The Artificial Investor - Issue 35: October 2024 recap
My name is Aris Xenofontos and I am an investor at Seaya Ventures. This is the monthly version of the Artificial Investor that covers the top AI developments of the previous month.
A Tech company’s largest fundraise ever. A BigTech earnings season in which AI stole the show. The acceleration of the robotaxi trend. The biggest strain on electricity grids of our lifetime. Innovation centred around agents, reasoning and robot dexterity. All this and much more in today’s issue about October 2024.
Let’s dive in.
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🚀 Jumping on the bandwagon
We have tracked more than 190 funding rounds worth an aggregate 9.2 billion dollars during October 2024, more than 3x the amount of September 2024 (and flat if we exclude OpenAI’s October funding round).
Last month’s megarounds highlight investor appetite for very large markets, such as foundational models (OpenAI’s 6.5-billion fundraise), coding automation (Poolside’s 500-million fundraise) and high-performance AI chips (Lightmatter’s 400-million fundraise).
In terms of exits, we saw mainly small acquisitions of AI players by large software and hardware companies. Nvidia acquired OctoAI for 250 million dollars, a startup that specialises in tools to build and run generative AI models efficiently. Command AI (fka CommandBar) was acquired by Amplitude for an undisclosed amount to enhance user behaviour understanding.
📈 On pink paper
Stealing the show. October was public companies’ earnings season and AI stole the spotlight once again. Most Magnificent Seven companies announced strong financial results. Microsoft’s quarterly revenues were 66 billion dollars (16% annual growth), Apple’s were 95 billion dollars (6% annual growth), Meta’s 41 billion dollars (19% increase year-on-year), Alphabet’s 88 billion dollars (15% yearly growth), Amazon’s 159 billion dollars (10% growth), and Tesla’s 25 billion dollars (8% growth). Nvidia’s stock price rose 3% and broke another valuation record on the back of this news. AI seems to have boosted the financial performance of most of them, as the fastest-growing divisions of Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet are their Cloud businesses, which have accelerated due to AI adoption; Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud is growing by 20%, Amazon’s AWS is growing by 19% and Google’s GCP by 26% vs. last year. Also, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella said that its AI business is about to reach 10 billion dollars run-rate revenues, Meta published some figures about Meta AI, which has reached 500 million users, while Tesla tried to divert attention away from the declining EV market and to its robotaxi plans (which the market didn’t like that much pushing down its stock price by 9%).
Up and to the right. Sticking to the earnings season, on the hardware side, semiconductor companies continue to perform well. TSMC, the main chipmaker for Nvidia and Apple that now makes more than half of its revenue from AI computing, beat expectations and grew its quarterly revenues by 39% to 24 billion dollars. AMD’s quarterly revenue increased by 18% from a year ago and reached 7 billion dollars, driven by its data centre business unit that grew by a notable 122% annually, and Super Micro’s shares rose by 15% as a reaction to its statement that it is selling 100,000 chips per quarter. Cerebras Systems, an AI chip startup, is trying to capitalise on the positive semiconductor market sentiment and filed for an IPO. The company competes with Nvidia and reported 136 million dollars of sales for the first half of 2024, but has received some criticism as 80% of its revenues come from one client. Samsung seems to be one of the losers in the AI hardware battle, as it has experienced delays in its latest-generation chips, which led to an apology to investors for disappointing results. The stock is down more than 30% since its peak last July.
Searching for stability. It looks like Google’s Search business is not being under attack just by startup companies, such as Perplexity, Arc and the Browser Company, which we have covered in the past, but also by incumbents. TikTok launched a new AI-driven product that allows brands to target ads based on users' search queries, posing a direct threat to Google's core business. 23% of Tiktokers run a search within 30 seconds of opening the app resulting in over three billion daily searches. Also, the Information leaked that Meta is developing its own AI search engine to reduce dependence on Google and Microsoft.
Bond. James Bond. Sometimes it feels like the BigTech companies are coordinated in their marketing efforts. OpenAI’s first London-based DevDay was largely uneventful, perhaps with the exception of a demonstration of the agentic capabilities of its reasoning model, o1, which can order…200 pies by making phone calls autonomously (you should watch the demo video). A few days later, Microsoft unveiled its plans to release sales-focused autonomous AI agents for its CRM, Microsoft Dynamics 365. The BigTech’s researchers also quietly released a Web automation AI agent, Omniparser, which understands what a user sees on a browser and is able to autonomously take actions on it, such as click buttons. Google is also working on its own Web-based AI agent under the name of Project Jarvis. It all started with Anthropic, the Enterprise AI foundational model company, releasing Computer Use, which allows developers to direct Claude (its AI model) to use computers the way people do: looking at a screen, moving a cursor, clicking buttons and typing text.
