This AI short film will make U.S. history

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

The longest GenAI short film in the U.S. will be released next week.

It’s a hybrid AI film that features Award-winning & BAFTA-nominated actors.

Created by Arcana and Phantom X.

Watch the video (posted on LinkedIn).

OK let’s keep going ↓

Here’s what you should know:

• Anthropic releases Claude 4

  Here’s the YouTube demo of Claude 4 autonomously coding. Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger called the release a milestone in Anthropic's work to make increasingly autonomous AI. He said in an interview with Reuters that customer Rakuten had Opus 4 coding for nearly seven hours.

• Apple plans AI glasses in 2026

  The new Apple glasses would boast a camera, microphone and speakers, similar to Meta's specs, and would provide access to the Siri voice assistant, according to Bloomberg.

• OpenAI is launching Stargate UAE

  Stargate represents their long-term vision for building frontier-scale compute capacity around the world in service of safe, secure, and broadly beneficial AGI.

• 100 things Google announced at I/O

  Here’s what Google announced, launched and demoed.

• Melania Trump’s AI voice narrates audiobook of her memoir

  Trump worked with startup ElevenLabs, an AI audio research and technology company, to render a version of her “official AI voice,” with the audiobook available exclusively in the ElevenReader app.

• Becker launches new AI learning and study assistant

  Becker, a provider of accounting exam reviews and professional education, has launched a new AI learning and study assistant designed to support students preparing for accounting and finance credentialing exams.

• Aston Martin Aramco announces CoreWeave as official AI partner

  CoreWeave, Inc. announced a multi-year partnership with Aston Martin Aramco, joining the team as Official AI Cloud Computing Partner. CoreWeave will help the team relocate existing data centre to their first large-scale cloud computing facility

• Lowe’s, Home Depot tout CX wins from AI projects

  Lowe’s was among the initial wave of companies signing up for ChatGPT Enterprise in 2023, following several years of work to mature its IT systems and architecture. Home Depot was also an early adopter with nearly 200 traditional and generative AI pilots across the organization in the first half of 2024.

• Johns Hopkins AI flags failed cancer treatments

  An artificial intelligence technique for detecting DNA fragments shed by tumors and circulating in a patient’s blood, developed by Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center investigators, could help clinicians more quickly identify and determine if pancreatic cancer therapies are working.

• AI learns how vision and sound are connected

  “We are building AI systems that can process the world like humans do, in terms of having both audio and visual information coming in at once and being able to seamlessly process both modalities. Looking forward, if we can integrate this audio-visual technology into some of the tools we use on a daily basis, like large language models, it could open up a lot of new applications,” says Andrew Rouditchenko, an MIT graduate student and co-author of a paper on this research.

The numbers:

• CoreWeave raised $2B through an upsized high-yield bond sale to scale its AI cloud infrastructure

• Legora secured $80M Series B at a $675M valuation as top law firms adopt its collaborative AI platform

• Veesion, based in France, raised ~$53M Series B to expand its AI for detecting suspicious behavior in retail stores

• Siro brought in $50M Series B for its AI-powered coaching platform for sales teams, led by SignalFire

• Converge raised $23M to advance its AI-driven approach to decarbonizing the construction industry

• Filed, an AI tax assistant for accounting firms, raised $17.2M led by Northzone

• Greenlite AI raised $15M Series A from Greylock to build AI agents for financial services

• Ravical secured $8M pre-seed to deliver domain-specific AI agents for professional services firms

• Zoca raised $6M from Accel to help local businesses using agentic AI

• Pay-i raised $4.9M for GenAI value intelligence tools

• PiLogic raised $4M to build custom satellite AI models

Thought starters:

More details are emerging about the AI device from Jony Ive and Sam Altman.

Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says it may be larger than Humane’s pin but as compact and elegant as an iPod Shuffle.

Designed to be worn around the neck, the device may lack a display, instead using built-in cameras and mics for environmental sensing.

And it could connect to phones or PCs for computing and display.

Here’s another one to think about (from Bloomberg, paywalled):

The first drugs conceived entirely by artificial intelligence will likely be commercially available around the end of the decade, according to the leader of an AI drug discovery startup.

“I would be surprised if we don’t see it over the next five to six years,” Alex Zhavoronkov, chief executive officer of Insilico Medicine, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “I hope we will be the first ones – we have more than 40 programs internally – but you never know.”

The pharmaceutical industry has long touted the promise of AI in slashing time and costs in the research and development process, although none has been approved so far. Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. is in final clinical testing of a psoriasis drug selected by AI, with data expected this year.

While most companies, according to Zhavoronkov, currently use AI in a piecemeal manner, what sets Insilico apart in his assessment is that it incorporates the technology in every step from target hypothesis to drug optimization to deliver drugs ready for human trials.

Insilico, which has operations across the US, China, the Middle East and Canada, recently filed anew for a listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange, after raising a private round that valued the company at more than $1 billion.

Meme of the day:

Thanks for reading,

Eddie

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