GM! It’s Brett again. Last week, I had a wild convo with a billionaire and one of the world’s leading mathematicians - Jorge Paulo Lemann, the founder of 3G Investments, and Stephen Wolfram, the guy behind Wolfram Alpha.

They were such a stark contrast: the billionaire wished he’d focused less on the bottom line, while the math genius didn’t capitalize enough on his ideas. It was humbling to hear these two legends admit they didn’t have it all figured out, reminding me that even the most successful people face uncertainties.

Oh, and it was great to hear Wolfram express excitement about our product.

Anyway, let's get to it.

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🏠 AI

The $157B Drama

The OpenAI drama didn’t stop when last month a bunch of big names headed for the exit, including CTO Mira Murati.

OpenAI's been on a wild ride this past week as well. They just closed a monster $6.6B funding round, valuing the company at $157B. But that's not all - they also snagged a $4B credit line.

But you know what the real kicker is: OpenAI reportedly asked investors to steer clear of backing rivals like Anthropic and xAI.

Despite projecting $3.7B in revenue this year, they're looking at $5B in losses. AI operational cost ain’t cheap.

Word on the street is OpenAI might ditch its nonprofit structure. But the non-profit will continue to exist and own a minority stake in the for-profit company.

On the product side, OpenAI's DevDay 2024 brought a slew of API upgrades for developers. They launched Realtime API for speech-to-speech apps, introduced Model Distillation to simplify fine-tuning smaller models, and rolled out Prompt Caching to cut costs and boost response times.

The bottom line: OpenAI is flexing hard - throwing haymakers with this massive cash infusion and product push. But with competition heating up and internal shakeups, the AI race is getting spicy. Keep your eyes peeled - this space is moving at warp speed.

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🤝 THE LATEST IN…

TECH

• YC is in hot water after backing PearAI, a coding editor that openly admitted it cloned VSCode.

• 11M+ android devices got hit by the Necro malware, hiding in popular apps like Wuta Camera.

• Google might ditch linking to New Zealand news if a new law makes them pay for it.

• Tesla posts quarterly increase in deliveries, but shares slump.

AI

• Meta’s after OpenAI’s Sora, introduced it’s own AI video generator. 

• Anthropic hires OpenAI co-founder Durk Kingma.

• OpenAI launched a “Canvas” feature for ChatGPT, letting you tweak text and code side-by-side.

• Google’s chasing OpenAI,  working on reasoning AI.

SCIENCE

• Alien civilizations might be cooking their planets to death with climate change.

• Turns out ants have been farming fungi for 66M years.

• Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun awarded Nobel for gene-regulating ‘microRNAs’

• NASA powered down another instrument on Voyager 2 to keep the 47-year-old spacecraft cruising through interstellar space.

CRYPTO

• Elon hyped up Trump’s rally and sent Dark MAGA coin soaring 316%.

• Japan’s Metaplanet dropped another $6.7M on bitcoin, pushing their stash to over $40M.

• FTX's discounted tokens drawing investor interest.

• EigenLayer investigates suspicious wallet that sold $5.5M worth of EIGEN tokens.

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

Raise: Poolside, an AI-powered software development platform, raised $500M in a Series B funding round to enhance its AI-driven assistive tool suite for developers.

Stat: 79%. That's how much Fidelity has slashed the value of Elon's X since the $44 billion purchase.

Rabbit Hole: The Intelligence Age (Sam Altman)

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