$1 Billion Preseed, Efficiency, & Video Games

1/ Efficiency Before Replacement?

For years, we’ve heard the doomsayers: “AI will take all your jobs.” And sure, in the long run, some roles may change, but in the short term? It’s about making us more efficient, with AI as our trusty copilot.

Consider the UK’s productivity gap – it’s 24% lower than it would have been if pre-2008 levels held. Could AI be the secret sauce to bridging that divide?

Even blue-collar workers are reaping the rewards in manufacturing. AI is helping with predictive maintenance, optimizing supply chains, and enhancing quality assurance. The future might not be about replacing workers, but empowering them.

2/ $1 Billion Pre-seed?

Ilya, a co-founder of OpenAI, just launched a new safety-focused AI startup called SSI. And here’s the kicker: they’ve raised a whopping $1 billion in a pre-seed round – a stage that usually sees funding in the low millions.

The cash infusion is aimed at acquiring massive compute resources and hiring the best talent. After all, if you’re going up against OpenAI (which you co-founded), you might as well go big or go home, right?

3/ Anthropic Releases Quickstart Repo

Anthropic has just rolled out a collection of quickstart projects designed to help developers easily build and deploy applications on their platform. And they didn’t stop there – they also introduced an enterprise plan for Claude, featuring an impressive 500,000-token context window.

4/ AI in Video Games

Video game actors recently went on strike over concerns about AI using their voices without consent. The result? A massive win: 80 companies have now agreed that AI can’t replicate an actor’s likeness without permission.

This deal brings developers, companies, and actors to the same table, but the big question remains – will it truly protect the talent over the long haul? Time will tell.