Beyond Tomorrow: ‘Strawberry’ Season In The Fall, OpenAI’s Fresh Funding Round—Weekly AI Wrap

Welcome back to this week’s edition of Beyond Tomorrow.

Technology company Nvidia Corp. dropped its second-quarter earnings this week. As has been the norm with the chipmaker, it smashed expectations with $30 billion in revenue. That’s $2 billion over what the company itself was expecting. Wall Street should have been ecstatic, right...right?

At the time of writing, the chipmaker’s stock has dropped nearly 6.4%, despite the company beating estimates. This is because, according to analysts, the company's growth hasn't been as significant as it was a couple of quarters ago. On top of that, Nvidia’s guidance for the following quarters, while strong, isn’t to the same degree as it used to be.

That's unending capitalism for you, folks! But AI optimists (like me) are still very pumped about Nvidia’s potential.

Jensen Huang, the company’s CEO, admitted that their latest line of ‘Blackwell’ chips was facing production problems that required them to rework some things. That being said, Huang is optimistic about the company’s ability to comfortably meet demand for their new chipsets. All that’s left is for the rollout to happen and see if they’re going to consolidate their hold on the data centre market even more.

Only time will tell.

We’re getting close and closer to berry picking season but the strawberry coming this fall isn’t to eat, unfortunately. OpenAI is reportedly planning on releasing its latest AI product, codenamed ‘Strawberry’, as soon as this fall, according to a report from The Information.

‘Strawberry’ apparently comes with boosted reasoning, math and programming skills. What’s more, the new model is also able to work on more subjective topics, like responding to queries around business strategy. The caveat here is that response times are likely to be longer, considering ‘Strawberry’ will require time to “think.”

If it proves valuable though, and more importantly, viable, OpenAI has a sizeable revenue opportunity here. Already, the company’s ChatGPT subscriptions have tripled, with monthly revenue clocking in at $238 million The Information reported, with the company privately valued at $86 billion, following an employee sale of existing shares.

It’ll be a timely launch too, if the company makes the reported timeline. The company’s competitors have levelled the playing field and are in some cases beating the company at several AI measurement metrics.

The ability to answer such questions is what’ll really give the new model a boost among its peers. It’ll be especially important for OpenAI given how scepticism about the tangible value of AI itself is on the rise.

But Strawberry’s true value isn’t in its ability to think, but more so in the training of OpenAI’s new flagship model, Orion, which is currently in development, according to The Information.

Strawberry’s ability to generate high-quality training data is where it’s likely to shine. That would mean the new product from OpenAI is capable of creating gold standard synthetic datasets, which would be hugely valuable. Especially at a time when scientists are warning that we’re running out of data to train models on.

There’s also a push within the company to use Strawberry to help reduce hallucinations from Orion. AI hallucination, where a model will produce incorrect information, is still a problem across the board and one that doesn’t have a solution just yet.

It remains to be seen whether we’ll eventually be able to get our hands on Strawberry at all, but in the meantime, speculation is rife, and the potential, exciting.

What's a little bit more money for an already highly valued company like OpenAI? Turns out, it might just be what helps push its valuation over the $100 billion mark.

Venture capital firm Thrive Capital is reportedly leading a several billion-dollar funding round for OpenAI, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The spice, it seems, will flow.

Given that Josh Kushner, the leader of the VC firm, has known Sam Altman for a considerable amount of time, this is not surprising. In fact, Kushner invested nearly $130 million in OpenAI in 2023 at a valuation of $29 billion. Kushner's investment has clearly paid off, given the value that OpenAI has shown since its first showcase. Fun fact: India’s until-very-recently richest man, Mukesh Ambani, is a shareholder in Thrive.

Thrive led another round of funding for the company in October 2023, this time at a valuation of $86 billion, according to Fortune. Of course, the ousting of Atlman and the ensuing controversy occurred soon after.

What’s more, this funding round isn’t just Thrive alone; big tech heavies are making an appearance, and I’m not just talking about Microsoft. Nvidia and Apple are in talks to invest in OpenAI, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Nvidia’s appearance isn’t all that surprising, considering that its been the go-to chip leader for a while now. The company has close ties with OpenAI. Nor is Apple’s for that matter; after all, it was only just recently that the company announced its partnership with the ChatGPT makers. But it could also potentially complicate matters for the iPhone maker.

At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June, the company made clear that OpenAI wasn’t the only partnership it was seeking when it comes to AI companies. It’s already been in several conversations with other AI heavyweights like Anthropic and Perplexity. Though Apple’s reported investment in OpenAI might be to maintain its current partnership, there’s a high likelihood that other companies might see this as a breach of presupposed neutrality.

Overall, though, details regarding the funding round are murky, so we'll have to watch how things play out in the coming weeks.

· Zensar CEO Says It's Important To Recognise Generative AI Limitations

· WazirX Parent Zettai Files For Insolvency After $235-Million Cyberattack

· Wipro Integrates Google Cloud's Gemini Code Assist To Boost Developer Efficiency

· Infosys And NVIDIA To Develop Gen-AI Solutions For Telecom Operators

· ChatGPT, Image Generators Just The Tip Of AI Innovation Iceberg, Says Nvidia's Jensen Huang

· Zepto Valuation Sees 40% Bump Up In Two Months

And … that’s it for this week! If you liked what you read, share it with folks you know. If you didn't, send us some feedback. Until next time!

Beyond Tomorrow is a weekly newsletter published every Saturday to give you a roundup of everything AI in the last week.