The Tech Journal

The trends that shaped EVs, robotaxis, and electric flight in 2024 : If there was one phrase that captured the vibe and theme of 2024 at least in the transportation sector it was “business whiplash.” Legacy automakers changed direction on their all-EVs-or-bust strategy, startups pivoted, and some Silicon Valley VCs and executives adjusted their views on a changing political landscape in which they now are playing starring roles. Jaguar went in an entirely new polarizing direction with a rebranding that got a lot of attention and lit social media on fire, at least for a few days. GM slowed its EV plans and was forced to change lanes on software an internal restructure accelerated by problems with the Chevy Blazer EV that has had positive developments. But the automaker’s most striking shift was its decision to no longer fund development of the Cruise robotaxi. https://lnkd.in/gyCTQu2K

Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon will face fraud charges in the US : Do Kwon, the co-founder of collapsed cryptocurrency startup Terraform Labs, will be extradited from Montenegro to the U.S. to face federal fraud charges, as first reported by Bloomberg. Kwon faces charges in both the U.S. and South Korea; Terraform Labs’ TerraUSD and Luna cryptocurrencies crashed in 2022, causing investors to lose over $40 billion. Terraform and Kwon were found personally liable for fraud following a civil trial on U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission allegations in April. Terraform agreed to pay $4.5 billion to settle the case with the SEC. https://lnkd.in/gk25tPG3

DeepSeek’s new AI model appears to be one of the best ‘open’ challengers yet : A Chinese lab has created what appears to be one of the most powerful “open” AI models to date. The model, DeepSeek V3, was developed by the AI firm DeepSeek and was released on Wednesday under a permissive license that allows developers to download and modify it for most applications, including commercial ones. DeepSeek V3 can handle a range of text-based workloads and tasks, like coding, translating, and writing essays and emails from a descriptive prompt. https://lnkd.in/dibdh53P

ChatGPT Search can be tricked into misleading users, new research reveals : ChatGPT Search, an AI-powered search engine that went live this month, can be fooled into generating completely misleading summaries, U.K. newspaper The Guardian has found. ChatGPT’s search feature is meant to make browsing faster by doing things like summarizing a web page’s product reviews. But The Guardian found it could get ChatGPT to ignore negative reviews and generate “entirely positive” summaries by inserting hidden text into websites it created. ChatGPT Search could also be made to spit out malicious code using this method. https://lnkd.in/ewxckP7c

AI sales rep startups are booming. So why are VCs wary? When you really probe venture capitalists about investing in AI startups, they’ll tell you that businesses are experimenting wildly but are very slow to add AI solutions into their ongoing business processes. But there are some exceptions. And one of them appears to be an area known as AI sales development representatives, or AI SDRs. These use large language models (LLMs) and voice technology to craft personalized outreach emails and place automated calls to potential customers. “In some markets, we’re seeing five to 10 companies all have success in a pretty short period of time,” Shardul Shah, a partner at Index Ventures, said of the AI SDR boom. https://lnkd.in/gZRzijUv

The promise and perils of synthetic data : Is it possible for an AI to be trained just on data generated by another AI? It might sound like a harebrained idea. But it’s one that’s been around for quite some time and as new, real data is increasingly hard to come by, it’s been gaining traction. Anthropic used some synthetic data to train one of its flagship models, Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Meta fine-tuned its Llama 3.1 models using AI-generated data. And OpenAI is said to be sourcing synthetic training data from o1, its “reasoning” model, for the upcoming Orion. But why does AI need data in the first place and what kind of data does it need? And can this data really be replaced by synthetic data? https://lnkd.in/g-uQiNnF

Elon Musk’s xAI lands $6B in new cash to fuel AI ambitions : xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, has raised $6 billion in a Series C financing round. The company announced this week that Andreessen Horowitz , Blackrock, Fidelity, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Nvidia, AMD, and others participated. Kingdom Holdings, the Saudi conglomerate holding company, invested roughly $400 million in the round, according to a public filing. The filing also revealed that xAI is now valued at $45 billion, close to double its previous valuation. The new cash brings xAI’s total raised to $12 billion, adding to the $6 billion tranche xAI raised in May. https://lnkd.in/eaCNCfii

Bluesky starts testing a trending topics feature : Social network Bluesky said on Christmas day that it launched trending topics feature in beta. The trending topics are available on both desktop and mobile apps of the social network. On the desktop, you can see trending topics on the right sidebar, and on the mobile apps, you can tap on the search button to look at them. Bluesky said that trending topics would currently be available only in the English language. You can disable trending topics by going to Settings > Content and Media and then unchecking the “Enable trending topics” option. https://lnkd.in/e5i5sfw3

Elon Musk’s xAI lands $6B in new cash to fuel AI ambitions : Elon Musk’s AI company, has raised $6 billion, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday. Investors gave a minimum of $77,593, per the filing (97 participated, but the document doesn’t reveal their identities). xAI later announced (confirming some earlier reporting) that Andreessen Horowitz , Blackrock, Fidelity, Kingdom Holdings, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Nvidia, AMD, and others numbered among them. The new cash brings xAI’s total raised to $12 billion, adding to the $6 billion tranche xAI raised this spring. CNBC reported in November that xAI was aiming for a $50 billion valuation double its valuation of six months prior. According to the Financial Times, only investors who’d backed xAI in its previous fundraising round were permitted to participate in this one. Reportedly, investors who helped finance Musk’s Twitter acquisition were given access to up to 25% of xAI’s shares. https://lnkd.in/e7kpcqmB

Nvidia’s CES 2025 keynote: How to watch : Nvidia will no doubt have the biggest CES 2025. After all, the company has pretty much the biggest everything nowadays. The chip giant is sporting a $3.4+ trillion market cap, due largely to its foundational position in the ongoing AI boom. Companies like OpenAI and Meta have purchased Nvidia processors by the boatload, and that’s unlikely to change in the new year. Founder and CEO Jensen Huang will help kick off CES 2025 on January 6 at 6:30 p.m. PT/9:30 p.m. ET, “with his trademark leather jacket and an unwavering vision,” per Nvidia. The keynote will be livestreamed both on YouTube and via the chipmaker’s site. https://lnkd.in/ezJPVH5B