Cognition CEO Scott Wu<\/p>\n
Cody Pickens for Forbes <\/p>\n
Early winners of the AI wave are on a bit of a shopping spree. <\/p>\n
This week, AI coding startup Cognition<\/a> bought Poke, an AI assistant that texts people like a friend, incorporating humor and slang. The idea is to bring Poke\u2019s personality to Cognition\u2019s coding agent Devin: \u201cIt\u2019s proactive, it knows you, and it\u2019s fun to talk to. That\u2019s exactly how working with Devin should feel, and now we get to build it together,\u201d CEO Scott Wu wrote in a recent blog<\/a>. People have exchanged 100 million messages with Poke in the last three months.<\/p>\n Renowned computer scientist Dr. Fei Fei Li\u2019s startup World Labs, which is building so-called \u201cspatial intelligence\u201d and interactive 3D worlds, has acquired robotics company SceniX. The acquisition will enable World Labs to test out how its digital simulations can train SceniX\u2019s robots. <\/p>\n And Bloomberg<\/a> reported this week that Midjourney, best known for its AI image generator, acquired popular astrology app Co-Star this spring, as it plans to build its first standalone app. That\u2019s just one of eight new projects the AI startup is pursuing, including a spa with full-body ultrasound machines it plans to open in San Francisco next year (yes, you read that right). <\/p>\n Now let\u2019s get into the headlines. <\/p>\n BIG PLAYS <\/p>\n Two of OpenAI\u2019s most advanced AI agents slipped out of the company\u2019s controls and hacked into AI startup Hugging Face to steal the answers for an internal test that evaluated its cyber skills, the company disclosed<\/a> last week. OpenAI didn\u2019t notice that its systems had gone on a dayslong hacking spree until the FBI was notified, Reuters<\/a> reported. OpenAI cofounder and president Greg Brockman told reporters in a press briefing last week that the company is working closely with government agencies to safely roll out its models and is still investigating the breach. <\/p>\n COMPUTE <\/p>\n OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever\u2019s high profile startup Safe Superintelligence (SSI) likes to keep its plans quiet. But on Monday the secretive AI lab announced chipmaker Nvidia has made a \u201csubstantial\u201d investment in the company, allowing it to increase its compute 10x over the next year. Bloomberg<\/a> reported Nvidia has invested $5 billion into SSI. The company, last valued at $32 billion, has been tight-lipped about its research direction but Sutskever<\/a> says it\u2019s focused on \u201coverlooked aspects of how the human brain functions\u201d\u2014whatever that means. <\/p>\n ETHICS + LAW<\/p>\n Hugging Face, a platform that hosts thousands of open source AI models and datasets, has a widespread nonconsensual deepfake problem, Wired<\/a> reported. Seven of the top nine image generation models freely available on Hugging Face allow people to digitally undress a person without their knowledge of consent, according to research by European nonprofit AI Forensics. Researchers also found the models were actively being used to create sexualized deepfakes. <\/p>\n AI DEAL OF THE WEEK <\/p>\n AI insurance startup Corgi has raised money from investors, yet again, marking its third fundraise in three months, Forbes<\/a> reported. The latest fundraise values Corgi at $4 billion, more than doubling its valuation since late May. Named after a two-year-old company-owned corgi, the AI startup also runs a 24\/7 cafe in San Francisco and employees work in-office seven days a week. <\/p>\n DEEP DIVE<\/p>\n Late last year, as factory farming advocate Lewis Bollard prepared to go on the Dwarkesh Podcast, a must-listen among the AI insider crowd, host Dwarkesh Patel dropped a bombshell: he would put up as much as $250,000 of his own money to match listeners\u2019 donations to FarmKind, a charity fighting factory farming.<\/p>\n For most podcast hosts, $250,000 is a season\u2019s budget. Patel viewed it more as a high-stakes litmus test of his wealthy audience\u2019s altruism.<\/p>\n Bollard, who was used to thinking of farm-animal welfare advocacy as a niche movement, had two immediate reactions: first, shock at the generosity of Patel\u2019s offer. The second, fear that the whole thing might flop. So he quietly worked his donor list, lining up backup \u201csympathy donations\u201d in case it did.<\/p>\n Patel wasn\u2019t worried. He made the case for generosity in terms built for AI researchers: cost, scale and measurable suffering. A $1 donation, he said, could get ten hens out of battery cage confinement, the equivalent of alleviating 10 years of suffering. Then he asked listeners to meet the full $250,000 match. After the show he went harder, posting<\/a>: \u201cBluntly, there are some listeners who are in a position to give much more. Given how neglected this topic is, one such person could singlehandedly change the game for 10s of billions of animals.\u201d<\/p>\n His appeal worked. The $250,000 ceiling was met in under 2 days. As donations flooded in, Bollard and Patel scrambled to find other large donors willing to extend the match. By the end, the campaign had raised nearly $2.5 million. Bollard estimates that 80 to 90% of donors had never given to an anti-factory farming initiative. And most<\/a> were rank-and-file AI lab employees.<\/p>\n The $2.5 million boon was more than just a great week. It was a market signal, a glimpse of a massive, untapped pipeline of capital emerging from the AI boom. The AI boom has created a new donor class: young, analytical, newly wealthy and eager to give money to causes they determine to be worthy. <\/p>\n Read the full story on Forbes<\/a>. <\/p>\n MODEL BEHAVIOR<\/p>\n