The Nugget

Last week saw significant developments in AI, including a $1 billion fundraising round for startup SSI, the launch of advanced language models, and Apple's entry into AI capabilities, indicating a rapidly evolving landscape where competition and innovation are at an all-time high.

Make it stick

💰 SSI raised $1 billion for AI development, signaling strong VC interest.
🖼️ Mistl's Pixel 12 model enhances vision-language AI capabilities with 130,000+ tokens.
⚡ Sambanova claims the fastest inference speeds for Lama 3.1 models at 132 tokens/sec.
🎥 Halo's MiniMax impresses with AI-generated video, blurring the line between reality and AI outputs.

SSI's $1 Billion Fundraising: Ilia Sutskever's startup, SSI, secures significant funding from notable VCs, highlighting confidence in its potential.
Glean's Enterprise RAG Model: Startup raises $260 million, aiming to transform enterprise data search through AI.

Mistl's Pixel 12 Model: A new multimodal vision-language model featuring a 12 billion parameter backbone, enhancing AI's ability to understand and generate visual content.
Sambanova's Optimized Inference: Claims speed advancements for the Lama 3.1 model at 132 tokens/sec, intensifying competition in the high-performance AI space.
Deep Seek v2.5: A model merging coding and chat functions, showing significant improvements in instruction following and coding benchmarks.

Mini CPM Series: A new Chinese model that competes with larger models, proving effective for niche tasks with a multilingual capability.
MiniMax for Video Generation: Demonstrates next-level AI capabilities in video synthesis, raising discussions about the future of AI-generated content.

Reflection 70 Billion Model: Despite its hype, feedback suggests it isn't living up to the expected performance improvements, pushing focus toward alternatives like Deep Seek and Mini CPM.
Apple AI Event: Announced new iPhones and integrated on-device AI, aiming for user-friendly, accessible AI technology, potentially engaging a broader audience.

"This is literally for VCs the ticket to get on another open AI."
"If you know like this is like a very big large GPU cluster... that communication has been improved."
"The new model is a much better coder... according to them this model performs really good."
"Small language models are extremely underrated at this point."
"Apple is going to take AI and put it in the hands of every single human who uses iPhone."

This summary contains AI-generated information and may have important inaccuracies or omissions.