GM! It’s Brett again. We’re coming out of stealth on October 8th at an AI-themed hacker house in SF during a16z’s SF Tech Week.

If you’re in town, I’d love to see you there! RSVP here.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY:

🏠 AI

IlyAI

So we all know that Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's co-founder and former chief scientist, left the company in May 2024 following the November 2023 leadership drama involving Sam Altman.

Then in June of this year, Ilya launched Safe Superintelligence (SSI) with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, aiming to develop AI systems that surpass human intelligence while prioritizing safety.

Last week, SSI announced a $1B funding round, valuing the 3-month-old company at $5B. Yeah a billion, with a "B"

This is crazy for a startup with just 10 employees. Their investors include heavyweights like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and DST Global.

By the way, this is their landing page - maybe they're saving the flashy stuff for the superintelligence.

SSI's playing the long game, though. They're not rushing to market. Instead, they're gearing up for years of R&D, snagging top talent, and beefing up their compute power.

The big picture: This mega funding round shows just how crucial AI safety has become. It's not just about building smart AI anymore - it's also about building safe AI. And investors are willing to bet big on it.

Speak naturally, Flow writes perfectly for you

It’s 2024. It’s crazy that we still have typewriters attached to our computers. If you same, Flow might be exactly what you need. You just speak naturally, and it writes exactly what you would’ve typed — without all mistakes Siri makes. And it works in every application on your computer. Flow is 3x faster than typing, and even cleans up your rambles, formats it, and fixes mistakes automatically.

Whether you’re messaging, emailing, or writing ideas, Flow adapts to your style and context, so it fits seamlessly into whatever you’re doing. And it works right in apps like ChatGPT and Cursor for the best AI prompting experience.

Curious? Download Flow in by Sep 12th to try the Pro version for free.

🤝 THE LATEST IN…

TECH

• Salesforce acquires data management firm Own for $1.9B.

• Bluesky blew up to 9M+ users, thanks to a Brazilian X ban.

• More advertisers are planning to leave X.

• Paylocity is acquiring corporate spend startup Airbase for $325M.

AI

• Gemini's got an upgrade: now you can fine-tune models.

• GPT-5's not coming, but 'GPT-Next' is – and OpenAI Japan says it’ll be 100x better than GPT-4.

• Benchmarking over 80 LLMs shows which model is best for each programming language.

• Anthropic launched Claude for Enterprise.

SCIENCE

• Elon said that the first Starships to Mars will launch in 2 years.

• Gene therapy gave some patients 10,000x vision boost.

• A new nonhormonal drug is easing menopause hot flashes and boosting sleep.

• NASA's calling in SpaceX to rescue stranded astronauts after Boeing’s Starliner hit some major hiccups.

CRYPTO

• Friend.Tech called it quits, renouncing control over the smart contracts.

• Tether drops $102M on South American agribusiness, says land is crucial.

• Japan’s big three banks are teaming up on “Project Pax” to bring faster cross-border payments with stablecoins.

• Snapshot X enabled gas-free onchain voting for DAOs via Starknet.

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

Raise: All Hands AI, an open source AI agent platform for developers, raised $5M in a seed funding round to build model-agnostic AI assistants that handle routine programming tasks.

Stat: $279 Billion. That's how much Nvidia lost in market cap, the largest single-day loss for any US stock ever, as Wall Street had a broad tech selloff.

Rabbit Hole: The Subscription Value Loop (Phil Carter)

🤩 MONDAY MOTIVATION

🛠️ FOUNDERS CORNER

The best resources we recently came across that will help you become a better founder, builder, or investor.

📉 Explo lets you embed customer-facing analytics in your product.

🚀 Solidroad turns simulated sales calls to real revenue.

📊 One Schema helps you impost CSV data faster.

❓️ AI GENERATED OR NOT

Last week’s answer: If you guessed AI-generated… you were wrong. Here’s the original.

REACH 40K+ FOUNDERS, INVESTORS & OPERATORS

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