NEWS YOU CAN’T MISS

AI's New Status Symbol: The Insane Scale of AI Superclusters

The new measure of AI supremacy? How many Nvidia chips you can pack together to power the AI.

Just a year ago, 10,000 chips in one place were considered a big deal—that’s how many are estimated to have been used to train the earliest version of ChatGPT in 2022.

Now, these chips are being put together at a ten-fold scale:

• Elon Musk's xAI built a supercomputer called "Colossus" with 100,000 of Nvidia’s chips, with plans to reach 300,000 using the upcoming Blackwell chips next year.

• Colossus was constructed in just 122 days, which Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described as "superhuman," sharing that such projects typically need years to complete.

• Not to be outdone, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company is training its most advanced AI models on a cluster "bigger than anything I've seen reported for what others are doing". Meta's ambitious plans include expanding its infrastructure to incorporate 350,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs. 🤯

The winner right now, however, is neither Musk or Zuckerberg: it’s Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. This race for bigger clusters has made NVIDIA the world's most valuable public company ($3.5T), with quarterly revenue soaring from $7B to $35B in two years.

But here's the billion-dollar question: Will bigger clusters continue to lead to smarter AI?

There are challenges: high costs, huge cooling needs, and doubts about whether simply adding more chips will deliver proportionally smarter AI.

Yet, these concerns don't seem to be deterring the world's richest billionaires from the AI supercomputer race. 💰

India’s Meesho Slashes Costs by 75% With AI

Meesho, the Softbank-backed e-commerce platform valued at $4.9B, is making waves with its new Generative AI-powered voice bot for customer support.

The startup processes over $5B in annual sales and has more than 160M customers in India, with 80% of them from small towns and villages.

A look at the numbers:

• The AI bot has cut customer call costs by 75%.

• It manages 60,000 calls daily in both English and Hindi, with plans to add six more Indian languages.

• The bot resolves 95% of queries on its own, reducing the need for human intervention and improving customer satisfaction by 10%.

Rather than creating its own LLM, Meesho uses existing ones combined with custom components to handle local language nuances. This approach has helped the bot perform well even on basic smartphones and in noisy environments.

Co-founder & CTO Sanjeev Barnwal highlighted that the technology isn't replacing human agents but rather allowing them to focus on more complex queries.

Yet another real-life case study with real-life results from using AI. What are you waiting for? 😎

WOMAN IN TECH

Meet Caecilia Chu, co-founder and CEO of YouTrip

Celebrating this week's Woman in Tech 🥳: Meet Caecilia Chu, a notable figure in the fintech industry, best known as the co-founder and CEO of YouTrip, a multi-currency mobile wallet in Southeast Asia that now processes $10 billion in payments a year.

Background and Education

Born in Hong Kong, Chu earned her bachelor's degree in Finance from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

After stints at McKinsey and Citigroup, Chu left the corporate world to launch an e-commerce business, which closed after two years. She subsequently founded You Technologies to address foreign transaction fees and poor exchange rates for travelers.

The company’s first product, YouTrip, offers a multi-currency mobile wallet for worldwide purchases. After raising over $100M, it has rapidly expanded to serve users in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Thailand, reaching over 500,000 users globally.

In 2022, Chu expanded YouTrip's offerings by launching YouBiz, a multi-currency expense management platform helping more than 3000 enterprises process expenses such as suppliers and remote workers.

Chu's contributions to the fintech industry have earned her several accolades:

• Tech Leader of the Year by the Singapore Computer Society (2022)

• One of the Top 10 Fintech Leaders by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (2020 & 2021)

• One of the Top 25 Financial Technology CEOs of Asia (2020)

Fave quote: “As a founder, you’re continuously faced with new problems to solve, decisions to make, and paths to forge. However, innovation rarely occurs within the familiar.” - Caecilia Chu

I’ve met Caecilia a ton of times, and she’s a rockstar: a visionary with true entrepreneurial grit!

Would You Let An AI Clone Take Your Meetings?

Pickle, a startup, offers a service that lets you create a digital avatar to attend web conferences on your behalf.

By submitting a 5-minute video, you can generate an AI version of yourself that shows up dressed professionally in meetings, even if you're relaxing in your PJs on a beach or in the mountains. If it can virtually blow dry my hair too, I’m totally in!

The avatar syncs with your real-time expressions, allowing you to speak through it. The service ranges from $300 to $1,150 annually and currently supports MacOS.

How do you feel about sending an AI version of yourself to meetings?

It’s snowing in some parts of the world but it’s always sunny in Singapore. Next week, I’ll be writing from beautiful chilly Chicago. ☃️

Hope everyone has a fabulous day!

Ayesha ♥️

ps. Let's be friends on LinkedIn and Instagram, if you like this newsletter, share it with your friends and family here.

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