I think this week will likely go down in history as a tipping point in the AI world. Yes, I know it sounds a bit dramatic but honestly, I think there are some pretty foundational things that happened this week that we'll look back at ten years from now and say, "that was one heck of a week!"
So let's just jam through it all, and as I try to do on here, quickly so you can spend 3-5 mins getting up-to-date and then back to your day. First, yes, OpenAI made history this week with the biggest fundraising round ever, a $6.6B raise on an $157B valuation.
For those not keeping score, OpenAI is losing about $5B a year so while this funding round is big, and record-breaking, they need it to do what they're doing. One interesting note on this round is that Apple, who previously was expected to participate, dropped out, and OpenAI also told their investors not to invest in Anthropic, Perplexity, X.ai and a few other AI companies they're going head-to-head with.
And while we're on the topic of OpenAI, they also announced Canvas - new AI coding tool. This announcement probably wasn't received super well by the team over at Cursor who have been the front-runners in the AI coding space and now have a new competitor that just raised $6.6B...but, so it goes.
So that's already a lot for one week, but like I said above, I think this week will go down in history as a tipping point, and Meta was able to jump on the train with their announcement of Movie Gen, their solution for creating and editing video with AI.
For anyone who knows me, you know I take wayyyy too many videos, and I never have time to edit them. I was just talking with a friend on a backpacking trip this weekend and he was asking me when I was ever going to have time to edit my videos. I told him, "I won't need time, AI will solve it for me sometime very soon."
Of course, I didn't know it would be this soon, but it's happened, and with Meta making a move like this, my guess is there's going to be a lot more to follow.
So yeah, that was this week in AI. I'll be in SF for tech week next week drinking from the AI firehose, can't wait to soak it all in. For now, thanks for reading and have a great weekend!