Weekly bulletin from AIport, issue #13

Hello and welcome to the latest issue of our AI bulletin! We hope you enjoy this week’s read. Give us a like if you do and have a great weekend! 

North America:

• OpenAI’s archrival xAI, led by Elon Musk, is close to raising $6 billion from investors, according to Bloomberg. Meanwhile, OpenAI partners with Moderna to develop new treatments.

• Rabbit’s R1, a handheld AI assistant and direct competitor to the poorly received Humane AI Pin, begins its spring shipping — the first reviews are in.

• Canada’s Sanctuary AI posts a video highlighting its new AI robot’s human-like movements. 

• Climax Foods and other companies are utilizing AI to make cheese, reports MIT Technology Review. 

• Perplexity launches its first B2B solution, Enterprise Pro, and announces partnerships with Japan’s SoftBank and Germany’s Deutsche Telekom.

• Apple releases OpenELM, a type of LLM that doesn’t require connection to cloud servers, and removes three AI nude apps from its App Store. 

Europe:

• The UK government’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launches a probe to investigate Microsoft’s relationship with Mistral and Inflection AI, as well as Amazon’s arrangements with Anthropic.

• Paris-based FlexAI exits stealth mode with a new round of investment aimed at recalibrating its compute infrastructure.  

Asia:

• Amidst the ongoing AI memory chip boom, South Korea’s SK Hynix records the fastest sales growth of the past 15 years. 

• Singapore’s state-owned news channel, CNA, airs a video segment on battling deepfakes in East Asia. 

Australia:

• Charlie, the ANZAC-themed AI chatbot introduced by the State Library of Queensland to answer questions about WWI, gets attacked by pranksters hours after its launch.