British Start-Up Synthesia Hits $2.1 Billion Valuation On AI Video Boom
Fundraising round makes it the country’s most valuable generative artificial intelligence media company.
Synthesia, a generative AI start-up based in Britain, has raised $180 million valuing it at $2.1 billion. The company uses artificial intelligence to create lifelike human faces and speech that are almost indistinguishable from real video but do not need cameras, actors or film studios.
The latest fundraising round brings the total capital raised to more than $330 million. Synthesia added that the new valuation made it the UK’s most valuable generative AI media company. It is already considered one of Britain’s most promising AI start-ups.
Matt Clifford, the British venture capital investor who helped establish the UK’s AI Safety Institute and has led the government’s AI policy review, recently named Synthesia as one of the UK’s “world-leading companies” in the area, along with Google DeepMind and Wayve.
The series D funding round was led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from existing investors including GV, an arm of Alphabet, and MMC Ventures along with new backers including the World Innovation Lab, Atlassian Ventures and PSP Growth. The company said it would use the funding to drive the expansion of its AI-powered video platform in several markets including Japan, Australia, Europe and North America. The extra money would also support development and talent growth.
Victor Riparbelli, chief executive and co-founder of Synthesia, said: “This new investment will help us develop a new generation of AI-powered video experiences that are interactive, real-time and personalized, offering possibilities we could have only imagined when we founded the company in 2017.”
More on Synthesia’s fundraising efforts and expansion
Data Flow | The Movement & Processing Of Data For Artificial Intelligence | IBM
Just as a symphony requires harmony between different instruments, data flow requires harmony between different components to unlock the power of data and drive AI-powered decision-making. IBM’s Luv Aggarwal discusses the importance of data creation, organization, storage, integration, and analytics in creating a seamless data flow that enables data-driven insights. Dive into the world of data flow and discover the key to harmonious business operations.
Bruce Burke Participating In Forbes Entrepreneur Of Impact Competition
Exciting News! I have been selected to participate in the Entrepreneur of Impact competition. One visionary winner will be featured in Forbes, receive $25,000, and have a one-on-one mentoring session with the Shark Tank's Daymond John.
I'm proposing building an AI-powered, fully automated news and information organization that creates news articles, videos, podcasts, deep dives, special reports, white papers, and more — focused on the ever-expanding world of AI.
Voting opens on the 20th, I would appreciate your vote and will be posting again when voting starts. I have setup my profile that outlines my proposal linked above.
OpenAI's AI Reasoning Model 'Thinks' In Chinese Sometimes - No One Know Why
Shortly after OpenAI released o1, its first “reasoning” AI model, people began noting a curious phenomenon. The model would sometimes begin “thinking” in Chinese, Persian, or some other language — even when asked a question in English.
Given a problem to sort out — e.g. “How many R’s are in the word ‘strawberry?’” — o1 would begin its “thought” process, arriving at an answer by performing a series of reasoning steps. If the question was written in English, o1’s final response would be in English. But the model would perform some steps in another language before drawing its conclusion.
“[o1] randomly started thinking in Chinese halfway through,” one user on Reddit said.
“Why did [o1] randomly start thinking in Chinese?” a different user asked in a post on X. “No part of the conversation (5+ messages) was in Chinese.” OpenAI hasn’t provided an explanation for o1’s strange behavior — or even acknowledged it. So what might be going on? Well, AI experts aren’t sure. But they have a few theories.
Read experts theories on 01 thinking in Chinese sometimes
Eric Schmidt’s New Secret Project Is An AI Video Platform Called ‘Hooglee’
The billionaire technologist has quietly founded a startup that aims to “bring people closer, simplify communication, and enhance engagement” through artificial intelligence.
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MiniMax Unveils Their Open Source LLM With Industry-Leading 4M Token Context
MiniMax is perhaps today best known here in the U.S. as the Singaporean company behind Hailuo, a realistic, high-resolution generative AI video model that competes with Runway, OpenAI’s Sora and Luma AI’s Dream Machine.
But the company has far more tricks up its sleeve: Today, for instance, it announced the release and open-sourcing of the MiniMax-01 series, a new family of models built to handle ultra-long contexts and enhance AI agent development.
The series includes MiniMax-Text-01, a foundation large language model (LLM), and MiniMax-VL-01, a visual multi-modal model.
A massive context window
MiniMax-Text-o1, is of particular note for enabling up to 4 million tokens in its context window — equivalent to a small library’s worth of books. The context window is how much information the LLM can handle in one input/output exchange, with words and concepts represented as numerical “tokens,” the LLM’s own internal mathematical abstraction of the data it was trained on.
And, while Google previously led the pack with its Gemini 1.5 Pro model and 2 million token context window, MiniMax remarkably doubled that.
More about MiniMax Open Source LLM on Venture Beat
How Restaurants Are Leveraging AI
PreciTaste AI CEO Ingo Stork and Union Square Hospitality Group founder Danny Meyer join to discuss how they're utilizing AI in the services and hospitality sector that include helping to manage crews and even predict demand. They speak with Caroline Hyde on "Bloomberg Technology", about integrating AI in hospitality.
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Google’s Gemini AI Just Shattered The Rules Of Visual Processing — Here’s What That Means For You
Google’s Gemini AI has quietly upended the AI landscape, achieving a milestone few thought possible: The simultaneous processing of multiple visual streams in real time.
This breakthrough — which allows Gemini to not only watch live video feeds but also to analyze static images simultaneously — wasn’t unveiled through Google’s flagship platforms. Instead, it emerged from an experimental application called “AnyChat.”
This unanticipated leap underscores the untapped potential of Gemini’s architecture, pushing the boundaries of AI’s ability to handle complex, multi-modal interactions. For years, AI platforms have been restricted to managing either live video streams or static photos, but never both at once. With AnyChat, that barrier has been decisively broken.
“Even Gemini’s paid service can’t do this yet,” Ahsen Khaliq, machine learning (ML) lead at Gradio and the creator of AnyChat, said in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “You can now have a real conversation with AI while it processes both your live video feed and any images you want to share.”
More on how Google’s Gemini is quietly redefining AI vision
How We Can Stay Ahead Of AI | Martin Warner | TEDxSwansea
Tech visionary Martin Warner explores the future of human potential in an AI-driven world. As artificial general intelligence rapidly evolves, Warner offers a compelling roadmap to outsmart machines, adapt, and thrive. This insightful guide will inspire optimism about how humanity can harness AI’s power while keeping the human spirit at the forefront.
Martin Warner is an Anglo-American celebrated entrepreneur, inventor, disruptive technologist, and founder/investor of ventures across media, high tech, aviation, and education in the UK, USA, and beyond. Renowned as a visionary entrepreneur, Martin is also a film financier and producer, educator, and investor.
He holds several entrepreneurial records, notably achieving a remarkable $50 million exit in just 17 months. Martin was also the first British pioneer to enter the electric air taxi movement, helping to shape the future of Urban Air Mobility. He is also a national bestselling author.
Martin holds over 120 patents and recently co-invented the world’s first full-color 3D desktop printer and introduced the world's first corporate news ticker, among other innovations. Beneath his success lies a profound commitment to nurturing the next generation of entrepreneurs. He has empowered and helped over 300,000 entrepreneurs worldwide.
Thats all for today, however new advancements, investments, and partnerships are happening as you read this. AI is moving fast, subscribe today to stay informed.