Sign Up | Advertise with Us

Hey there,

Some exciting AI news today with OpenAI hitting a massive valuation milestone and Amazon transforming basketball analytics.

We've also got some reality checks on AI material discovery and California finally passing an AI safety bill that doesn't kill innovation.

Let's dive in.

The best marketing ideas come from marketers who live it. That’s what The Marketing Millennials delivers: real insights, fresh takes, and no fluff. Written by Daniel Murray, a marketer who knows what works, this newsletter cuts through the noise so you can stop guessing and start winning. Subscribe and level up your marketing game.

Sign Up Free

OpenAI just closed a secondary share sale that values the company at $500 billion. Current and former employees sold about $6.6 billion worth of stock to investors including Thrive Capital, SoftBank, and Dragoneer Investment Group. This makes OpenAI the world's most valuable private company, overtaking SpaceX's $456 billion valuation. The company is also experiencing intense competition for talent with Meta reportedly offering nine-figure compensation packages to poach top AI researchers.

Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, launched its first product called Tinker. It's an API that lets developers fine-tune open source AI models without dealing with infrastructure headaches. The company raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation before even shipping a product. Tinker handles distributed training on GPU clusters while you write training loops in Python, supporting models from Llama to massive 235-billion parameter architectures.

Remember when DeepMind announced it discovered 2.2 million new materials using AI? Turns out many are completely impractical. Researchers found over 18,000 compounds include radioactive elements like promethium that could never be useful materials. The AI models also predicted highly ordered crystal structures that only exist at absolute zero while real materials are much messier. Scientists say AI holds promise for materials discovery but needs more collaboration with experimental chemists and realistic expectations about current limitations.

The NBA partnered with Amazon Web Services to create "NBA Inside the Game," an AI platform that analyzes 29 body data points per player 60 times per second. Starting this season, fans will get new stats like Defensive Box Score that tracks who's guarding whom in real time, and Gravity that measures how much defensive attention a player attracts even without the ball. The system processes billions of data points to provide insights during live games on the NBA App and Prime Video broadcasts.

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 53 into law, requiring large AI labs to be transparent about their safety protocols for preventing catastrophic risks. Unlike last year's vetoed SB 1047, this bill got support because it asks companies to do things they're already doing like safety testing and releasing model cards. The law shows regulation doesn't have to kill innovation and prevents companies from cutting safety corners under competitive pressure, though Silicon Valley is still pushing for federal laws that would override state regulations.

Universal Music and Warner Music are close to striking landmark AI licensing agreements within weeks. They're negotiating with startups like ElevenLabs, Stability AI, Suno, and Udio, plus tech giants including Google and Spotify. These deals come after a wave of lawsuits over AI firms using copyrighted music without permission to train their models. The agreements mark a major shift in how the music industry approaches AI technology and could set precedents for creative industries dealing with generative AI.

Stay tuned for more updates, and have a fantastic day!

Cheers,
Zephyr