💾 AI processor

🧵 In today's edition:

• 🗣️ Claude 3.5 Sonnet

• 💰️ SoftBank goes deep into its bag

• 💾 AI processor

• 🛠️ AI Tools to Check Out

• 🤑 AI Fundraising News

• 🐦 Tweet Post of the Day

🗣️ Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Anthropic launched their Claude 3.5 Sonnet model last week, the first in their new Claude 3.5 model family. 

This sets new intelligence benchmarks, outperforming competitors (like GPT-4o 👀) and its predecessor, Claude 3 Opus, across various evaluations.

Key features include:

• Enhanced intelligence in graduate-level reasoning, undergraduate knowledge, and coding.

• Speed that is 2x higher than that of Claude 3 Opus.

• Cost-effective input tokens and output tokens at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens.

• 200K token context window.

• State-of-the-art vision capabilities.

Anthropic also introduced "Artifacts,” a feature that allows real-time interaction with Claude's creations, marking the beginning of Claude's evolution into a collaborative work environment.

Looking ahead: Anthropic plans to release Claude 3.5 Haiku and Claude 3.5 Opus later this year. The company is also developing new features for businesses and exploring capabilities like memory for enhanced personalization.

Read more: Anthropic Blog

💰️ SoftBank goes deep into its bag

SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 is making a significant move in the AI sector, investing $10-20M in Perplexity AI, a US startup valued at $3B. This investment is part of a larger $250M funding round that triples Perplexity's valuation.

In case you forgot: 

• Perplexity AI, less than two years old, aimed to compete with Google search by providing real-time information and presenting results in text rather than links. 

• The company also partnered with SoftBank to offer Japanese wireless customers a free one-year subscription.

Why now? 

• This investment aligns with SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son's ambitious vision for AI. Son recently expressed his commitment to realizing "artificial superintelligence" (ASI), describing it as his life's purpose.

• SoftBank is expected to accelerate its AI investments, with plans to deploy around $100B into AI-related chips. 

• The company has also invested $200M in Tempus AI, a medical data analysis startup, and plans a joint venture to provide similar services in Japan.

Overall: Son's ultimate goal is to use AI to reduce human suffering, particularly in healthcare. He aims to analyze data from 50% of Japan's cancer patients within a few years to provide more accurate diagnoses.

This investment in Perplexity AI marks SoftBank's return to venture capital investing, with a renewed focus on advancing AI technology.

Read more: Bloomberg

💾 AI processors

ByteDance (yep, the company behind TikTok) is collaborating with U.S. chip designer Broadcom to develop an advanced AI processor. 

Their goal? To secure a stable supply of high-end chips amid U.S.-China tensions.

Here are some key deets: 

• The chip will be a 5nm application-specific integrated chip (ASIC)

• It will comply with U.S. export restrictions

• Manufacturing will be outsourced to Taiwan's TSMC

• The partnership helps ByteDance reduce costs and ensure chip supply

• Design work is underway, but manufacturing hasn't started yet

Why is this a big deal? It's one of the first publicly known chip development partnerships involving advanced technology between Chinese and U.S. companies since U.S. export controls were introduced in 2022.

Overall: ByteDance's AI push faces challenges due to limited access to advanced AI chips. The company has been stockpiling Nvidia chips and has purchased Huawei's Ascend 910B chips to support its AI initiatives.

The partnership with Broadcom is crucial for ByteDance to enhance its algorithms, which power popular apps like TikTok, Douyin, and the AI chatbot Doubao.

ByteDance is also actively recruiting semiconductor talent, with hundreds of job openings in this field, highlighting the race in AI chip development and the strategies companies are employing to navigate geopolitical tensions in the tech industry.

Read more: Reuters

🛠️ AI Tools to Check Out

• Snoooz: Advanced Out-of-Office assistant that automatically answers, categorizes, and routes your emails while you're away on sick leave, PTO, business trips, or outside office hours. Check it out!

• Smartly: Launch multiple campaigns and ad groups across digital channels simultaneously with automated workflows powered by AI - no manual work needed. Check it out!

• ClientZen: Cleans, analyses, and monitors your feedback across the entire customer journey. Check it out!

🤑 AI Fundraising News

• Axelera AI raises $68M in Series B funding to provide purpose-built AI hardware acceleration technology for AI inference, including computer vision and generative AI applications.

• Quickcode.ai raises $1.1M in Seed funding to help streamline data management for trade compliance professionals.

🐦 Tweet Post of the Day

Another day, another video generation AI 🫡