Salesforce releases 2 new AI sales agents

Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: Salesforce releases 2 new AI sales agents 

💰 Funding: VCs using SPVs to buy shares in AI startups at a premium, risking overvaluation

⚡️ Top News Stories:

1. Salesforce has launched two new AI-driven sales agents, Einstein SDR Agent and Einstein Sales Coach Agent, designed to automate and enhance sales processes for enterprise teams.

• Einstein SDR Agent autonomously engages with inbound leads, handling tasks like answering questions, booking meetings, and managing objections 24/7, allowing sales teams to focus on more complex deals.

• Einstein Sales Coach Agent facilitates realistic role-plays with sellers, simulating buyer interactions during discovery, pitch, or negotiation stages, and providing personalized, objective feedback to improve sales skills.

2. Google DeepMind employees demand an end to military contracts, citing ethical concerns over AI use in warfare.

• 200+ Google DeepMind employees signed a letter in May ‘24, urging Google to end its contracts with military organizations due to concerns over the use of AI in warfare.

• The letter emphasizes that the concerns are not about specific geopolitical conflicts but about the ethical implications of using AI for military purposes, particularly highlighting Project Nimbus with the Israeli military.

• The protest reflects growing tensions between Google’s AI division, focused on ethical AI, and its cloud business, which sells AI services to military clients.

• The letter points out that when Google acquired DeepMind in 2014, it was agreed that DeepMind’s technology would not be used for military or surveillance purposes.

• DeepMind staff are calling for an investigation into the use of Google cloud services by militaries, a halt to military access to DeepMind’s AI, and the creation of a governance body to prevent future military use of their tech.

3. California's revised AI bill, SB 1047 which mandates safety testing and kill switches for advanced AI models, gains support from Anthropic and Elon Musk while other tech giants like Meta and OpenAI argue the bill may hinder AI development..

4. Mark Zuckerberg and Daniel Ek argue that Europe should embrace open-source AI to maintain competitiveness and drive innovation, highlighting that Europe’s current complex and inconsistent regulatory environment is hindering AI development and innovation.

5. Google introduced a free Prompt Gallery in its AI Studio, enhancing developer tools and showcasing the versatility of the Gemini API.

6. NVIDIA released the Mistral-NeMo-Minitron 8B, a small yet powerful language model offering state-of-the-art accuracy while being compact enough to run on RTX-powered workstations.

7. AI21 has launched two new models, Jamba 1.5 Mini and Jamba 1.5 Large, designed to be the fastest and most efficient long-context models available for enterprises by utilizing a hybrid architecture combining Transformer and Mamba technologies.

8. Boston Dynamics released a new video showcasing their latest electric Atlas robot, highlighting the robot's robust and powerful actuators. 

9. China displayed over two dozen humanoid robots at the 2024 World Robot Conference in Beijing, with  Tesla’s Optimus being the only foreign robot present, indicating the intense competition from Chinese tech companies like Agibot and Deep Robotics.

10. Anthropic has introduced LaTeX rendering for its AI model, Claude, allowing it to display mathematical equations in a standardized format which enhances Claude's ability to consistently and clearly present complex mathematical concepts, benefiting users in STEM fields.

11. Perplexity AI will monetize its search app by launching ads in Q4, with plans to start with specifically targeting high-income, educated user base.

12. Google has appointed Noam Shazeer, former Character.AI founder, as co-lead of its Gemini AI project, the key AI model line developed by Google's DeepMind, intended for integration into products like Search and Pixel smartphones.

13. Chinese firms are bypassing US export restrictions on advanced AI chips by accessing them through cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS).

14. Apple is considering exploring mobile robots and possibly humanoid machines for the next decade, focusing on smart home integration, starting with a tabletop robot potentially arriving by 2026 or 2027.

💰 Top Funding News:

1. VC’s are increasingly buying shares of late-stage AI startups through Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) on the secondary market, often at a 30% premium, which is raising concerns about overvaluation.

2. Viggle AI, an AI video generation startup that creates short animated videos that excels in realistic physics-based animations, raised a $19M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, w/ Two Small Fish.

That's all for today's email! If you want more please follow us at the social channels linked below, or check out our website!

Share our newsletter: If you like our work please share/forward this email with your friends, colleagues, and family. It's the best way to support us!

If this email was forwarded to you please sign up here to continue receiving them.

Want your content, product, jobs, or event featured in our newsletter? Reply to this email with the details, and our team will reach out to you.

Do you use AI for work? Tell us how, and you could be featured in our newsletter!

Check out our website for more resources, including a list of AI investors, products, events, and twitter follows.

For an archive of all our posts, click here.

We'd love to hear from you! You can always leave us comments or feedback by replying to this email!

Powered by AI. Curated and edited by Humans.