Amazon's new hit show...used AI

👋 Good morning/evening (wherever you are). It’s Monday.

A new Amazon show called House of David has an AI opening sequence (Season 1, Episode 6).

The numbers are wild:

• 22 million viewers in the first 17 days

• It climbed to No. 2 on the streaming platform among television series

• Just three weeks after its Season 1 premiere, Prime Video ordered a second season

There’s more details about this historic show on my recent LinkedIn post.

Speaking of LinkedIn…

Reid Hoffman (co-founder of LinkedIn) mentioned, “Start using AI deeply. It is a huge intelligence amplifier.”

OK let’s keep going ↓

Here’s what you should know:

• Kai-Fu Lee says OpenAI's Sam Altman "probably not sleeping well"

  Former Google China head Kai-Fu Lee is pivoting his AI startup 01.AI to fully embrace Deepseek's open-source models, describing them as an existential challenge to OpenAI's business model.

• AI marketplace for designing home goods

  Arcade, a generative AI marketplace for designing jewelry, is expanding its offerings to include home goods, starting with rugs. A new feature called “Match My Room,” allows users to upload a photo of their room so their design complements the existing colors and style.

• Apple Joins AI Data Center Race After Siri Mess

  Loop Capital analyst Ananda Baruah late Monday said Apple is in the process of placing orders for about $1 billion in Nvidia (NVDA) GB300 NVL72 systems. That equates to about 250 servers at $3.7 million to $4 million each, he said in a client note.

• The Future of AI Evaluation?

  MC-Bench changes how we evaluate AI models by challenging them to create Minecraft builds.

• Jack Ma-Backed Ant Touts AI Breakthrough Using Chinese Chips

  Used Chinese-made semiconductors to develop techniques for training AI models that would cut costs by 20%.

• Zapier adds AI capabilities to workflows

  Add the power of AI directly into your automated workflows, so you can move past isolated chat interactions and into connected, code-free systems.

• GAIA: An Open-Source Project from AMD

  Leverages the power of Ryzen AI Neural Processing Unit (NPU) to run private and local large language models (LLMs).

• Cloudflare announces AI Labyrinth

  A new mitigation approach that uses AI-generated content to slow down, confuse, and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and other bots that don’t respect “no crawl” directives.

• Perplexity’s proposal to buy TikTok

  It’s called ‘A Vision for Rebuilding TikTok in America’.

The numbers:

• AI chip startup FuriosaAI reportedly turns down $800 Million acquisition offer from Meta

• n8n raises $60 Million for AI-powered workflow automation

• Billionaire Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix Inc., is donating $50 Million to his alma mater Bowdoin College, one of the richest US liberal-arts colleges, to create an initiative for artificial intelligence and humanity.

• Browser Use told TechCrunch that it has raised a sizable $17 Million seed funding round led by Felicis’ Astasia Myers with participation from Paul Graham, A Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners.

Thought starters:

• Healthcare C-suites divided on AI despite $50 Billion potential savings

• Boston Dynamics’ Atlas can walk, run, crawl

• 53% of ML researchers believe an AI intelligence explosion is likely

If you read the last email…you know what’s going on with the ARC Prize Foundation and its benchmark: ARC-AGI.

ARC-AGI-2 was officially announced and it’s focused on measuring general fluid intelligence or reasoning.

For now, humans are still better than AI. But, it’s been less than 24 hours…let’s see how quickly AI “passes” this benchmark.

Meme of the day:

Thanks for reading,

Eddie

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