Research roundup. We have come across a number of interesting AI-related research reports last month. Stanford University published its 7th annual AI Index, which talks about how AI has surpassed human-level performance in tasks like image classification and English understanding, the high training costs of LLMs, which in some cases reached 190 million dollars, the fact that the US is top producer of notable AI models, etc. Accel, the American VC fund, released its 2024 Euroscape Report, which focuses on the performance of public and private markets, and how they have been impacted by AI (a similar report was released by CB Insights). A recent survey by Censuswide on behalf of Red Hat revealed that more than 80% of IT managers report an AI skills shortage, specifically in generative AI and data science, up from 72% last year. Wharton’s AI centre published an Enterprise AI Study, which revealed that weekly Gen AI usage among business leaders jumped from 37% to 72%, organisations reported a 130% increase in AI spending since 2023, and that 90% of leaders believe AI enhances employee skills. Finally, BCG published its 2024 AI Adoption report, which states that, over the past three years, companies that lead in AI adoption have achieved 1.5 times higher revenue growth, 1.6 times greater shareholder returns, and 1.4 times higher returns on invested capital vs. AI laggers.
⚔️ A double-edged sword
Everyone loses in war. The last 30 days we saw again the US-China Tech/AI Cold War heating up. Allegedly, hackers, which were sponsored by the Chinese government, infiltrated US internet providers (e.g. AT&T and Verizon) to gain access to court-authorised wiretap requests and vast amounts of internet traffic. A response by the US government is expected. In the meantime, Bloomberg leaked that the US contemplates capping Nvidia’s and AMD’s AI chip sales to China and other nations. Also, the US government is finalising rules to limit US investments in AI and other Tech sectors (e.g. quantum computing), in China. The goal is to prevent US know-how from aiding China in developing advanced technology and gaining dominance in global markets.
Doing more with less. Content creation/review and technology are proven to be one of the domains most affected by AI. ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is laying off hundreds of staff in Malaysia as AI takes over content moderation. As a result, 80% of content removals on TikTok are now automated. Google’s CEO stated that more than 25% of the code generated in Google is done so with the help of AI.
Breaking the bank. The US Department of Treasury reported that using AI it identified or recovered 4 billion dollars in fraudulent payments in 2023, a sixfold increase compared to 2022. US defence and security agencies have spent 700 million dollars on AI projects since the launch of ChatGPT and could exceed 1 billion in spending on AI projects by next year. The DOD has 83 active contracts with various companies for Generative AI work, with major Tech companies like Palantir and Scale AI being among the companies with the largest contracts, ranging from 15 to 90 million dollars.
Hungrier than ever. Data and Tech infrastructure is currently consuming more energy than it ever has been, since the commercialisation of the Cloud in the mid 2000s. As a response, Amazon signed an agreement with Dominion Energy, Virginia’s utility company, to explore the development of a small modular nuclear reactor, and, if all goes well, plans to invest more than 500 million dollars in the project. Also, Google signed a deal with Kairos Power to buy 500 MW of energy from seven small nuclear reactors, with the first one due to be completed by 2030 and the remainder by 2035. Microsoft could not miss out of course and signed a 20-year deal with Constellation Energy to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. Finally, the AI challengers, OpenAI and Anthropic, have not signed such deals yet, but have been busy lobbying for energy production initiatives. We covered the topic extensively in one of our recent weekly editions.
🧩 Laying the groundwork
🔢 Models
October was the month of the multimodal large language model releases. Meta released the Llama 3.2 models (text + speech), once again topping the open source benchmarks and catching up with the first version of OpenAIs GPT 4o model. The release also includes lightweight 1B and 3B parameter models for Edge use cases. Mistral AI also introduced two new compact language models, Ministral 3B and Ministral 8B, for edge devices. Nvidia has released the NVLM 1.0 family of open-source models, led by the 72 billion parameter NVLM-D-72B (text + image). This is a fine-tuned version of Qwen 2.0 72B, an existing text-only model released by Alibaba, with vision capabilities added on top of it.
On the pure video side, Meta’s CEO teased the public with a video showcasing the capabilities of its forthcoming text-to-video model, Movie Gen. Amazon’s home security business, Ring, released a video search capability. The AI models powering the search will eventually enable Ring to notify users about specific situations and provide summaries of recent happenings. The open-source community welcomed the entry of a new AI video generator, Pyramid Flow, which offers high-quality video clips up to 10 seconds in length. This is still not as powerful as private models (some reach 20 seconds), but it’s certainly a move in the right direction.
