Meta’s $15 billion bet on AGI

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

Meta is close to finalizing a nearly $15 billion investment in Scale AI, its largest external deal to date, which would give it a 49% stake in the company, according to The Information.

As part of the push toward artificial general intelligence, Mark Zuckerberg is assembling a 50-person AI team, and Scale CEO Alexandr Wang is expected to join once the deal closes, per Bloomberg and The New York Times.

Switching gears:

Newsweek sat down with Oscar-winning production designer Rick Carter to talk about AI.

It’s worth a watch. Carter has spent decades working with Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, James Cameron, and J.J. Abrams.

Watch the video. Posted on LinkedIn.

OK let’s keep going ↓

Here’s what you should know:

• OpenAI taps Google in unprecedented cloud deal despite AI rivalry

  OpenAI plans to add Alphabet's Google cloud service to meet its growing needs for computing capacity, three sources told Reuters, marking a surprising collaboration between two prominent competitors in the artificial intelligence sector.

• o3 is 80% cheaper and introducing o3-pro

  OpenAI cut o3 prices to $2 input and $8 output per million tokens. The new o3-pro is priced at $20 input and $80 output, 87% cheaper than o1-pro.

• Niantic Spatial and Snap sign multi-year partnership

  Niantic Spatial Inc. and Snap Inc. have signed a strategic multi-year partnership to jointly build a next generation AI map that will serve as the foundation for AR glasses and AI agents to understand, navigate and interact with the real world. Snap will also support the geospatial AI startup’s funding with an additional investment of capital.

• Datadog introduces Bits AI SRE, your AI on-call teammate

  Bits acts like an engineer on your team: it sees the same telemetry, understands the context of your systems, and can generate and test exponentially more hypotheses in parallel than a human.

• Magistral, the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

  Magistral Medium scored 73.6% on AIME2024, and 90% with majority voting @64. Magistral Small scored 70.7% and 83.3% respectively.

The numbers:

• Tailscale doubled its valuation to $1.5B and plans to IPO by 2030, riding momentum from the AI boom.

• Glean raised $150M at a $7.2B valuation just 9 months after its last round, surpassing $100M ARR.

• Horizon3.ai raised $100M to expand its autonomous security platform and enter the U.S. federal market.

• Linear (Atlassian competitor) raised $82M in a Series C at a $1.25B valuation, led by Accel, boosting its growth in AI-enhanced project tools.

• Ontra, a legal AI startup automating back‑office workflows for Wall Street, secured $70M in Series B funding.

• Polimorphic, which delivers AI-powered government engagement tools, secured $18.6M in funding as revealed via an SEC filing.

• Altura secured $9M in Series A funding for its AI-powered bid management platform, led by Octopus Ventures.

Thought starters:

• The Gentle Singularity (Sam Altman)

• How we really judge AI

• Apple Executives Defend Apple Intelligence, Siri and AI Strategy

• BFI and CoSTAR launch report on generative AI for the screen industries

Meme of the day:

Thanks for reading,

Eddie

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