature of the preview and its commitment to balancing creativity with safety measures.

5. The Allen Institute for AI (AI2) has released OLMo 2, a fully open family of language models with 7B and 13B parameters, trained on up to 5 trillion tokens, providing accessible training data, code, and evaluation tools to advance the open language model ecosystem.

6. French startup Linkup has launched an API to connect AI developers with licensed premium web content, enriching LLM responses while avoiding copyright issues and regulatory scrutiny, using a marketplace model that compensates content partners based on access frequency.

7. Amazon is developing Olympus, a multimodal AI model for video analysis capable of identifying specific scenes through text prompts.

8. Uber has launched "Scaled Solutions," a new gig worker division focused on AI data labeling and annotation for internal teams and external clients like Aurora Innovation and Niantic, with global recruitment underway in countries such as the U.S., Canada, and India.

9. Europe’s leading AI startup, Mistral, is expanding to Palo Alto, California, to attract top AI talent and grow its U.S. sales and engineering teams, while balancing its European “sovereign AI” identity against competition from U.S. giants like OpenAI and Anthropic.

10. President-elect Trump is considering appointing an AI czar to oversee federal AI policy and private-public tech collaboration, with input from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, focusing on national competitiveness, rooting out inefficiencies, and expanding energy resources for AI infrastructure.

11. Following its partial acquisition by Microsoft, Inflection AI has shifted focus from cutting-edge AI models to enterprise-specific tools, with new CEO Sean White emphasizing practicality over frontier innovation and strengthening its offerings through acquisitions in email management, data analytics, and automation consulting.

12. Researchers using AI and drones have discovered 303 new geoglyphs in Peru's Nazca Desert, nearly doubling the mapped total in six months, with AI analyzing aerial imagery to narrow 47,410 candidates to 1,309, revealing diverse figures like plants, animals, people, and even a knife-wielding orca severing a human head.

💰 Top Funding News:

1. Chinese autonomous-driving tech firm Pony AI priced its IPO at $13 per share, raising $260M and achieving a market value of $4.5Bn. 

2. SoftBank is acquiring $1.5Bn worth of shares from OpenAI employees in a tender offer that values the company at $157Bn, providing liquidity for eligible employees with restricted stock units held for at least two years.

3. /dev/agents, a new startup led by former Google, Meta, and Stripe executives, which aims to create a cloud-based OS for AI agents, raised a $56M Seed round, from Index Ventures, CapitalG, and prominent angel investors.

4. Cradle, which leverages gen-AI models to accelerate protein engineering, raised a $73M Series B, led by IVP, w/ participation from Index Ventures and Kindred Capital.

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