Tesla unveils futuristic robotaxis

Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: Tesla unveils futuristic robotaxis + AI pioneers dominate Nobel Prizes + AI updates from OpenAI, Amazon, AMD and more

💰 Funding: Huge funding for startups tackling AI-powered Legal, Accounting, and Logistics

⚡️ Top News Stories:

1. Tesla unveiled the Cybercab, a futuristic, fully autonomous electric vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals, featuring wireless charging and robot-assisted interior cleaning, expected to launch in 2026 or later.

• Tesla introduced the Robovan, an electric, autonomous van designed to carry up to 20 passengers and goods, aimed at high-density urban areas.

• Regulatory approval is required before production of these vehicles, as Tesla faces scrutiny over its Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology.

• Tesla is shifting focus from EV production to AI and robotics, also showcasing its Optimus humanoid robots.

2. John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton—often called the "godfather of AI"— were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for their foundational work in ML, revolutionizing AI, while both laureates, including expressed concerns about AI's potential dangers, warning that advanced systems could surpass human intelligence and gain control.

• Meanwhile Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind, along with David Baker, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their AI-driven protein prediction breakthroughs, with their AlphaFold2 model accurately predicting the structure of nearly all known proteins, fulfilling a 50-year-old vision and revolutionizing science by advancing drug discovery and medical breakthroughs.

3. AMD launches its Instinct MI325X AI chip, targeting Nvidia’s dominant GPUs, aiming to compete with the upcoming Blackwell chips.

4. Amazon has launched AI Shopping Guides, which help customers research over 100 product types by offering tailored recommendations and key insights using LLMs to consolidate and ensure up-to-date product information, enhancing the shopping experience with educational content and customer insights to streamline the transition from research to purchasing.

5. Amazon is introducing next-gen robotic warehouses, starting with a massive facility in Louisiana, featuring 10x more robots than standard centers, utilizing the Sequoia inventory system capable of storing over 30 million items, with advanced robots like Sparrow and Cardinal working alongside AI expertise from recent Covariant hires.

6. Amazon has introduced the Vision-Assisted Package Retrieval (VAPR) system, an AI-powered tool that helps delivery drivers prioritize packages using visual and audio cues, with green or red indicators guiding package selection, aiming to reduce retrieval time from up to five minutes per stop to under a minute.

7. AI startup Writer has introduced Palmyra X 004, a new LLM designed for enterprise AI, which excels in action capabilities and tool calling, outperforms models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google by nearly 20% on the Berkeley Tool Calling Leaderboard, supports a 128k context window, multimodal inputs, and 30+ languages, and can trigger workflows, update databases, and perform enterprise tasks.

8. At Zoomtopia 2024, Zoom introduced AI-first platform innovations, including AI Companion 2.0 with contextual understanding, real-time web information, and task automation across third-party apps like Gmail and Microsoft Office, along with a paid custom AI add-on for personalized workflows, AI-driven task management features for meetings and daily tasks, and industry-specific AI solutions for healthcare, frontline workers, and education.

9. Adobe has launched a free Content Authenticity web app that allows creators to attach Content Credentials to their work, using digital fingerprinting, invisible watermarking, and cryptographically signed metadata for durable protection and proper attribution, with support already integrated into Photoshop, Lightroom, and Firefly. 

10. Inflection AI has launched Inflection for Enterprise, an AI system powered by Intel’s Gaudi® 3 AI accelerators and Tiber™ AI Cloud, designed to accelerate AI adoption for large businesses with customized solutions, alongside releasing a commercial API that allows developers to access its LLMs for creating advanced conversational AI applications.

11. OpenAI is reducing its reliance on Microsoft due to supply delays, leasing a data center in Texas, from Oracle—potentially with Microsoft's approval—while also developing proprietary AI chips to cut costs and increase independence, amid tensions over their joint 'Fairwater' data center project.

12. OpenAI has partnered with Hearst to integrate content from over 20 magazines and 40 newspapers, including Cosmopolitan, Esquire, and the San Francisco Chronicle, into ChatGPT, enhancing AI responses with trusted journalism for millions of users.

13. OpenAI plans to become a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) to defend against hostile takeovers and protect CEO Sam Altman from external interference, while balancing the interests of shareholders, public benefit, and stakeholders like employees and society, with a separate nonprofit continuing to focus on OpenAI's mission of benefiting humanity.

14. OpenAI has introduced MLE-bench, a new benchmark to evaluate AI agents on ML engineering tasks based on 75 real-world Kaggle competitions, assessing core skills like dataset preparation, model training, and tuning across various domains, with its o1-preview agent achieving bronze-level results in 16.9% of competitions using AIDE scaffolding, while also exploring the effects of scaling resources and pre-training on AI performance.

15. Headspace has launched AI chatbot Ebb, which offers personalized mental health support by guiding users through reflection and gratitude exercises, developed with clinical psychologists using motivational interviewing techniques to encourage positive behavioral changes.

16. Stripe is deepening its partnership with NVIDIA to enhance its AI capabilities, improving fraud detection and global access to NVIDIA’s AI platform.

17. Uber is set to launch an AI assistant powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 to help drivers transition to electric vehicles, supporting its commitment of $800M towards converting its fleet to EVs by 2040, with 180,000 drivers per month already making the switch.

💰 Top Funding News:

1. EvenUp, which leverages its AI model trained on extensive legal data, to power its Claims Intelligence Platform™ that automates document preparation, helps lawyers navigate case details, and improves negotiation processes, raised a $135M Series D, led by Bain Capital Ventures, w/ Premji Invest, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, SignalFire, and B Capital Group.

2. Auger, a logistics software startup using AI to optimize supply chain management, raised $100M in funding, led by Oak HC/FT.

3. Basecamp Research, is building an AI platform designed to understand and predict biological phenomena, such as protein structures and small molecule interactions, raised a $60M Series B led by Singular. 

4. Braintrust, which helps companies evaluate and monitor the performance of their AI tools, raised a $36M Series A, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), w/ Databricks, Datadog, and prominent backers such as OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo.

5. TensorWave, which provides an AI GPU cloud delivery platform that leverages AMD's Instinct MI300x series AI accelerators, raised a $43M SAFE, led by Nexus VP, w/ Maverick Capital, Translink Capital, Javelin Venture Partners, StartupNV, and AMD Ventures.

6. Numeric, which automates the accounting book-closing process using AI, helping accountants reconcile and analyze financial data, raised a $28M Series A, led by Menlo Ventures, w/ IVP, Socii, Founders Fund, Long Journey, 8VC, Friends & Family Capital, and Fifth Down.

7. Unify, which uses AI to deliver "warm outbound" sales messages by analyzing data to create personalized outreach for prospective buyer, raised a $12M Series A, led by Emergence Capital and Thrive Capital, w/ OpenAI Startup Fund, Neo, Abstract, 20Sales, and AltCap.

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.