🔥 Hot Takes Tuesday for 2024-09-03
AI's growing prominence, funding trends, and the future of coding tools are explored in this edition.
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(Scroll to the end…)
First… an observation and a question.
By the time our industry achieves ubiquitous AI infrastructure that is as agile, elastic, cost-effective, and TRiSM mature when compared to current non-AI infrastructure, will practitioners have moved on to another non-AI technology marvel (shiny object! squirrel!) or will AI be the defining specialization of the next several decades?
If you are reading this question in your internal voice of wonder, I’d love to get your thoughts in a reply.
And now, back to our regular Hot Takes Tuesday…
Funds, Funding, and M&A
Let’s take a look at where the money is flowing.
Techmeme: Sources: OpenAI is in talks to raise funding at a $100B+ valuation; Thrive Capital is leading the round, set to invest ~$1B, and Microsoft is expected to invest (Wall Street Journal)
From Wall Street Journal. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 🤖 BIG numbers are only big until they are not and I’m curious to see if Thrive’s thesis for OpenAI turns into a unicorn, decacorn, etc. cut down valuation trend a year from now on everything else that was similar to Tiger’s this time last year.
Techmeme: Magic, which makes AI tools for coding and to automate software development tasks, raised $320M from Eric Schmidt and others, bringing its total raised to $465M (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
By Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 🤖 Speaking of BIG numbers, the amount of implied spending by Magic on Google Cloud alone is remarkable and seems to mimic what Poolside seems to imply in their published interviews around A.I. coding tools.
Techmeme: Codeium, which offers enterprise AI coding tools, raised a $150M Series C at a $1.25B post-money valuation, and reports 700K+ users and 1K+ enterprise clients (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
By Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 🤖 Speaking of A.I. coding tools, Codeium is a unicorn 🦄 now too and the market could still absorb a few dozen more like it if (when?) the specialization around A.I. demands more coding tools for more challenges ahead.
Note: Some images via Unsplash
Disclosure
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Cuthrell Consulting LLCAttn: Jay Cuthrell1903 Live Oak St #92Beaufort, NC 28516-0092
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