AI language learning startup Speak secured $20M in Series B-3 funding, reaching a $500M valuation, to further develop its voice-to-voice interface that has helped over 10 million users across 40+ countries learn English through pattern recognition and repetition rather than memorization.
Paris-based AI startup Poolside.ai reportedly seeks to raise $400 million at a $2 billion valuation, potentially joining other French AI companies in securing substantial funding.
Anthropic has launched Claude 3.5 Sonnet, a new AI model that outperforms competitors and its predecessor in various tasks. Claude 3.5 Sonnet offers enhanced intelligence, speed, improved vision capabilities, and new features like Artifacts, while maintaining a strong focus on safety and privacy.
OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever has launched Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), a new for-profit AI company focused solely on developing safe superintelligent AI systems using an engineering-based approach instead of the traditional guardrails enforced on most AI systems.
Microsoft's Azure AI team has released Florence-2, a versatile vision foundation model available on Hugging Face, which uses a unified prompt-based approach to excel at various vision and vision-language tasks, outperforming larger task-specific models in several benchmarks.
Elevenlabs released a demo that showcases the capabilities of its Texts to Sounds Effects API. The demo enables users to add sound effects to any video they upload. The company also announced partnerships and collaborations with PocketFM, AnyTopic, and the creative production firm Tool.
Amazon has made MLflow, an open-source MLOps platform, generally available as a fully managed capability on Amazon SageMaker, offering streamlined ML lifecycle management with comprehensive experiment tracking, unified model governance, and efficient server management across most AWS Regions.
Meta's FAIR team has released several cutting-edge AI models and datasets, including multimodal generation, text-to-music conversion models, and tools to increase geographic representation in text-to-image models, to foster open innovation and collaboration within the global AI research community.
Researchers have developed an AI-powered blood test that could provide early diagnosis for Parkinson's disease long before symptoms appear, potentially revolutionizing early detection and treatment of this neurodegenerative condition.
Apolitical's Government AI Campus, a knowledge hub for civil servants, has received a $5 million grant from Google.org to expand its AI education offerings. The platform aims to reach one million public sector workers within two years.
Waabi, a pioneering generative AI company for autonomous vehicles, has raised $200 million in Series B funding to launch fully driverless trucks in 2025, leveraging its innovative end-to-end AI system and advanced simulator to achieve unprecedented progress in the autonomous trucking industry.
CuspAI, a company developing an AI-powered platform to accelerate the design of novel materials for sustainability and clean energy, came out of stealth after raising a $30 million seed funding round and securing a partnership with Meta.