The weather’s getting hotter — but not quite as hot as the generative AI space, which saw a slew of new models released this week, including Meta’s Llama 3.
In other AI news, Hyundai-owned robotics company Boston Dynamics unveiled an electric-powered humanoid follow-up to its long-running Atlas robot, which it recently retired.
And Rebecca and Sean report on layoffs at Tesla , which they say hit high performers and gutted some departments.
AnalysisGoogle Cloud bets on generative AI: Ron writes about how Google Cloud is investing heavily in generative AI, as evidenced by the string of announcements during Google’s Cloud Next conference earlier in the month.
Generative AI in health: Generative AI is coming for healthcare — but not everyone’s thrilled.
Astranis has taken the wraps off a new generation of communications satellites that will serve broadband to customers on Earth from geostationary orbit, but faster and smaller than any comsat up there.
Astranis builds and operates relatively small broadband satellites in high orbits, and sells that capacity on to telecom and internet service providers.
The startup takes prize in the comparatively diminutive size of its GEO satellites, which are normally huge and, as a result, are easy to track and potentially attack.
Like the company’s current satellites, Omega will have the ability to maneuver in GEO using on-board all-electric propulsion.
The company aims to complete the first Omega satellite in 2025 and launch to orbit in 2026.
Meta, hell-bent on catching up to rivals in the generative AI space, is spending billions on its own AI efforts.
But an even larger chunk is being spent developing hardware, specifically chips to run and train Meta’s AI models.
Meta unveiled the newest fruit of its chip dev efforts today, conspicuously a day after Intel announced its latest AI accelerator hardware.
Google this week made its fifth-generation custom chip for training AI models, TPU v5p, generally available to Google Cloud customers, and revealed its first dedicated chip for running models, Axion.
Amazon has several custom AI chip families under its belt.
Using Deadline Cloud, customers in media and entertainment as well as architecture and engineering can leverage AWS compute to render content for TV shows, movies, ads, video games and digital blueprints, said AWS GM of creative tools Antony Passemard.
Deadline Cloud then provisions Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances and manages the network and compute infrastructure.
And — for customers with on-premises compute — Deadline Cloud integrates with this compute and uses it to execute rendering jobs.
With Deadline Cloud, customers can link their own third-party software licenses with the service or leverage usage-based licensing for rendering with existing rendering tools (e.g.
As Passemard alluded to, the rise of generative AI has fueled the demand for rendering hardware, too, and led to the creation of entirely new cloud-based, GPU-accelerated providers.
On its website, Orbit Fab says its hydrazine delivery service in geostationary orbit will cost $20 million for up to 100 kilograms.
Given the simplicity of the architecture, nailing each part of the hardware is critical; hence why it’s taken years for Orbit Fab to debut the refueling port.
Orbit Fab is aiming to sell 100 fueling ports this year, which will put the RAFTI “on a decent percentage of satellites going to orbit,” Faber said.
“SpaceX has made rockets reusable, Orbit Fab makes satellites reusable,” Faber said.
The same is true of satellites: if you’re not making your satellites reusable, you’re just putting preordained junk into orbit.”
In this edition of WiR, we cover Carta’s allegedly unethical tactics, Samsung’s Ballie home robot, Volkswagen bringing ChatGPT into its cars and Amazon embracing more generative AI.
Saarinen alleged in a LinkedIn post that Carta misused sensitive information that startups entrust to the company in pursuit of its own goals.
Samsung’s Ballie returns: Remember Ballie, Samsung’s spherical home robot from CES 2020?
Volkswagen cars get ChatGPT: Volkswagen is getting into the ChatGPT game.
Enterprises skeptical of GenAI: Generative AI gets a lot of press, from image-generating tools like Midjourney to Runway to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
At the end of 2022, like many, I made some predictions about what 2023 would bring to the technology investing ecosystem.
AI and data continue to dominate the funding landscape.
U.S. VC deals fall from $275 billion in 2022 to $200 billion in 2023, and sustain at about $200-$220 billion next year.
Valuations will remain relatively steady, except for AI businesses, which will command a premium of about 10-15% to the market.
While VC deals fell dramatically between 2022 and 2023, 2024 won’t see as sharp of a decline.
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