Stephanie Palazzolo
@steph_palazzolo
Writing AI Agenda @theinformation, texan, & horror movie aficionado // reach me at stephanie@theinformation.com or on Signal at 979-599-8091
5K Following 23.3K Followers
In this morning's AI Agenda, @amir reports on OpenAI's work to develop its answer to Grok Bot, as well as what it's doing to respond to Instinct.
Plus, I share more on what OpenAI researchers have seen to make them so nervous about the progress of AI.
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Jensen, Musk, Zuck: They're on our new list of Tech's Most Influential People, which looks at who will sway the industry over the next 10 yrs.
But we went deeper than the obv. choices: @dwarkesh_sp, @JTLonsdale, @YasminRazavi, @ScottWu46, @miramurati—you're in great company!
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New in this morn's AI Agenda: OpenAI is close to solving another Millennium Prize problem, the Hodge Conjecture.
It could take extra time to announce, though, as the company figures out how to navigate its rocky relationship with the math community.
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Scoop: Anthropic, Google and OpenAI have been holding regular discussions about creating an AI industry standards body, meeting as recently as this past week even as efforts in the White House stalled.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also discussed moving the idea forward without the government in a company town hall this past week
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The CEO of popular AI assistant Instinct has told investors he’s looking to raise $1b in new funding. That could imply a $10b valuation, 4xing its valuation from last month.
ICYMI: @coryweinberg and I reported last night that OpenAI's former head of Sora, Bill Peebles, is teaming up with Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and investor Sujay Jaswa to create a new startup that will develop AI models for Hollywood.
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If you thought 2 tranches was crazy, wait till you hear about 3 tranches! That was the case for Gimlet Labs' latest fundraise, which saw money go in at $2.5b, $3b and a "significantly higher" price despite the headline price being $3b.
w/ @_pheebini:
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Thrilled for our AI Agenda Live conference later this month!
Come to see my colleagues and I ask our burning questions to the researchers, execs and founders shaping the field, including Google DeepMind's Koray Kavukcuoglu and OpenAI's Thibault Sottiaux
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There’s new discussion of whether Anthropic and OpenAI will keep their best models to themselves, thanks to semianalysis. We have been writing about industry concern over this since June.
Key Q is how they’d keep up model sales revenue, given that Anthropic enterprise application revenues aren’t likely to supplant API sales anytime soon.
In any case, these companies can’t just forego large revenue opportunities…
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Anthropic’s total compute bill has long been a mystery, and became a key focus for IPO investors.
We tried to do the math, which brings us to an estimated $517B+ worth of deals and ~14.8gw+ in agreed capacity since Oct. 25
More details below + comparison w/ OpenAI:
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New w/ @_pheebini @validapau: Coatue is in talks to form a JV with chip startup MatX to finance purchases of memory and logic dies as well as capacity at chip manufacturers for the company.
The JV is in discussions to be funded with billions of dollars:
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Anthropic is looking to build more billing, fraud detection and other financial infrastructure in-house, according to job postings.
That's raising questions for what it could mean for Stripe (and helps to explain Stripe's recent OpenRouter deal):
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New @thinkymachines $40 billion round with potentially a lot of Nvidia money (again.)
w/ @_pheebini @steph_palazzolo @julia_hornstein
UPDATE: Nvidia in talks to put in $2.5B to $3B in Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab, per a16z.
Story is updated with the deets @validapau
GPT-6 Astra is out! In a press briefing, OpenAI president Greg Brockman suggested it could be AGI.
He and other execs also addressed a recent Information report about a technique that could make future models harder to monitor:
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Mira Murati's Thinking Machines is in talks to raise $1b+ at a $40b+ valuation, below the $50b+ price it was raising at last fall.
Still, it's an impressive multiple for a startup generating 100s of millions in annual. rev
@_pheebini @julia_hornstein
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I'm so excited to announce that I'm hosting The Information's new AI show! Each episode will be a deep dive into a hard technical problem with a researcher or founder working on the frontier of AI
Up first, I'll be talking with @polynoamial about the challenges with AI agents
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Hey who's that guy? 🤔
The cat's out of the bag! I'm starting an AI show!
Enjoying all the discussion about our Astra story from last night but think there's more nuance here than people are initially getting from the headline... tried to get into it a bit more in this morning's AI Agenda:
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new: OpenAI & others quietly using loop transformers that don't show their 'thinking' when scaled up
a leap forward on performance, but sparking concerns inside & outside OpenAI re: security as this takes off
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