AI

This Week in AI: VCs (and devs) are enthusiastic about AI coding tools

Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. This week in AI, two startups developing tools to generate and suggest code — Magic and Codeium — raised nearly half a billion dollars combined. The rounds were high even by AI sector standards, especially considering […]

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The Cosmos Institute, whose founding fellows include Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, launches grant programs and an AI lab

The Cosmos Institute, a nonprofit whose founding fellows include Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark and former Defense Department technologist Brendan McCord, has announced a venture program and research initiatives to — in the organization’s words — “cultivate a new generation of technologists and entrepreneurs equipped with deep philosophical thinking to navigate the uncharted territory of our

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Ilya Sutskever’s startup, Safe Superintelligence, raises $1B

Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised over $1 billion in capital from investors including NFDG (an investment partnership run by Nat Friedman and SSI CEO Daniel Gross), a16z, Sequoia, DST Global and SV Angel. SSI told Reuters that it plans to use the tranche to

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Before Midjourney, there was NightCafe — and it’s still kicking

Elle Russell, co-founder of Cairns, Australia-based NightCafe, which offers a suite of AI-powered art-creating tools, prefers to avoid the spotlight. “I like to remain hidden behind my monitors,” she told me in a recent interview. NightCafe is similarly low profile. The company, which Russell helped her partner, Angus Russell, launch five years ago, doesn’t get

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The org behind the data set used to train Stable Diffusion claims it has removed CSAM

LAION, the German research org that created the data used to train Stable Diffusion, among other generative AI models, has released a new data set that it claims has been “thoroughly cleaned of known links to suspected child sexual abuse material (CSAM).” The new data set, Re-LAION-5B, is actually a re-release of an old data

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Generative AI coding startup Magic lands $320M investment from Eric Schmidt, Atlassian and others

Magic, an AI startup developing models to generate code and automate a range of software development tasks, says that it’s raised a large tranche of cash from investors including ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In a blog post on Thursday, Magic said that it closed a $320 million fundraising round with contributions from Schmidt, Jane Street,

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GitHub Copilot competitor Codeium raises $150M at a $1.25B valuation

A startup whose product competes with GitHub Copilot and other AI-powered coding assistants has achieved unicorn status. On Thursday, Codeium said it closed a $150 million Series C round led by General Catalyst that values the company at $1.25 billion post-money. The round, which also saw participation from existing investors Kleiner Perkins and Greenoaks Capital,

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OpenAI reportedly in talks to close a new funding round at $100B+ valuation

OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, could be in talks to raise a massive tranche of cash. The Wall Street Journal reports that OpenAI may be close to closing a fundraising round led by Thrive Capital, a previous investor, that’d value the AI company at over $100 billion. That’s substantially higher than OpenAI’s previous $86 billion

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