OpenAI nears record funding round

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI’s market dominance is ready to receive a $40B stamp of approval — a record-breaking funding round that might value the ChatGPT maker at a whopping $300B.

With the AI leader currently burning billions but projecting an enormous $125B in revenues by 2029, are investors making the safest bet in tech history…Or the riskiest?

P.S. Our next workshop is today at 4 PM EST — join and learn easy methods to use the newest AI tools to take your content creation to the following level!

In today’s AI rundown:

• OpenAI nears $40B funding round

• Anthropic reveals how Claude ‘thinks’

• Add Deep Research to your AI code editors

• Qwen’s QVQ-Max visual reasoning model

• 4 recent AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

💰 OpenAI nears $40B funding round

The Rundown: OpenAI is reportedly finalizing an enormous $40B funding round led by SoftBank, which might make it the most important private funding in history — and nearly double the ChatGPT maker’s valuation to $300B.

The main points:

• SoftBank will invest an initial $7.5B, followed by one other $22.5B later this 12 months with other investors including Magnetar Capital, Coatue, and Founders Fund.

• OpenAI expects its revenue to triple to $12.7B in 2025 and turn out to be cash-flow positive by 2029 with over $125B in projected revenue.

• The corporate reportedly lost as much as $5B on $3.7B of revenue in 2024, attributed to AI infrastructure and training costs.

• The funding may also partially support OpenAI’s commitment to Stargate, the $300B AI infrastructure JV announced with SoftBank and Oracle in January.

Why it matters: OpenAI’s for-profit turn is seeking to be a record-breaking one, and each company projections and investor wallets are signaling that the AI boom shouldn’t be slowing down any time soon. The competition could also be getting tougher — but as we’ve seen this week, no company dominates mindshare within the AI world quite like OpenAI.

TOGETHER WITH TURING

🤝 Network with AI’s best at Google Cloud Next

The Rundown: Heading to Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas? Turing and Fireworks AI invite you to an exclusive evening reception on April 10  — where you may connect with fellow leaders within the AI community and unwind after a day full of insights.

Register today to:

• Network with fellow Google Cloud Next attendees

• Connect with the highest leaders in AI / LLMs

• Enjoy unbelievable food and inventive cocktails

Click here to secure your spot.

ANTHROPIC

🔬 Anthropic reveals how Claude ‘thinks’

The Rundown: Anthropic released two research papers that reveal how its AI assistant Claude processes information, helping to raised understand internal mechanisms that designate capabilities like multilingual reasoning and advanced planning.

The main points:

• The researchers developed an “AI microscope” that reveals internal “circuits” within the model, showing how Claude transforms input to output in key tasks.

• Claude uses a universal “language of thought” across different languages, with shared conceptual processing for English, French, and Chinese.

• When writing poetry, Claude plans ahead several words, identifying rhyming options before constructing lines to succeed in those planned words.

• The team also discovered a default that stops speculation unless overridden by strong confidence, helping explain how hallucination prevention works.

Why it matters: The closer we get to superintelligent AI, the more vital understanding how models process internally becomes. With research already detailing AI’s deceptive qualities and more powerful systems being integrated into life across the globe, cracking the inner workings becomes more crucial by the day.

AI TRAINING

🔍 Add Deep Research to your AI code editors

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn easy methods to connect Firecrawl’s Deep Research to your AI code editors, like Cursor and Windsurf, to access real-time web information directly in your coding environment.

Step-by-step:

1. Visit Firecrawl, create an account, and generate your free API key from the Dashboard.

2. For Windsurf: Click “Configure MCP,” paste the provided JSON code, replace the API key placeholder along with your key, and refresh the server list.

3. For Cursor: Go to Settings > MCP > Add Latest MCP Server, name it “firecrawl-mcp,” select “command”, and enter it along with your API key.

4. Start using Deep Research by typing queries like “Deep Research the newest advancements in React state management” in your editor’s chat.

Pro tip: Yow will discover the JSON code (for Windsurf) and the command (for Cursor) here. Also, be specific along with your research queries for more focused and relevant results.

PRESENTED BY SAMBANOVA

🧠 Deep Research, powered by the fastest Deepseek R1 671B

The Rundown: SambaNova just released a brand new Deep Research AI Agent that produces detailed reports and evaluation in seconds, not minutes or hours — allowing you to run complex research at a fraction of the time and price.

The main points:

• Research tasks take just 5-30 seconds to finish, so you may quickly iterate on the ultimate report

• Fully open source – connect your individual data sources

• Integrates with SambaNova Cloud, which delivers lightning-fast inference on the very best open source models, including DeepSeek R1 671B at over 255 tokens/second

Join to try Fast Deep Research for yourself!

ALIBABA

👁️ Qwen’s QVQ-Max visual reasoning model

The Rundown: Alibaba’s Qwen team released QVQ-Max, a brand new visual reasoning model that goes beyond basic image recognition to investigate and reason about visual information across images and videos.

The main points:

• The model is an evolution of QVQ-72B-Preview, expanding capabilities across mathematical problem-solving, code generation, and inventive tasks.

• QVQ-Max incorporates a “pondering” mechanism that could be adjusted in length to enhance accuracy, showing scalable gains as pondering time increases.

• Other complex visual capabilities shown include analyzing blueprints, solving geometry problems, and providing feedback on user-submitted sketches.

• Qwen said that future plans include creating a whole visual agent able to operating devices and playing games.

Why it matters: That is Qwen’s third model release this week! Between Omni, Qwen2.5-VL, and now QVQ-Max, the Chinese powerhouse continues to crank out capable models across the AI spectrum. With China flooding the market with advanced systems, the gap between the U.S. and China has never been smaller.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• ⚡Kilo Code for VS Code – AI agent extension that generates code, automates tasks, and provides suggestions. Get $15 Claude 3.7 tokens now.*

• 🎆 Ideogram 3.0 – Latest text-to-image AI with text & graphic design capabilities

• 🤖 Qwen2.5-Omni-7B – Alibaba’s multimodal AI for consumer hardware

• 📦 Amazon Interests – Shop and discover recent products with natural language

* Sponsored Listing

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🧠 Mistral AI – AI Solution Architect, Deployment

• 📅 Databricks – Executive Assistant

• ⚙️ OpenAI – ML Infrastructure Engineer

• 📱 Meta – Social Media Manager, Technology

📰 Every part else in AI today

OpenAI released an updated version of GPT-4o to paid users, featuring higher prompt adherence, improved coding and creativity, and more “freedom.”

Butterfly Effect, the Chinese startup behind the Manus AI agent, is looking for recent funding at a $500M valuation because it faces massive money burn from Claude API costs.

OpenAI is delaying the rollout of its 4o image generation to free users and imposing rate limits, with CEO Sam Altman saying the demand is “melting” the corporate’s GPUs.

AI infrastructure giant CoreWeave reduced its IPO goal from $4B to $1.5B ahead of its Nasdaq debut on Friday, with Nvidia stepping in as an anchor investor.

Archetype AI introduced “Lenses” — a brand new category of physical AI applications for its Newton model that transform sensor data into actionable insights.

PwC unveiled agent OS, a platform to integrate multi-platform AI agents into enterprise workflows as much as 10x faster than traditional methods.

Lockheed Martin is partnering with Google Public Sector to integrate genAI into its AI Factory ecosystem, aiming to reinforce national security applications.

COMMUNITY

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See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team