In today’s newsletter:

• News - 🔒 Is AI Ready to Hack the World? Anthropic’s Bold Safety Tests Reveal All

• Culture - 📈 How Reddit’s Vast Post Archive Became an AI Treasure Trove

🔒 Is AI Ready to Hack the World? Anthropic’s Bold Safety Tests Reveal All

In a San Francisco conference room, Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team, led by Logan Graham, is on the frontlines of AI safety, battle-testing the company’s latest model, Sonnet 3.5, for potentially catastrophic risks. From simulated cyberattacks to hypothetical bioweapon designs, the team ran thousands of “evals” to assess the AI’s capabilities. While the model showed progress—successfully exploiting simple website flaws and demonstrating advanced programming abilities—it fell short of dangerous thresholds, like reliably completing tasks that would take a human hours or cooking up precise chemical weapon instructions. In a humorous twist, Sonnet couldn’t teach a virtual robot to walk but managed to make it wiggle.

Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI employees, is determined to prioritize safety in a competitive race where others might cut corners. Graham’s team gave Sonnet 3.5 a passing grade at AI Safety Level 2, meaning it isn’t quite ready to wreak havoc. But with rapid advancements across the industry, Graham admits the clock is ticking to ramp up safeguards. As Anthropic navigates the delicate balance between innovation and risk, its efforts underscore the urgency of creating robust safety standards in an AI-powered future that’s advancing faster than ever.

🗞️ In Other News…

• Nvidia is expanding its operations in China, adding 200 employees and opening a Beijing office to boost research in autonomous driving, despite declining revenue and ongoing regulatory scrutiny.

• The Pentagon has launched the Artificial Intelligence Rapid Capabilities Cell (AI RCC) with $100 million in funding to accelerate AI adoption for autonomous weapons, command systems, and enterprise management, aiming to enhance military efficiency and counter adversaries like China through rapid experimentation and scaling of emerging technologies.

• Alphabet’s stock surged nearly 12% this week after announcing its Willow quantum computing chip, highlighting Google's innovation despite commercial quantum applications being years away and ongoing challenges in generative AI competition and government scrutiny.

• Executives at the WSJ CEO Council urged the incoming Trump administration to prioritize artificial intelligence by fostering public-private partnerships, attracting AI talent through immigration policies, supporting workforce retraining, and investing in infrastructure to maintain U.S. global leadership while avoiding overregulation.

📈 How Reddit’s Vast Post Archive Became an AI Treasure Trove

Reddit has transformed its vast trove of user-generated content into a goldmine, capitalizing on the insatiable appetite of AI companies for high-quality training data. By charging businesses like OpenAI and Google for access to its 19-year archive of candid, topic-organized discussions, Reddit’s data-licensing revenue skyrocketed from $12.3 million to $81.6 million in just a year. This strategy not only powered Reddit’s first quarterly profit as a public company but also made it a key player in the booming AI market, where high-quality text is increasingly scarce.

What makes Reddit so valuable for AI? Unlike other platforms, Reddit’s voting and karma system helps AI models identify quality content, while its pseudonymous users create honest and diverse posts across 100,000+ subreddits. This authenticity and breadth are manna for AI training, enabling breakthroughs in conversational and contextual accuracy. With its stock doubling in the past three months, Reddit is now diversifying beyond ads and tapping into AI’s explosive growth, solidifying its role as a unique and lucrative player in the tech landscape.

VC Fundraising Rounds

• Vapi, a San Francisco-based platform for deploying Voice AI agents, has raised $20 million in Series A funding. (12/11/24)

• RapidCanvas, a B2B platform leveraging artificial intelligence to automate tasks, has secured $16 million in funding. (12/11/24)

• Speak, a leading global platform for AI-driven language learning, has raised $78 million in Series C funding, reaching a $1 billion valuation. (12/10/24)

• Astrix Security, a trusted provider of enterprise solutions for securing non-human identities (NHIs), has raised $45 million in its Series B funding round. (12/10/24)

• WaveForms AI has secured $40 million in funding to advance its AI audio software, which enhances machine interactions by detecting emotional cues. (12/10/24)

• Aqemia, a French startup combining "quantum-inspired physics" with machine learning to accelerate drug discovery, has raised $38 million. (12/10/24)

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