OpenAI's funding dilemma

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Welcome back, Superhuman

OpenAI is facing a pivotal decision about its corporate structure — with billions in funding at stake. And: The field of generative AI coding tools heats up with two fresh entrants.

🎧️ New Podcast: The PowerPoint Killer – How Gamma AI grew to 20 million users in 1 year. Check it out: Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.

Today’s Insights

• What’s at stake for OpenAI’s latest funding round?

• Frontier: The growing AI coding sector

• Tutorial: Finding top prompt ideas

• Everything else you should know today

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• AI-Generated Images: Not-so-distant future

NEXT IN AI

OpenAI may be rethinking its entire business strategy

Users are still discovering all of the capabilities packed inside OpenAI’s new frontier model, o1: There’s its alleged 120-point IQ scores, which outpace the average human by 20 points; its ability to initiate conversations with users totally unprompted; and its impressive coding skills, letting developers build a fully-functional chess game in minutes. 

The buzz around o1 has helped Sam Altman drum up a reported $6.5B in new funding, catapulting the startup’s valuation to an eye-watering $150B. And all the big players — including Microsoft, Nvidia, and Apple — want in.

But there’s a catch: 

• In order to clinch that funding, OpenAI might have to ditch its entire business structure

• Right now, funders have to hand over excess profits they earn to the startup’s nonprofit parent

• But for the latest round, some investors say they'll contribute only if OpenAI first agrees to become a traditional, for-profit company

Without the funding boost, OpenAI would likely have to stall plans to train future models, including ones that build on o1’s unique reasoning capabilities. On the flip side, abandoning its nonprofit roots could erode public trust. And that comes as, for the first time ever, OpenAI labeled its new model “medium” risk in the areas of biological and chemical weapons, raising security concerns.

​​Will OpenAI maintain its unique structure and sacrifice rapid growth? Or will it embrace a more traditional model to fuel its ambitions, possibly at the cost of some of its founding principles? The future of AI, both for OpenAI and the industry as a whole, could hang in the balance.

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FROM THE FRONTIER

The AI coding field just got more crowded

Some fields have yet to embrace AI, but software engineers are welcoming the technology with open arms: More than 97% say they’ve already started using AI at work. That’s made generative coding startups some of the fastest-growing in the industry. 

And two relative newcomers just entered the fray with fresh rounds of funding:

• Founded last year, Paris-based Poolside is set to raise $500M in a new round. Although it doesn’t have a product to show off just yet, it bills itself as an AI-powered alternative to GitHub, built from the ground up to tackle coding challenges.

• Another 2023-founded startup, Supermaven, just brought in $60M to expand its AI programming efforts. It sets itself apart with a massive 300,000-token context window and a custom neural network that’s more efficient than traditional models.

🎧️ DECODING THE FUTURE

The journey from 0 to 20M users: How Gamma became a breakout AI success

We sat down with Grant Lee, the cofounder of Gamma, one of the most successful generative AI products on the market today with over 20 million registered users and millions of monthly actives. Gamma is reimagining how people create and share presentations. In our conversation, Grant shared:

• How Gamma evolved from a PowerPoint alternative to an AI-powered creation tool

• How they grew to 20M users and got viral adoption

• The challenges of building a horizontal product and finding product-market fit

• Strategies for integrating AI into existing workflows

• Lessons learned from building a profitable AI startup

Listen now on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.

THE AI ACADEMY

How to find top prompt ideas using Prompt Gallery

1. Go to Prompt Gallery and sign in.

2. Explore and select a prompt category from the list.

3. You will see a sample prompt with results.

4. You can adjust the prompt by editing/rewriting it using the given sample.

5. Set the temperature and models etc. and click on "Run" to get the response.

Tip: Add more detail in prompts or set the tone and style to get more personalized outputs.

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Section’s AI Proficiency Report measured the proficiency, knowledge, and usage of 1000+ people across industries, and found…

• The most proficient users get a day and a half of their week back, but they’re the smallest segment of AI users

• Most people have barely experimented with AI and they’re reporting virtually no productivity gains

Deep-dive the report + learn how to join the 7% of hyper-productive AI users

AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

• Advanced Search: AI search engine Perplexity will soon let users refine their results by category, such as filtering for published academic papers or videos.

• Virtual Coworkers: Slack is integrating a host of new AI features, including autonomous agents from Salesforce, Adobe, Anthropic, and other tech companies.

• Unlikely Duo: AI chip startup Groq has signed a deal with oil giant Aramco to build what would be the largest-ever data center in Saudi Arabia.

• Sleep Soundly: The US FDA approved the latest Apple Watch as a device to help detect sleep apnea, which can be dangerous if left untreated.

• Movie Magic: The text-to-video platform Runway unveiled an API that will let developers incorporate the video generator into their own apps and services.

PRODUCTIVITY

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PROMPT OF THE DAY

Even coaches need coaching

Prompt: I’m acting as a mentor to a young colleague who’s having difficulty adjusting to a new promotion. What are 10 deep questions I can ask to discover the root of the problem? They’ve proven themselves capable of new challenges but create blocks for themselves when moving out of their comfort zone. Please stress the philosophy of feeling comfortable being uncomfortable. Include some questions an experienced and trustworthy coach might ask. 

_{Source: BetterUp}

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

The not-so-distant future

Midjourney Prompt: A futuristic man stands on an ultra-modern indoor balcony, outside is a futuristic city with towering skyscrapers and flying cars, the city is high and low, presented in a surreal style, clean picture, minimalist style, panoramic, different perspectives, large scale, epic fantasy, super large scale
--ar 3:4 --v 6.1 --chaos 60 --stylize 350

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🧞Your wish is my command

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Thanks for reading.

Until next time!

Zain & the Superhuman AI team