Your weekly briefing on all things AI

While a considerable amount of time is focused on the application realm of AI, this week’s newsletter highlights a critical aspect underpinning all AI innovation: infrastructure. Understanding the often overlooked AI infrastructure and it’s developing technical landscape, gives an edge to investors and founders when evaluating the potential of category defining startups.

Let’s dive in:

📰 $Billions Going Towards Data Centers

📈 Scale AI Looking At a $13B Valuation

💡 Doctors Get it Easier, Financial Planners Get it Harder

🛠️ Knowledge Management or “Second Brain” Tools

📰 AI in the News

$250 Billion in Data Center Investment Plans

The recent surge in AI developments has prompted significant investments in data center infrastructure by tech giants. Amazon is committing a staggering $150 billion to data center expansion, aimed at supporting a boom in AI and cloud computing services. Concurrently, OpenAI, in partnership with Microsoft, is launching the ambitious "Stargate" project, a $100 billion venture for an AI-focused data center equipped with a supercomputer.

Why it matters: This trend not only highlights opportunities in direct AI applications but also in the supporting ecosystem – including energy solutions for data centers, advanced computing hardware, cooling solutions etc.

For context: Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle collectively spent only $160 billion in 2022 to boost their cloud computing capabilities, up an average of 30% over the past five years, according to Newmark's U.S. data center market overview report that published in January.

More Stories

• Sam Altman gives up control of OpenAI Startup Fund, resolving unusual corporate venture structure. (link)

• ChatGPT becomes way more accessible. (link)

• Wendy’s launches an AI loyalty program. (link)

• Orchard Vision turns farm equipment into data collectors. (link)

• Adobe’s Firefly makes 20+ APIs available to developers. (link)

• Google Launches a $20 Million accelerator program. (link)

• OpenAI is developing voice cloning. (link)

📈 Venture Deals

Scale AI Raising Funds at a $13 Billion Valuation

Scale AI is a startup company that provides "data infrastructure to power the AI revolution." Their main focus is on helping companies and organizations build high-quality training data for AI and machine learning models, particularly for applications like self-driving cars, robotics, and computer vision.

Accel is in talks to lead a new funding round for Scale AI. The round is expected to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The Information’s sources added that the deal is set to boost Scale AI’s valuation by 80% to about $13 billion. (Full Story)

More Venture Deals

• Adept raised $350M to train neural networks to perform general tasks for enterprise clients (link)

• FundGuard raised $100M for its AI accounting platform (link)

• Foundry raised $80M to build an AI-optimized public cloud (link)

• Eliyan raised $60M for chiplet interconnects that speed up AI chips (link)

• BigID raised $60M to propel AI data security innovations (link)

• Robovision raised $42M to accelerate industrial automation (link)

• 0G Labs raised $35M to build a modular AI blockchain (link)

• Profluent raised $35M to scale foundational AI models for biomedicine (Link)

• Fieldguide raised $30M for it’s accounting industry offering (link)

• Spectral raised $30M for medical diagnostics (link)

• Borderless raised $27M for AI-powered HR innovation (link)

• NeuReality raised $20M for its disruptive AI Inference technology (link)

• Axion Ray raised $17.5M to countermeasure emerging issues
  before they impact customers (link)

💡 Industry Impacts

🏥 Healthcare

Sutter Health Brings GenAI to it’s Doctors & Staff: In a team up with Abridge AI, Sutter is helping Doctors and staff avoid burnout by saving them time on menial tasks like writing paperwork. Abridge also secured a $150 million Series C financing from strategic partners like Nvidia. (link)

⚖️ Legal

Utah Forces GenAI Transparency: Utah became the first U.S. state to enact a comprehensive AI statute governing private-sector AI usage. The statute requires clear and conspicuous disclosure when individuals interact with Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). Utah's AI Law imposes fines and enforcement measures for violations, with penalties of up to $2,500 per violation. (link)

💰 Finance

AI is Already Disrupting Traditional Financial Planning: Many newer AI-powered companies are pitching a different model for their advice. Charging a flat fee, as needed, rather than a % of assets, keeps their offerings much more widely accessible and AI helps them keep their costs low. (link)

🛠️ Tool of the Week

Imagine having a ChatGPT-like application that could access all of your documents, notes, and conversations for context? Heyday is an AI copilot that plugs into all of your files, emails, call transcripts and more to create a query-able database. Knowledge management tools like this lay the groundwork for real Jarvis-like AI assistants or what many call a “second brain”.

More AI Knowledge Management Tools

• Mindpal is a knowledge management platform that you can build AI Agents with.

• Quivr is hailed by many as a “second brain”.

• TextCortext has a large suite of products/extensions to integrate AI into your regular workflows.