Anthropic Launches Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Meta is launching an European AI startup acceleration program and Stability AI gets a new CEO

Happy Thursday everyone!

I'm Rubén Colomer, GP at Next Tier Ventures and this is AI Weekly Digest, a weekly roundup of the latest news, funding rounds, tools, interesting reads, events, and jobs related to Artificial Intelligence.

News ?????

• Anthropic Launches Claude 3.5 Sonnet , its fastest and most affordable model, and introduces Artifacts. This new version surpasses GPT in speed and benchmark performance, offering advanced code execution capabilities.
• Meta is launching an European AI startup acceleration program based at STATION F , in partnership with Hugging Face and Scaleway, and with the support of the HEC Paris Incubator. (Apply here )
• Apple and Meta are talking about partnering on artificial intelligence . The iPhone maker and the social media giant have discussed integrating Meta’s AI model into Apple’s recently announced Apple Intelligence.
• Stability AI gets new leadership as gen AI innovations continue to roll out . Prem Akkaraju, former CEO of visual effects company Weta Digital is set to become the new CEO of Stability AI. The company also secures significant new investment.
• Etched introduces Sohu, an ASIC chip that revolutionizes AI model processing , offering superior performance and cost-efficiency compared to NVIDIA GPUs. The company also rises $120M Series A
• US Record Labels Sue AI Music Generators Suno and Udio for Copyright Infringement.
• Amazon developing AI chatbot that would compete with ChatGPT and others
• TikTok launches Symphony , an AI assistant that makes it easier to create amazing content.
• Former Snap engineer launches Butterflies , a social network where AIs and humans coexist.

Funding ????

• HeyGen , an AI video generation platform that is profitable with $35M in ARR , has raised $60 million in Series A funding, led by Benchmark , with participation from Thrive Capital, BOND, Conviction, and others.
• Rising Team , a Silicon Valley-based team performance platform, has raised $8 million in its Series A funding . Zeal Capital Partners led the round with participation from Peterson Ventures, Roble Ventures, Female Founders Fund, Burst Capital, and Supernode Ventures.
• OrbitShift , a startup that harnesses the power of AI for sales intelligence, has secured $7 million in a seed funding round . The round was led by Peak XV Partners’ Surge scale-up program and Stellaris Venture Partners.
• Edinburgh-based AI legal assistant platform Wordsmith has raised $5 million led by Index Ventures , with participation from General Catalyst and angel investors including Skyscanner founder Gareth Williams.
• Ability AI , a martech startup specializing in full-cycle paid marketing automation with the help of autonomous AI agents, has raised $1.1 million in pre-seed funding from SMRK VC as a lead investor.
• Warsaw-based CampusAI secured $10M in pre-seed funding to develop a metaverse for learning AI skills, aiming to establish a virtual campus dedicated to AI training. The investment came from angel investor Maciej Zientara.
• Document intelligence startup Klarity Intelligence, has raised $70 million in new round of funding led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. Scale Venture Partners, Tola Capital, Picus Capital, Invus Capital and YCombinator also participated.
• Legal operations technology startup Ruli announced that it closed on a $2.2 million pre-seed funding round led by venture capital firm SignalFire, with participation from a number of additional investors, including Bruce Gibney
• GrayMatter Robotics, an AI-powered robotics leader empowering humans with intelligent automation, announced $45 million in Series B funding . Wellington Management led the round, which also included NGP Capital, Euclidean Capital, Advance Venture Partners, SQN Venture Partners, 3M Ventures, B Capital, Bow Capital, Calibrate Ventures, OCA Ventures, and Swift Ventures.

M&A ??

• OpenAI acquires video-first collaboration platform Multi ?. The platform, aimed at enterprise users, allows up to ten users to communicate via screen sharing and featured customisable shortcuts.
• Aiir , the provider of radio station websites and playout software, acquires Radio News AI , an audio tool created by Stefan de Groot twelve months ago, for generating news, sports, and traffic reports using AI; Aiir CEO Ricki Lee expresses excitement about the product's growth
• OpenAI has acquired Rockset , which builds tools to drive real-time search and data analytics. In a post on its official blog, OpenAI said that it would integrate Rockset’s technology to “power its infrastructure across products.”
• SoundHound AI has enhanced its AI-based food ordering capabilities with the acquisition of Allset , an online ordering platform that connects restaurants and local customers.

