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  • šŸ¤– Perplexity AI Closes a $500 Million Funding Round

šŸ¤– Perplexity AI Closes a $500 Million Funding Round

PLUS: Eleventh Day of ā€œ12 Days of OpenAIā€ Event, AI Agents Tackle Scientific Discovery

Welcome back AI enthusiasts!

In todayā€™s Daily Report:

  • šŸ˜³Perplexity AI Closes a $500 Million Funding Round

  • šŸŽ„Eleventh Day of ā€œ12 Days of OpenAIā€ Event

  • šŸ§ŖAI Agents Tackle Scientific Discovery

  • šŸ› Trending Tools

  • šŸ’°Funding Frontlines

  • šŸ’¼Whoā€™s Hiring?

Read Time: 3 minutes

šŸ—žRECENT NEWS

PERPLEXITY AI

šŸ˜³Perplexity AI Closes a $500 Million Funding Round

Image Source: ā€œTechCrunch Disrupt 2024 (TCD24)ā€/Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch/CC BY 2.0

A free AI-powered Answer Engine called Perplexity AI raised $500 million at a $9 billion valuation.

Key Details:
  • Perplexity AI is ā€œa research partner that saves you valuable time by delivering the precise knowledge you need.ā€

  • Google Search has been the dominant Search Engine for decades, processing roughly 8.5 billion search queries per day.

  • However, AI-powered Answer Engines threaten this dominance by providing fast, accurate, and unbiased answers to your questions with citations.

  • In contrast, Google Search lists websites that may contain relevant information to your search queries.

  • Answer Engines are eliminating the hassle of sifting through endless websites to find answers to your questions.

  • ā€œThe whole world is searching for answers, and this Answer Engine is showing us a smarter way to find them,ā€ said Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas.

  • So, why are Answer Engines becoming more popular? In the last two decades, the average humanā€™s attention span has decreased from 12 seconds to less than 8 seconds. Gen Z favors instant gratification, seeking quick access to answers.

Why Itā€™s Important:
  • So, why is Google Search not doing this? Itā€™s built on driving traffic to other websites. The more you visit a website, the more Google Search claims credit for it. This credit allows Google Search to charge advertisers higher fees to get more clicks, improving Googleā€™s margins.

  • As Jeff Bezos famously said, ā€œYour margin is my opportunity.ā€ Perplexity AI is capitalizing on the flawed aspects of Google Searchā€™s business framework.

šŸ©ŗ PULSE CHECK

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OPENAI

šŸŽ„Eleventh Day of ā€œ12 Days of OpenAIā€ Event

Image Source: OpenAI/YouTube/ā€œWork with Apps-12 Days of OpenAI: Day 11ā€/Screenshot

OpenAI showcased a series of enhancements to ChatGPTā€™s Desktop App to make it less of a conversational chatbot and more of an Agentic tool.

Key Details:
  • The ā€œ12 Days of OpenAIā€ event involves 12 livestreams across 12 days of ā€œa bunch of new things, big and small.ā€

  • ChatGPTā€™s Desktop App can seamlessly integrate with various third-party platforms, including Quip, Notion, and Apple Notes.

  • ChatGPTā€™s Advanced Voice Mode can also work with these third-party platforms, allowing you to ā€œtalk to your documents.ā€

  • ā€œAs our AI models get increasingly powerful, ChatGPT will become more and more Agentic,ā€ said OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil. ā€œItā€™s about seeing, understanding, and automating your work.ā€

  • Agentic AI is all about the autonomy to make decisions and take action. Itā€™s like having a virtual co-worker who can think, reason, and adapt to changing circumstances without constant guidance.

Why Itā€™s Important:
  • By integrating ChatGPTā€™s Desktop App into widely used third-party platforms, OpenAI lowers the barrier to AI adoption.

  • These integrations ensure anyone can access ChatGPT without switching between different platforms, minimizing workflow disruptions.

AI RESEARCH

šŸ§ŖAI Agents Tackle Scientific Discovery

Image Source: Canvaā€™s AI Image Generators/Magic Media

One of the most significant challenges in scientific research is finding effective ways to organize, interpret, and utilize data to drive new scientific discoveries. As scientific knowledge grows, it becomes more difficult for scientists to analyze all that data to uncover hidden connections.

Researchers at the MIT Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics (LAMM) created ā€œSciAgents,ā€ a framework that enables multiple AI Agents to organize relationships between scientific concepts by leveraging Graph Reasoning.

In other words, ā€œSciAgentsā€ deploys AI Agents to explore vast amounts of scientific information, identify patterns, and generate new hypotheses that lead to scientific discoveries. The AI Agents each specialize in specific domains of scientific research.

Graph Reasoning refers to a technique where scientific concepts are represented as Graphs. The Graphs are composed of nodes (e.g., genes, elements, or particles) and edges (i.e., the relationships between nodes). ā€œSciAgentsā€ can understand all the scientific concepts represented as Graphs. By leveraging Graph Reasoning, the AI Agents can effectively explore vast amounts of scientific information in half the time as a group of scientists sifting through piles of data and literature.

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

šŸ’°FUNDING FRONTLINES

  • Boon raises a $20.5M Series A to build Agentic AI tools for fleets.

  • Cartesia secures a $22M Funding Round to build real-time AI models.

  • Salt AI lands a $3M Seed Fund to unite low-code speed with full-code power.

šŸ’¼WHOā€™S HIRING?

  • Salesforce (Dallas, TX): Data Analyst Intern, Summer 2025

  • Amazon (Seattle, WA): SDEI Intern, DynamoDB, Summer 2025

  • NEXJE (Ann Arbor, MI): Frontend Development Intern, Summer 2025

  • RapidSOS (Remote): Implementation Engineering Intern, Summer 2025

  • NVIDIA (Santa Clara, CA): Developer Technology Intern, AI, Summer 2025

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šŸ“’FINAL NOTE

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ā¤ļøTAIP Review of The Day

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