NEWS YOU CAN’T MISS

AI Goes Nuclear: The Unexpected Energy Source

The recent Climate Week NYC highlighted the growing importance of nuclear power in meeting the increasing energy demands of AI and data centers.

But how will we power these data centers? 

Believe it or not, the answer lies in nuclear power.

Nuclear Revival: U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm emphasized the need to revive old nuclear reactors and develop new ones to meet the clean energy transition goals.

Tech Giants' Involvement: Microsoft, Oracle, and Amazon have struck deals in nuclear power to supply their data centers with carbon-free electricity. Microsoft just signed a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with Constellation Energy to restart Unit 1 at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.

Financial Support: A group of 14 financial institutions, including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, endorsed a goal to triple nuclear energy by 2050.

Food for thought: Ami Badani, Chief Marketing Officer of semiconductor firm Arm, highlighted that data centers training AI models now use 2% of the world's electricity and cautioned that AI could account for 25% of US power consumption by 2030.

🌎 I totally agree with this direction. Finding a sustainable way to cater to AI's insatiable need for data centers and power is critical to our planet's future.

OpenAI Secures $6.6 Billion in Historic Funding Round

When you raise the most money any company has ever raised, you deserve a celebration. Sam Altman and OpenAI just secured a historic $6.6 billion funding round, pushing their valuation to a mind-blowing $157 billion.

So What’s the Plan:

• More investment in “frontier AI research, … compute capacity, and … building tools” according to Open AI’s website (aka create an AI God?)

• Also, they really need the money: Open AI’s expenses (compute, training models, staff etc) are $5 billion in 2024.

Finance Geek Highlights:

• Investor Lineup: Thrive Capital led the charge with $1.3 billion, alongside giants like Microsoft, Nvidia, and SoftBank. Even the UAE-based tech investment firm MGX participated in the funding round.

• Thrive's Special Arrangement: Thrive Capital could pump in another $1 billion next year if OpenAI hits its revenue goals. Talk about confidence.

• No Competition Allowed: OpenAI reportedly wants its investors to stay loyal and refrain from supporting competing startups like Anthropic and Elon Musk's xAI (makes sense with xAI hot on their heels after securing a $6 billion investment in May).

• A "Safe Bet" with a Catch: With $300 million in August revenue and projected $11.6 billion next year, OpenAI seems like a golden ticket. But there's a twist: investors might want their money back if OpenAI doesn't go fully for-profit within two years.

This historic funding round proves the tech world is all in on AI. 😎 

WOMAN IN TECH

Meet Chenlin Meng and Demi Guo, Co-Founders of Pika Labs

Celebrating this week's Women in tech 🥳: Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng, the duo behind Pika Labs, an innovative generative AI startup transforming video creation with their AI-to-video generator.

In its first 6 months, Pika Labs attracted over 500,000 users and recently raised $80M in a Series B funding round, taking its total funding to $135M.

Spotlight on the founders:

Demi Guo - CEO: With a Mathematics degree and an MS in Computer Science from Harvard University, Guo was the youngest research engineer at Meta AI Research during her time at Harvard.

Guo held research roles at Facebook and then Epic Games, alongside which she was pursuing a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard. In 2023, she left both her role at Epic Games and her PhD to pursue Pika Labs.

Chenlin Meng - CTO: Meng is a Stanford University alumna with an interest in gen AI and diffusion models. She’s known for her pioneering work on DDIMs (a key method in content generation that's been applied in projects like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion). She has co-authored more than 25 research papers on gen AI.

Guo and Meng founded Pika Labs after their team faced setbacks in a video-making competition by Runway. Dissatisfied with existing video generation tools, they created Pika Labs, which allows users to use Discord to create AI-generated videos.

I love their clear and inspiring mission: “to enable anyone to be the director of their stories and to bring out the creator in all of us.”

p.s They just released Pika 1.5, did you try it?

Food for Thought

Would you trust an AI to mentor you? 🤖🎓

Kian Katanforoosh, CEO of Workera, was mentored by AI expert Andrew Ng. Now, he's launching Sage, an AI agent designed to assess your skills and guide your career. But can an AI really fill the shoes of a great human mentor like Ng?

Sage is more than just a test-taker – it creates personalized learning paths and offers smart suggestions to help you ups

Thank you for the incredible response to my first AI course! With over 200+ students on the waitlist, I’m excited to announce that the next cohort is now open for November. Secure your spot here! 

Keep learning and upskilling 🚀🚀

Until next time! The future awaits.

Ayesha ♥️