OpenAI's new text-to-video model

Top hits of the week

• OpenAI unveiled Sora, a generative AI model that creates video from text. Give Sora a brief — or detailed — description, or a still image, and it’ll generate 1080p movie-like scenes with multiple characters, different types of motion, and background details.

• Y combinator puts out a new call for startups in areas like spatial computing, new defense tech , climate tech, explainable AI, stablecoin finance, eliminating middlemen in healthcare, and more. It put out a list of 20 categories it’s looking to fund over the next few years.

• Lyft announces earnings with a typo that increased its stock by 60% — briefly… Then dropped. The company announced growth of 500 basis points, or 5 percentage points, however, it was supposed to be just 50 basis points, or .5 percentage points (no extra 0).

• Airbnb announced that it’s using AI to create the ‘ultimate concierge’. The company quietly acquired a stealth AI firm called GamePlanner.AI back in November 2023 and will utilize its tech for new AI initiatives.

• ChatGPT will now remember — and forget — things you tell it to. OpenAI is slowly rolling out a new feature called “Memory” that lets you tell the chatbot explicitly to remember something, see what it remembers, or turn off its memory altogether.

Earlier this week

• Coinbase posted first quarterly profit since 2021 on sturdy trading volumes due to a resurgence of interest in crypto. The company reported a profit of $273.4 million, or $1.04 per share, in the three months ended Dec 31.

• DoorDash beats estimates for delivery orders in the fourth quarter. Total orders increased 23% to 574 million in the three months ended Dec 31. Revenue rose 27% to $2.3 billion, slightly exceeding the $2.25 billion analysts had projected.

• Uber announces $7 billion buyback plan for the first time ever following a strong recovery in ride-share and healthy demand for its food delivery business. This marks a vote of confidence in the company’s strong financial momentum.

• Mozilla lays off roughly 60 employees and will shift focus to Firefox and AI.

• Instacart lays off 250 employees (7% of its workforce) to reshape the company. It intends to focus on its most promising initiatives that it believes will transform the company and industry over the long-term. It’s also authorizing a $500M share buyback.

• Nvidia is releasing a new tool called Chat with RTX that lets owners of GeForce RTX 30 Series and 40 Series cards run GenAI models offline on a Windows PC.

• Apple’s longest-serving designer, Bart Andre, is retiring after more than 30 years at the company. Bart joined Apple in 1992 with Jonny Ive and is described as being “one of Ive’s top lieutenants” and is credited with helping run Apple’s industrial design team. Remember, Jonny Ive (Apple’s former Chief Design Officer) left the company in 2019 to start his own agency called LoveFrom and brought many Apple designers with him.

Deal flow

• Rasa, a dev platform for conversational GenAI, raises a $30 million Series C funding round co-led by StepStone Group and PayPal Ventures. Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and Basis Set Ventures also participated.

• Enterprise-focused startup, Sierra, raises $110 million to bring AI ‘agents’ to businesses. It’s founded by former-Salesforce Co-CEO Bret Taylor and longtime Googler Clay Bavor.

• Hippo Harvest, the indoor farming startup, raised a $21 million Series B round on the back of its repurposed warehouse robots to grow lettuce. This values the startup at $145 million.

• Zendesk, the global customer services platform, has acquired an Estonian-based startup that provides an AI-powered quality assurance platform called Klaus for an undisclosed amount.

• Code testing startup Antithesis raises $47 million in seed funding to launch an automated testing platform for software. It’s now valued at $215 million.

• Mindy secures $6M in seed funding from Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund to build an email-based AI assistant.

• FlowFi raises $9M in seed funding to revolutionize financial management for entrepreneurs, offering them access to vital financial insights and metrics.

Other interesting gems

• Zuck posted a reel giving his take on Apple’s Vision Pro. He believes Quest is the better value and product. It’s lighter, has no wires, the screen is wider and brighter, and has a greater content library.

• Forbes Fintech 50 list that features companies that continue to innovate, grow, and adapt even as the industry suffers layoffs, lower valuations, and a collapse in VC support.