Google’s Astra is the first “AI-for-everything” agent

TECH IN THE NEWS

$32 Billion AI Bill - A bipartisan coalition of senators proposed massive U.S. annual emergency spending on AI to continue outcompeting China.

Major Tariff Hikes - The U.S. announced tariffs on ~$18B worth of Chinese imports, including EVs, semiconductors, batteries, and solar cells.

$10B of AI Compute - Elon Musk's xAI startup is negotiating a $10B multi-year deal to rent cloud server capacity from Oracle.

Build 2024 - Microsoft’s dev conference next week in Seattle could bring new Surface hardware with on-device AI/ML and Copilot AI updates.

Market Highs? - The Nasdaq, Dow, and S&P indexes all hit new records on growing expectations of easing inflation and rate cuts.

#BUZZCHALLENGE

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THE HOTTEST THING IN TECH
Google’s Astra is the first “AI-for-everything” agent

At I/O 2024 this week Google announced “Project Astra” a multimodal AI assistant, as it pushes to be a universal assistant integrated into every aspect of our work and home lives. Astra is a prototype AI agent and the bleeding edge of Google’s efforts to infuse autonomous reasoning and action capacity across Search, Gemini Live, and their entire ecosystem. The array of AI features announced was overwhelming, and the boundaries between them are pretty blurred, but Astra showed it is a serious contender in the accelerating digital assistant battle with OpenAI’s GPT-4o.

The main features of the Astra and Gemini Live reveal:

• Can see, hear, and take actions on your behalf

• Can use your phone's camera and audio to analyze environments 

• Near real-time conversational AI through video and audio

• Capable of advanced reasoning and recall

• ‘AI teammates’ are agents that can answer questions on emails, meetings, and other data within Workspace.

• May also power a future pair of AR glasses as teased (Samsung?)

• Google Lens visual search tool will enable video footage.

• Astra public access is expected through the Gemini app late 2024

Google’s new Trillium chips are also coming to make it easier for clients to run AI applications based on this tech. The sixth-gen TPU will boast 4.7x better performance than the 5th and is customized to power LLMs. Google is second only to NVIDIA in the AI data center market, but it’s yet to be seen if this upgrade can help close the gap on the latter’s ~80% share.

To enhance Search, Google also rolled out "AI Overviews" to all U.S. Search users, its largest overhaul in years. The feature uses Gemini AI to summarize answers to complex questions at the top of search results. It also unveiled a conversational search chatbot and ‘multi-step reasoning’ to speed up results. Will it be enough to see off challengers like Perplexity?

Get our Deep Dive on Perplexity AI and how AI Search is adding value to Enterprises, Professionals, and Investors » Get Premium Deep Dives

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1. Corp General Counsel and Valuation, raised $160MM with 25-50% IRR. Ex-Morgan Lewis & Vedder Price attorney, ex-KPMG CPA, Longview Innovation. Brooklyn Law JD.

2. Lockheed Martin Software Engineer, ex-Rutgers Junior Full Stack Developer. Secret clearance. Expertise in C++, PHP, SQL. Rutgers BA in Computer Science.

3. Program Director at U.S. Army PEO Soldier, managing $2B+ budget. Ex-IVAS Program Manager and Asymmetric Warfare Group Logistics Manager. Liberty University MA.

FOR INVESTORS
Open Deals

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1. Multilingual Messaging Portal - Sydney, AU - Global, AWS-backed SaaS platform for businesses to communicate with clients without language barriers. $300k secured, seeking $650k for U.S. expansion. (Series A)

2. Digital Twins - Miami, FL - Applying proprietary digital twinning tech to remote patient monitoring and therapy. Over $1 million revenue projected in 2024. Grants received for DoD applications. Raising $2 million in SAFEs with 25% discount for angels and 20% discount for VCs and family offices.

3. Homepage for Founders and Investors - Irvine, CA - A platform for investors to meet founders and for founders to grow their businesses with access to high-value community members, vendors, securitization tools, and capital. (Seed)

4. AI Agent Employees - New York - Sophisticated workflow automation for businesses, by a previously-exited founder. Building towards fully autonomous organizations. Backed by Tribe & Kenetic, rolling out to extensive waitlist.

5. Personalized Talent Marketplace - Delaware - Hiring platform with a focus on personalization and tailored guidance through an AI feature set. Founder experienced in recruiting and talent acquisition, seeking $300k. (Pre Seed)

TRENDING TOOLS AND BUZZY TECH
Tools

Apple - Built-in eye tracking for hand-free navigation of iPhones and iPads.

Anthropic - Claude AI assistant launched in Europe in multi-language.

ElevenLabs - Its first consumer app is the Reader: AI Audio audio reader.

Hume AI - ”Chatter“ interactive voice AI podcast offers daily news updates.

Tech

Intel - Aurora Supercomputer claims the fastest AI System in the world.

Google - Opens API access to smart home platform w/ 600M+ devices.

NVIDIA - 9 new Grace Hopper-powered 200 exaflop AI supercomputers.

MIT - “SuperLimbs” Exoskeleton supports astronauts in low gravity.

DEALS WE’RE WATCHING
Closed Deals:

Immunology Therapeutics - Penn. Biotech startup Uniquity Bio emerged from stealth with $300M from Blackstone Life Sciences to treat immunology & inflammation indications.

RestaurantTech Unicorn - Irvine restaurant management tech startup Restaurant365 raised $175M at a $1B+ pmv led by ICONIQ Growth.