OpenAI co-founder raises $1B seed round

Welcome, AI enthusiasts.

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s recent AI safety startup just raised a whopping $1 billion seed round, valuing it at $5 billion after only three months.

With SSI sitting on a pile of money, a ‘cracked‘ team, and backing by tech’s most prolific investors — are we about to finally discover what Ilya saw? Let’s get into it…

In today’s AI rundown:

• OpenAI co-founder raises $1B for AI safety

• The fastest AI model goes multimodal

• Turn any text into speech in seconds

• AI gets smarter by re-reading questions

• 6 recent AI tools & 4 recent AI jobs

• More AI & tech news

Read time: 4 minutes

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

SSI

💰 OpenAI co-founder raises $1B for AI safety

The Rundown: Protected Superintelligence (SSI), a brand new AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, just raised $1 billion in funding to develop protected AI systems that surpass human intelligence.

The small print:

• SSI plans to concentrate on AI safety, aiming to create superintelligent AI systems which can be protected for humans and can spend years on R&D before bringing any product to market.

• Sutskever, Daniel Gross, and Daniel Levy founded SSI just three months ago, and the corporate is now valued at $5 billion.

• The startup, which only has ten employees, plans to make use of the funds to accumulate computing power and hire top talent.

• Investors include major enterprise capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital.

Why it matters: That is the primary time a startup — that only got here into existence three months ago — raised a whopping $1 billion dollars for a seed round. Nevertheless it doesn’t come without reason, as Ilya Sutskever was one among the major reasons OpenAI is what it’s today, and SSI is sure to draw some incredible talent.

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GROQ

🔥 The fastest AI model goes multimodal

The Rundown: Groq just launched LLaVA v1.5 7B, a robust, recent multimodal AI model that may understand each images and text and reportedly runs 4x faster than OpenAI’s GPT-4o.

The small print:

• LLaVA v1.5 7B can answer questions on images, generate captions, and have interaction in conversations involving text, voice, and pictures.

• The model can be used for various tasks like visual product inspection, inventory management, and creating image descriptions for visually impaired users.

• That is Groq’s first enterprise into multimodal models and faster processing times on image, audio, and text inputs may lead to higher AI assistants.

• Groq is currently offering this model for free in “Preview Mode” for developers to experiment with.

Why it matters: Groq went viral earlier this 12 months for its blazing-fast AI speeds — and now it’s pairing those capabilities with powerful multimodal models. In relation to AI apps, faster is at all times higher, and the insane speeds paired with advanced models open the door for an countless supply of latest applications.

AI TRAINING

🎧 Turn any text into speech in seconds

The Rundown: ElevenLabs’ free mobile app (for each iOS and Android) allows users to convert any text into high-quality audio using AI voiceovers, across multiple languages.

Step-by-step:

1. Download the ElevenLabs app from their website and create a free account.

2. Tap the “+” icon and select “Submit File” to upload your text.

3. Tap “Generate” to create your audio file, then find it in your library to listen.

Pro tip: You’ll be able to truly customize your audio by choosing from a whole bunch of AI voice options.

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• AI’s role in enhancing creative flow states

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AI RESEARCH

📚 AI gets smarter by re-reading questions

The Rundown: Researchers have discovered that making AI systems ‘re-read‘ questions twice, mimicking human behavior, significantly improves their reasoning and problem-solving abilities across various tasks.

The small print:

• The technique, called RE2 (Re-Reading), improves AI performance in math, common sense, and symbolic reasoning by simply repeating the query before answering.

• It really works with different AI models and might be combined with other AI reasoning techniques.

• The strategy is best when repeating the query twice — more repetitions can decrease performance.

• RE2 even improved non-instruction-tuned AI models, showing broad applicability.

Why it matters: RE2 adds to the growing list of research showing the potential of mimicking the best way humans think and process to enhance AI. The simplicity of this research also suggests that many AI corporations could also be overlooking basic, human-inspired prompting techniques in the search towards the very best performing model.

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• 🔬 Synthesia – Sr. Research Engineer

QUICK HITS

Anthropic launched Claude Enterprise, competing with ChatGPT Enterprise by offering larger context windows and GitHub integration for businesses.

Google committed $10 million to enhance AI literacy amongst young people in 17 countries and across 13 different languages.

Sakana AI raised $100M in Series A funding and announced a collaboration with Nvidia to advance AI research and infrastructure in Japan.

Salesforce agreed to accumulate AI voice agent firm Tenyx to boost its AI offerings, joining tech giants within the race for AI talent and technology.

A Samsung executive reportedly revealed GPT-5 specs, 3.5 trillion parameters and 7000 B100 GPUs for compute, at SEMICON Taiwan.

Microsoft announced Copilot+ AI features will expand to recent laptops starting in November, broadening its AI capabilities beyond ARM-based devices.

You.com raised $50M to concentrate on AI productivity agents for complex queries, moving away from general AI search.

THAT’S A WRAP

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