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An AI Startup Asked Investors to Pitch Them and Raised a Series A at $350M Valuation

An AI Startup Asked Investors to Pitch Them and Raised a Series A at $350M Valuation

Plus Anthropic releases a new 100k token model

Nathaniel Whittemore
May 11, 2023

Welcome to The AI Breakdown, the most interesting & important news and conversations in AI.

First, the News:

Meta introduces the “AI Sandbox” to help advertisers leverage AI - ah, the most inspiring use case
Looks like Wall Street liked Google I/O
Lawmakers in the EU have agreed to “tougher” draft rules on AI — whatever that means
With competition heating up, both Google and OpenAI plan to scale back public research releases
People have been salivating at ChatGPT’s forthcoming increase to 32K tokens and Anthropic goes and drops a 100k Claude. That’s approximately “One Great Gatsby” for those keeping track at home.

Introducing 100K Context Windows! We’ve expanded Claude’s context window to 100,000 tokens of text, corresponding to around 75K words. Submit hundreds of pages of materials for Claude to digest and analyze. Conversations with Claude can go on for hours or days.
— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI)
4:37 PM • May 11, 2023

The Most Interesting $350M-But-Could-Have-Been-$1B-Valuation-Series A

To say AI startups are in demand among venture capitalists is an understatement. Take the story of Rewind. It started with this tweet from April 14:

AI is so hot right now. We’ve had 100+ investors reach out. We don't have time to meet with everyone so instead we're sharing our investor presentation with the world:
More than anything we hope this transparency builds customer trust.
— Dan Siroker (@dsiroker)
3:17 PM • Apr 14, 2023

If you’ve ever raised capital, you’ll know how unusual this is. The question was would it work?

Well, according to The Information, Rewind received more than 1,000 offers and ultimately closed a Series A round at a $350M valuation. Series A!!! What’s more, apparently some investors (22 in fact) were offering a BILLION dollar valuation.

Staying in the spirit of transparency, Dan himself added more context.

I wasn't planning on sharing this today but since the news leaked, I feel obliged to comment:
I've raised over $200M in my career and have learned a lot about what works & what doesn't.
This time around, I decided to do a few unconventional things. First, I decided to forgo the… httptwitter.com/i/web/status/1…p
— Dan Siroker (@dsiroker)
8:23 PM • May 11, 2023

The company also grew daily active users 150% over the same period, thanks to the buzz around the unorthodox funding campaign.

A Helpful Resource

People are fascinated by AutoGPT, but the non-technical UI’s like Godmore and AgentGPT are still nascent. Here’s a tutorial on setting up AutoGPT for real on a Mac.

Today on The AI Breakdown

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Signing off from the future’s past - NLW