Weekly Wrap: "Google Shocks the World with Massive Investment in Cutting-Edge Startup Claude - Find Out What's Next!"
The A.I. race is on! $300M to GPT competitor and band of ex-Open AI'ers | PLUS: We map the Open AI Mafia
Featured podcast episodes this past week:
S2, Ep 9: Alex Banks — This A.I. helps you go viral on Twitter
S2, Ep 10: Dana Sydoreneko & Gametree Non-Toxic Gamer Matches
S2, Ep 11: Jordan Shamir and Yofi Fight Bots
S2, Ep 12: Jimmy Soni: The Founders: The PayPal Mafia Story
ChatGPT3 wrote our headline
Is there an Open AI Mafia?
This chart says yes.
Hey! What are you doing February 7th at 12noon PST?
You’re watching our Winner Takes All Pitch Event that is what you are doing
🔥 3 Celebrity investor judges
🔥 $100 staked/founder
🔥 5 founders
🔥 Each gives 1 minute pitch
🔥 4 minutes to answer judges questions
One of the prime examples that inspired Form Your Own Pack and Founders Pack, is the PayPal Mafia.
We’ve heard from Shane Feldberg about the Clearco Mafia, but rapidly offshoots from OpenAI are happening.
The best news came for the kids at Anthropic who raised $300M from Google this week. Anthropic is lead by ex Open AI VP of Research Dario Amodei.
Their chat model Claude will rival Chat GPT3 for General Artificial Intelligence chat supremacy.
I particularly love Adept who have built a model that does pretty much anything a human can do at a keyboard. Adept can be told to make new columns or rows and calculations in spreadsheets, add contacts to Salesforce, research Redfin for a new house in a price range and market locale… and more. They’ve raised $65M to date. They are lead by David Luan former VP of Engineering from Open AI.
Jeff Arnold leads accounting A.i Pilot. Pilot provides accounting, CFO, and tax services for startups and growing businesses. They have raised $165M to date.
Peter Chen is a former research scientist at Open Ai and has raised $147M for Covariant which is described as a Computer Vision A.i brain “that actually works.” Wait there are not working AI computer brains. Sounds like we need to avoid them. Who are they?
The Berkeley-based startup offers an off-the-shelf universal AI for robots, the Covariant Brain, which has the potential to transform retail and other industries. They are predicted to go public next year with a valuation of over $1 billion.
Who’s the robot in this Dall-E 2 painting? Hmm you tell us, Peter Chen
Maddie Hall leads the team at Living Carbon (you mean like - humans?) and they’ve raised $36 M. The self described ‘public benefit company’ has a a mission to fight climate change by through CO2 capture & storage in trees. (Isn’t that already a thing photosynetfisis? Asking for a friend) We’d like to know more about how you monetize that Maddie! (DM me back pls)
What going on with Josh Tobin. Who, you may ask? Josh is a former Open AI research scientist now at Gantry. Allegedly “loved by engineers”, Tobin and co-founder Vicki Cheung have built Gantry - which helps improve its client’s Machine Learning (ML) products with analytics. They’ve raised a seed round. Seed + Series A for $28.3M? geez that was fast. The round was led by Amplify and Coatue, and with participation from Index Ventures, South Park Commons, and a host of amazing angel investors like Pieter Abbeel and Greg Brockman.
Jonas Schneider is also ex-OpenAI and has raised $14M for Dadaelius to develop “reconfigurable production capacity”. What does this mean? basically it is manufacturing capacity that can be retooled instantly. Through robotics and AI they aim to have configurable agile manufacturing for any process, volume, and part complexity. Geez why don’t you just make a Replicator from Star Trek next Jonas?
How about Ashley Pilipiszyn? She is a pilot, scientist communicator, and adventurer. Prior to co-founding Titan, she was at OpenAI, SLAC National Accelerator Lab, and Stanford University where she worked on applied science challenges - and her company Titan believes Anyone can be an astronaut. “It’s time to give space a technology upgrade and make it accessible to everyone that wants to imagine, create, experiment and invent everything.”
Thats great! But have we heard of Wolves in Space Titan? Lets chat
OK this next one is creeping me out a bit. Turning stem cells into human eggs is their tagline. Conception Bio and Matt Krilsoff are working on a technology that would give women the opportunity to have children well into their forties and fifties,. OK thats fine, but will these kids are three eyes? They also want to potentially allow male-male couples to have biological children.
Bruh, maybe we need to think about this. Have you ever watched the Stepford wives? Or its lesser very unrelated non-cousin film with Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman The Switch? meh I don’t know Conception is 110% something to keep an eye on though.
Finally we’ll mention Ludwig Petterson’s company Quill. They already got bought - by Twitter. Twitter has acquired Quill, a Slack rival in the business-focused messaging space, the companies said on Tuesday. The specific terms of the deal weren't disclosed.
"Together with Twitter, we will continue to pursue our original goal -- to make online communication more thoughtful, and more effective, for everyone," Quill said in the release. As part of the acquisition, Quill will cease operations and users will have until Dec. 11 to export their message history before the service shuts down and deletes all the data from its servers.
What is up Elon Musk? What is the plan for Team Quill?
Is this where the PayPal Mafia + Open AI Mafia meet? Well actually since Elon founded then abandoned Open AI- they kind of already have cross DNA but it will be exciting to track the progress of these startups and the inevitable next wave that come out of Open AI now that Chat GPT3 has hit 100M subs.
This party is just getting started