Nvidia is now the third most valuable company in the world.

Nvidia is now the third most valuable company in the world, right behind Microsoft and Apple.After the frenzy of the AI chip-maker’s highly-anticipated Q3 earnings on Thursday, Nvidia’s stock price jumped 16% — increasing its market value by $273 billion in just one day. They reported making $18 billion in revenue in the third quarter, up 265% from a year ago.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attributes its rocketship trajectory to “the era of generative AI taking off”.

“Large language model startups, consumer internet companies and global cloud service providers were the first movers, and the next waves are starting to build. Nations and regional CSPs are investing in AI clouds to serve local demand, enterprise software companies are adding AI copilots and assistants to their platforms, and enterprises are creating custom AI to automate the world’s largest industries,” he said.

It seems like customer demand for AI is far outpacing supply. What a wild ride!

The Long Read

Inside the funding frenzy at Anthropic, one of AI’s hottest start-ups: The company raised $7.3 billion over the last year, as the lure of artificial intelligence changes Silicon Valley deal-making (link)

🔥 Latest news

• OpenAI valued at $80bn after deal, NYT reports: Microsoft-backed OpenAI has completed a deal that values the artificial intelligence company at $80 billion or more, the New York Times reported, citing people with knowledge of the deal. The company would sell existing shares in a so-called tender offer led by venture firm Thrive Capital, the report said. Under the deal, employees will be able to cash out their shares of the company rather than a traditional funding round which would raise money for the business, the report added.

• Google launches Gemini 1.5 with ‘experimental’ 1M token context: Google has unveiled its latest AI model, Gemini 1.5, which features what the company calls an “experimental” one million token context window. The new capability allows Gemini 1.5 to process extremely long text passages – up to one million characters – to understand context and meaning. This dwarfs previous AI systems like Claude 2.1 and GPT-4 Turbo, which max out at 200,000 and 128,000 tokens respectively. 

• ElevenLabs to launch AI for sound effects: After mastering the art of machine learning (ML) based voice cloning and synthesis, ElevenLabs, the two-year-old AI startup founded by former Google and Palantir employees, is moving to expand its portfolio with a new text-to-sound model. The AI will allow creators to generate sound effects by simply describing their imagination in words. It is expected to enrich content in a new way in the age of AI-driven digital experiences. The model is not available publicly, but ElevenLabs has showcased its capabilities by releasing a minute-long teaser featuring videos produced by OpenAI’s new Sora and enhanced with its own AI sounds.

• OpenAI reportedly working on a Google rival that will supercharge your searches: The AI search engine could be a new feature for ChatGPT, or a potentially separate app altogether. Microsoft Bing would allegedly power the service from Sam Altman, which could be the most serious threat Google Search has ever faced. 

• Softbank’s Masayoshi Son is reportedly seeking $100B to build a new AI chip venture: According to a report in Bloomberg, the SoftBank founder is seeking $100 billion to build a new venture that would compete with the likes of Nvidia in the area of AI chips. Code-named Izanagi, the new venture would collaborate with Arm, the chip design company that SoftBank spun out as a public company last year. It still owns about 90% of the Arm’s stock as of this month. Following some of the same playbook that SoftBank used when pulling together its outsized Vision Fund investment funds, the report said that it plans to tap Middle East-based institutional investors for about $70 billion of the $100 billion sum. SoftBank itself would foot the remaining $30 billion. 

• NVIDIA unveils Eos – The next leap in supercomputing dominance: NVIDIA introduces Eos, its fourth-generation DGX H100 System that is set to be the world’s fastest supercomputer.  With an astounding 32 petaflops of AI performance potential, equivalent to one quadrillion floating-point operations per second, this new system outpaces its predecessor by a factor of six. The enhanced capabilities of the DGX H100 System enable it to handle the immense computational demands of large language models crucial for generative AI applications.

• Groq AI model goes viral and rivals ChatGPT, challenges Elon Musk’s Grok: Groq, the latest AI tool to come onto the scene, is taking social media by storm with its response speed and new technology that may dispense with the need for GPUs. Groq became an overnight sensation after its public benchmark tests went viral on the social media platform X, revealing its computation and response speed to outperform popular AI chatbot ChatGPT. Groq Inc, the developer of this model, claims to have created the first language processing unit (LPU) through which it runs its model, rather than the scarce and costly graphics processing units (GPUs) typically used to run AI models

🔧 Cool Tools and Experiments

• Bulletin: An AI-powered news reader that tackles clickbait and summarizes stories

• Google introduces ‘Shop with Google AI’ feature, accessible to select users through the Google Search app that enables them to seamlessly search for products and generate AI-inspired outfit variations with a single click

• Moxie: An AI-powered emotionally intelligent robot that can play with and teach kids

• Instagram rolls out new AI feature Backdrop that lets creators replace the background of photos with AI 

• Mistral quietly releases a new model in testing called ‘next’. Early users testing the model are reporting capabilities that meet or surpass GPT-4

💰 Latest Startup Fundings

• Qloo, an AI-powered insights engine composed of highly-accurate behavioral data from consumers around the globe, raised $25M in its Series C.

• PayPal-backed Rasa raises $30M to grow conversational AI platform

• Zocks, an AI that pulls structured data from free-flowing conversations, emerged from stealth with $5.5M in seed funding from LightSpeed Venture Partners

• Yuga Labs, the Web3 lifestyle and media company that created Bored Ape Yacht Club and Otherside, acquired Proof, a Web3 digital art platform

• China-based AI startup Moonshot AI secures $1B in funding led by Alibaba and the venture capital firm HongShan