Techmeme
May 27, 2024, 11:40 AM

Top News

x.ai:
xAI raised a $6B Series B from Valor, Vy Capital, a16z, Sequoia, Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Holding, and others, Elon Musk says at a pre-money valuation of $18B  —  xAI is pleased to announce our series B funding round of $6 billion.  —  xAI is pleased to announce...
Axios:
Elon Musk says all of the $6B in xAI's Series B is new money rather than shares “given” to investors in Musk's takeover of Twitter  —  - That said, there's plenty of overlap in the investor list, and it's unclear if the original Twitter/X backers also received additional equity in xAI …
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
A closer look at Apple's AI strategy: Project Greymatter, local and cloud LLM data processing, Siri, sealing a chatbot partnership deal with OpenAI, and more  —  Though Apple's first set of modern AI features won't be as impressive as rival offerings, the company is betting that its massive customer base can give it an edge.
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
Researchers find that GPT-4 can outperform human analysts in predicting the direction of future corporate earnings even when given only financial statements  —  Researchers from the University of Chicago have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) can conduct financial statement analysis …
Lulu Garcia-Navarro / New York Times:
Q&A with Netflix's Ted Sarandos on the state of Hollywood, shifting US tastes, programming strategy, ads, corporate activism, YouTube, live events, AI, and more  —  Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times  —  If you're anything like me, you probably spent some large portion of this week sitting on your couch watching Netflix.
Wall Street Journal:
An analysis of ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity's responses to some real-life questions and everyday tasks: Perplexity ranked first overall  —  We tested OpenAI's ChatGPT against Microsoft's Copilot and Google's Gemini, along with Perplexity and Anthropic's Claude.  Here's how they ranked.
Reuters:
China set up a new ~$47.5B state-backed investment fund on May 24 as the third and largest phase of its Big Fund to boost the country's semiconductor industry  —  China has set up a new state-backed investment fund with registered capital of 344 billion yuan ($47.5 billion) to boost the country's semiconductor industry.
Louise Matsakis / Big Technology:
How Shein and Temu, which are spending billions on digital ads and offering steep discounts or free products, have become big threats to Amazon in the US  —  In the fall of 2020, Amazon looked unstoppable.  The pandemic lockdowns had supercharged its e-commerce business …
TIME:
LLMs aren't sentient; they lack the physiological states required for sensations like hunger and pain, and thus can't have subjective experiences of such states  —  Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the term used to describe an artificial agent that is at least as intelligent as a human …

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Washington Post: