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  • šŸ¤– Meet MANG, the New Venture Capital Bully?

šŸ¤– Meet MANG, the New Venture Capital Bully?

PLUS: Amazonā€™s New Tailored Shopping Assistant, Summarize Podcasts With Google Bard

Welcome back AI enthusiasts!

In todayā€™s AI Report:

  • šŸ„ŠMeet MANG, the New Venture Capital Bully?

  • šŸ“¦Amazonā€™s New Tailored Shopping Assistant

  • šŸŽ™Summarize Podcasts With Google Bard

  • šŸ› 5 Trending Tools

  • šŸ’°Venture Capital Updates

  • šŸ’¼Whoā€™s Hiring?

Read Time: 3 minutes

šŸ—žRECENT NEWS

VENTURE CAPITAL LANDSCAPE

šŸ„ŠMeet MANG, the New Venture Capital Bully?

Image Source: Vincent West/File Photo/REUTERS

Meet the newest and most aggressive venture capitalists in AI startups: Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, and Google (MANG).

Key Details:
  • MANGā€™s total capital raised in 2023 surpassed $25 billion, or 8% of the total venture capital raised in North America.

  • $23 billion worth of investments were concentrated in data and AI systems, with notable investments in these companies:

    1. January 23rd: Microsoft invests $10B in OpenAI at a $29B valuation.

    2. September 23rd: Amazon raises $4B for Anthropic at a $18B valuation.

    3. June 23rd: Microsoft and Nvidia invest $1.3B in Inflection AI at a $4B valuation.

  • Before OpenAIā€™s ChatGPT captivated Silicon Valley, mobility startups like Waymo, Cruise, Rivian, and Uber dominated funding rounds.

  • Now, Large Language Models (LLMs) provide the largest number of customers in computing, and cloud providers offer a solid business model to drive revenue.

Why Itā€™s Important:
  • Experts view MANG as a modern-day tollbooth. When drivers pass a tollbooth, they pay a fee to the government. When customers use a premium chatbot, they pay a fee to MANG.

  • For example, when Amazon (i.e., MANG) hosts Anthropic (i.e., AI Model) on AWS Bedrock, Anthropic users pay a small fee to AWS Bedrock through Anthropic to cover infrastructure costs.

  • Combined operating profits for MANG totaled $276 billion in 2023. MANG leverages these operating profits to develop bigger, better tollbooths.

šŸšØ@mdgarratt believes this is illegal. He labels it ā€œround-tripping:ā€ when one company invests in another company to generate sales, then buys back the assets later.

He argues Amazon invests in Anthropic only to have Anthropic spend the money on AWS Bedrock.

šŸ©ŗ PULSE CHECK

Are MANG companies engaging in round-tripping?

Vote Below to View Live Results

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

AMAZON

šŸ“¦Amazonā€™s New Tailored Shopping Assistant

Image Source: Leon Neal/Getty Images

Amazon recently announced Rufus, a new personal shopping assistant tailored to help users discover and shop for products.

Key Details:
  • Rufus is a conversational chatbot that answers questions like ā€œWhatā€™s the main difference between trail and road running shoes?ā€ or ā€œCompare drip and pour-over coffee makers.ā€

  • Rufus utilizes Amazonā€™s product catalog, customer reviews, and Q&As from across the internet to answer queries.

  • Amazon is currently testing this feature with a small subset of users in the U.S. but plans to roll it out nationwide in the coming weeks.

Why Itā€™s Important:
  • Amazon CEO Andy Jassy stated: ā€œRufus meaningfully improves how easy it is for customers to find and discover the best products to meet their needs.ā€

  • This new feature enhances the shopping experience with personalized assistance, expert knowledge, and a conversational interface.

AI TIPS

šŸŽ™Summarize Podcasts With Google Bard

Google recently added upgrades to Bard, making it great for summarizing long-form content from YouTube.

Hereā€™s How You Can Use It:
  1. Head to Bard. Itā€™s free for all Chrome users.

  2. Enter the prompt: ā€œWrite a detailed summary of this video [Insert Link]. Summarize using bullet points. Include timestamps to the relevant themes and sections, adding important quotes.ā€

  3. Youā€™re all set!

Now, you can generate detailed summaries of any video or podcast in seconds.

šŸ› TRENDING TOOLS

šŸŽ“Meiro creates and manages interactive tests, quizzes, and text games.

šŸ¦¾PromptPal discovers the best AI prompts.

šŸ Ailliot enhances your real estate journey and helps you close deals.

šŸ‘©ā€āš•ļøDrLambda converts documents to slides, social posts, or videos.

šŸ™Pictory provides easy video creation for content marketers.

šŸ”®Browse our always Up-To-Date AI Tools Database.

šŸ’°VENTURE CAPITAL UPDATES

  • SEMRON secures $7.9M to build industry-first 3D AI semiconductor chips.

  • Coris raises $3.7M to identify an AI-driven paradigm shift in SMB risk management.

  • Salesforce AI CEO Clara Shih believes AI is a ā€œmoving target,ā€ but her aim is steady.

šŸ’¼WHOā€™S HIRING?

  • Yext (New York, NY): Site Reliability Systems Intern, Summer 2024

  • Snap Inc. (Palo Alto, CA): Software Engineer, Snap-Up Apprentice, Summer 2024

  • NVIDIA (Santa Clara, CA): Finance Data Science Intern, Summer 2024

šŸ¤–PROMPT OF THE DAY

CONVEY INFORMATION

šŸ¤ÆTurn Boring into Mind-Blowing

Analyze [Boring Topic] and give me 5 ideas on how to make this content fun, engaging, and interesting.

Boring Topic = [Insert Here]

šŸ“’FINAL NOTE

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ā¤ļøAI Pulse Review of The Day

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