Interesting Reads ????

• How to build a ChatGPT-4o AI assistant with vision
• 5 Free Artificial Intelligence Courses from Top Universities (Stanford, MIT). Want to learn AI from the best of resources? Check out these free AI courses from top universities .
• The 100 most promising B2B SaaS startups in Europe and Israel for 2024 , valued under $1 billion
• Artificial Intelligence — How to create the new generation of applications
• The Best AI Productivity tools in 2024 by Zapier. These 38 AI apps will help you work faster and better

Tech ????

• Create a Siri-like AI voice assistant with Llama 3 and Groq , a tutorial by Alvaro Cintas.
• ChatGPT4-o vs Claude 3.5 AI performance comparision .
• NLUX is React and JavaScript open-source library for building conversational AI interfaces. It makes it super simple to build web applications powered by LLMs and AI. With just a few lines of code, you can add conversational AI capabilities and interact with your favourite AI models. (GitHub Repo ).
• Prompt2UI - Open source version of artifacts from Claude (GitHub Repo ).
• Northern California community to use AI to potentially stop school shootings

Tools ?????

• Course.im makes it easy to create a course you can share with your audience, embedded on your own website like a YouTube video or a Google map.
• Otto is an AI-powered tool designed to streamline and automate tasks using an intelligent table-driven interface.
• Bitskout provides AI Microservices for technical teams in financial industry to discover, test, and deploy low-risk/high-return use cases 10x faster and cheaper.
• Dropbase is a developer platform for building custom internal tools and backend operations software, fast and painless.
• Pygma , Your Personal AI social media manager
• Rewind brings you new levels of productivity — browse, search, and ask Rewind about anything you’ve seen on your phone.
• Bytebot , AI-powered scraping automations that evolve with the sites you target. Get the data you need with just a URL and a prompt

Events ????

Valencia Digital Summit is a major technology event that gathers innovators, entrepreneurs, and business leaders from around the world to discuss the latest trends and advancements in digital technology. This year, artificial intelligence will be a fundamental focus, with dedicated sessions exploring its transformative impact across various industries. Attendees will have the opportunity to engage with AI experts, participate in workshops, and discover innovative AI applications that drive business growth and societal advancement.        

• Valencia Digital Summit - October 23-24 - Valencia, Spain (*SPONSOR*)
• International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) (August 3-9) - Jeju-si, South Korea A prominent event in the field of AI, bringing together researchers and professionals to discuss the latest advancements in artificial intelligence.
• EAI Africatek - EAI International Conference on Emerging Technologies for Developing Countries (August 6-8) - Ilorin, Nigeria This conference focuses on sustainable development through the utilization of artificial intelligence and innovative technologies.
• International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Control Engineering (August 7-9) - Xi'an, China Explore advancements in robotics, artificial intelligence, and control engineering.
• Ai4 2024 (August 12-14) - Las Vegas, NV, USA The world’s largest gathering of AI business leaders, featuring over 350 speakers and thousands of attendees.
• Generative AI Summit 2024 (August 13-15) - Sydney, Australia Australia’s largest event dedicated to generative AI, offering case studies and practical examples on AI implementation.

AI Jobs ????????

• Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Optimization (Reddit) - Remote - USA - $216,700—$303,400 USD
• Senior Demand Generation Manager (Cresta) - San Francisco, CA - Hybrid
• Applied Scientist Lead - Computer Vision / Machine Learning (Onfido) Remote - UK
• ML/AI Engineer / NLP Expert - Custom LLM Development (HelloBetter) - Remote - €70K-180K
• AI/ML Data Engineer (RTX) - Remote - 96,000 USD - 200,000 USD
• Staff Data Analyst (Personio) - Germany, Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands, UK or Remote - $80-$123K

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You can reach me on Linkedin , where I discuss AI, Venture Capital, and startups or on Instagram , where I share images created with Artificial Intelligence.

Stay tuned for more AI insights and updates in the next issue of AI Weekly Digest!. Until then, keep exploring the exciting world of artificial intelligence.

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