We mentioned earlier how the large AI companies are working on agents. Last month we saw the release of a couple of agentic models. Writer released Palmyra X 004, a new AI model with 150B parameters that is focused on workflow automation. We also saw on the open-source side the launch of Gradio 5, a model focused on web automation.
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Elsewhere, it was leaked that Google is also working on a reasoning model series to compete with OpenAI’s o1 model series. OpenAI released its real-time voice API, which is impressive and has already been used by 3rd party developers to create apps, like this one that allows you to control your browser with your voice. Apple finally released an early version of Apple Intelligence, in the form of its new iOS 18.1 for iPhone 15+ models, which incorporates a smarter Siri that can now handle unstructured instructions, and summarised notifications. Bytedance is advancing on its AI independence and plans to develop a new AI large model using Huawei's Ascend 910B chip to avoid US export control restrictions on AI chips. Finally, alternative novel LLM architectures continue to gain interest. Last month, Liquid AI, a startup co-founded by former researchers from MIT's CSAIL, announced it has developed the Liquid Foundation Models (LFMs), which are not based on the transformer architecture and (according to them) outperform other transformer-based models in similar size categories like Meta's Llama 3.1-8B and Microsoft's Phi-3.5 3.8B.
💾 Hardware
The most impressive news in Hardware Land during October came from robotics. Tesla had its We Robot event, where it showcased its humanoid robots and robotaxi product series, with some demo videos coming out in social media. It was certainly a big month for robotaxis, as China’s WeRide debuted on the Nasdaq and Waymo, the American market leader, announced a 5.6 billion dollar fundraise led by its parent, Alphabet. We provided an update on the robotaxi trend in one of our weekly editions.
We would just add here a couple of things that have happened since our last blog post. Many people have talked about how autonomous cars could potentially make controversial decisions in the future by choosing to take a life over taking multiple ones. Well, actually something very similar happened for the first time and it was caught on camera. A Tesla vehicle saved the life of a pedestrian in Romania by swerving to avoid the man who had fallen onto the street and crashing into an oncoming car.
EngineAI Robotics launched SE01, a full-size humanoid robot that uses an end-to-end neural network solution that allows it to exhibit the most natural, human-like movements among robots (see by yourself). Finally, robot dexterity was also demonstrated by Boston Dynamics, which released a video showing a fully-autonomous Atlas humanoid robot moving automotive parts in a warehouse, and by ETH’s Robotic Systems Lab that demonstrated a four-legged robot climbing up a ladder quite comfortably.
Moving away from robots and onto AI chips, AMD announced that it plans to mass produce its new MI325X AI chip in Q4 2024 as a response to increased demand by Microsoft and Meta. The MI325X chip, built on CDNA 3 architecture, promises blazing-fast AI performance with 256GB HBM3E memory, 6 terabits per second bandwidth, and double the performance of its predecessor. A relatively new “kid on the block”, Cerebras Inference, has released a major update, now running Llama 3.1-70B at 2,100 tokens per second, marking a 3x performance boost from the prior release. Also, it appears that something we have talked about a few months ago is finally happening, as OpenAI is actively working with Broadcom and TSMC to develop its first in-house AI chip.
🧪 Scientific Breakthroughs
Last month saw a number of advancements in AI research, including:
Also, AI had its special share of attention within the scientific community in October, as AI-related discoveries won no less than two Nobel prizes this year:
🍽️ Fun things to impress at the dinner table
Shocking. Not a fun thing at all, but certainly some food for thought. A 14-year old American committed a suicide and his mother sued Character.ai, as her son was spending many hours with the AI companion app prior to the tragic incident.
Busted. These US university students were falsely accused of cheating by AI.
Down boy. This collar helps people understand what their dog tells them.
Art attack. A portrait of the world’s first humanoid robot artist called Ai-Da is about to get auctioned soon, starting at 130,000 dollars.
You are your data. Someone connected the images coming from Meta’s glasses to an online human face search and managed to reveal the personal details of everyone they looked at.
Eyes on the field. The Wimbledon tennis tournament will end a tradition of 147 years of using human line judges. They will be replaced by AI in 2025’s tournament for the first time.
Science of dating. Dating app Grindr launched an AI wingman to help users track conversations, recommend potential partners and suggest dating locations.
Look closely. Ethos is a popular restaurant in Austin with 72,000 followers on Instagram that…does not exist.
Behind bars. Someone in the UK was sentenced to 18 years in prison for creating child sexual abuse imagery using AI technology from Daz 3D.
Tune in. This radio station in Krakow fired its journalists and introduced AI “presenters" due to a lack of audience engagement.
💲Show me the money
We have tracked more than 190 funding rounds worth an aggregate 9.2 billion dollars during October 2024, specifically:
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