Welcome, humans.

My (Noah’s) great Uncle, who’s 72 and still wakes up at 6:30am every day to start his work day cause he loves it, told us that he reads The Neuron every single day to stay on the cutting-edge of AI. 

Not all heroes wear capes, just sayin’! 🤷

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

• Reddit clinches a deal to license its data for $60M/year.

• Adobe Acrobat integrates AI features into its PDF software.

• The FTC proposed new rules to clamp down on AI deepfakes.

• Investor demand for AI is hitting unprecedented levels.

Reddit makes $60M.

Training a chatbot is a bit like making Grandma’s chicken soup.

The basic ingredients, like chicken and carrots, represent all the available content on the internet. This part's a breeze—everyone's doing it.

However, it's the unique blend of spices that sets the outcome apart—for chatbots, this means finding exclusive datasets to train their models on.

In 2023, some publishers like X realized, “oh sh*t, our data is really fricken valuable for AI training.” So they paywalled/hid their data.

This left companies like OpenAI with a dilemma:

1. Use that data anyway (& get sued).

2. Fork over cash to publishers for access.

We’ve been seeing a lot of #2 lately—In December, OpenAI agreed to an eight-figure sum with Axel Springer for its news articles, and Apple is considering shelling out up to $50M for content licenses from news orgs.

Now, Reddit signed a $60M/yr contract with an AI company that’ll use its content for chatbot training.

• “AI company” likely means OpenAI or Google.

• And “its content” essentially means user-generated content. This move has unsurprisingly irked many Reddit users, who are now purging their past posts/comments in protest.

We’re not taking sides, but it's no secret that social media giants have a long history of profiting from user data:

Why it matters: The best chatbots have already eaten the internet. They’re worried that anyone can do this and catch up. To maintain their edge, they're on the hunt for fresh, exclusive data sources.

Anticipate more deals like this, possibly starting with $100M/year payments to The NYT from OpenAI, once they iron out the legalities (just our two cents).

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Wednesday Wirings (mega edition).

An AI bubble? Overheard from a (vegan) Palo Alto cafe: “Oh hell naw!”.

Investors, both big and small, can't get enough of AI, and there's no sign of it slowing down:

1. Nvidia's stock rose by 16.4% this month, hitting a market cap of $1.72T.

2. Arm, a British semiconductor firm, soared 57.92% this month.

3. Scale AI is eyeing a valuation of up to $14B for its next funding round.

4. SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son plans to gather $100B for an AI chip venture.

5. Recogni, which designs AI compute solutions, raised $102M.

6. Rasa, a conversational AI platform for enterprises, secured $30M.

7. LangChain, a toolkit for building with AI, snagged $25M.

8. Clarity, which helps detect AI deepfake videos, raised $16M.

9. Rogo, an enterprise AI for financial institutions, raised $7M.

10. Dili, a YC-backed platform automating operations for PE/VC firms, raised $3.6M.

11. AIX Ventures raised a $202M fund for early-stage AI companies.

We curated the top 27 tools you need for work in our “Top Tools For Business”!

Around the Horn.

• The FTC proposed new rules for AI deepfakes impersonating individuals & NY’s Governor wants to make "deceptive AI" illegal.

• Deutsche Telekom unveiled a new phone concept eliminating apps, with AI handling all your tasks (this is the future, TBH).

• Adobe announced new AI features in Acrobat that can summarize files, chat with documents, & more.

• Andrej Karpathy posted a new lecture called “Let’s build the GPT Tokenizer.”

A Cat's Commentary.

Where do you #Neuron?

Keep sending in pictures of where you read The Neuron for a chance to be featured! Submit here.

Spotlight on this week’s #neuron champ: An absolutely purrfect photo 😻: