In today’s AI news, Mercor, the AI recruiting startup founded by three 21-year-old Thiel Fellows, has raised $100 million in a Series B round, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. Menlo Park-based Felicis led the round, valuing Mercor at $2 billion — eight times its previous valuation. Existing investors Benchmark and General Catalyst, as well as DST Global and Menlo Ventures participated.

In other advancements, GPT-4.5 could arrive as soon as next week, as Microsoft gets ready to host OpenAI’s latest artificial intelligence models.

Microsoft engineers are currently readying server capacity for OpenAI’s upcoming GPT-4.5 and GPT-5 models. While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged recently that GPT-4.5 will launch within a matter of weeks.

Then, OpenAI’s astounding growth rate potential is luring possible investors as questions loom over whether the startup will go public. “In terms of a multiple to pay for stock like ours, there’s incredible interest at the moment,” finance chief Sarah Friar told CNBC’s David Faber on Thursday. Its future growth potential has also enabled OpenAI to “achieve valuations that are on par with the growth rate of the scale” it is reaching.

S internal testing, it could mark a meaningful step forward for an all-purpose multimodal AI that can operate interactively in both real and digital spaces. + In videos, Figure is introducing Helix, a generalist Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that unifies perception, language understanding, and learned control to overcome multiple longstanding challenges in robotics. A detailed report on Helix can be found in text accompanying the video.

In today’s AI news, for those who were thinking Meta Platforms Inc. might back down from its heavy-spending ways in the wake of the DeepSeek news, think again. On the earnings call, Zuckerberg spoke of “the hundreds of billions of dollars” Meta will invest in AI infrastructure over the long term.

S ChatGPT and the newly ascending DeepSeek. “Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms… almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,” Alibaba Meanwhile, amid the market turbulence and breathless headlines, Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic and one of the pioneering researchers behind today’s large language models, published a detailed analysis that offers a more nuanced perspective on DeepSeek’s achievements.

And, Microsoft is bringing Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s R1 model to its Azure AI Foundry platform and GitHub. The R1 model is now part of a model catalog on Azure AI Foundry and GitHub — allowing Microsoft’s customers to integrate it into their AI applications.

In videos, Reid Hoffman is the co-founder of LinkedIn, a legendary Silicon Valley investor, and author of the new book Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future. Hoffman joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss his optimistic case for AI, the massive investments flooding into the field, and whether they can pay off.

And, in the new episode of Moonshots, Emad Mostaque, Salim Ismail, and Peter Diamandis discuss recent DeepSeek news, the China vs. USA AI race, and more. Emad is the founder of Intelligent Internet and former CEO of Stability AI. Salim is a serial entrepreneur and strategist well known for his expertise in exponential organizations.

“If you lease it like you lease a car, a $30,000 car, your price point per month is 300 bucks,” says author, futurist, investor, doctor, and engineer Peter Diamandis in a recent TechFirst podcast. “And that translates amazingly to $10 a day and 40 cents an hour. So you’ve got labor that’s waiting for whatever your wish is. You know, clean up the house, go mow the lawn, you know, please change the baby’s diapers.”

Longevity businessman Peter Diamandis said he prioritized his body composition over everything else last year.

Now in his 60s, the physician and entrepreneur is directing tens of millions of dollars at far-out tech to let him and others live twice as long, or longer.

The entrepreneur and futurist expects advancements in AI and lidar technologies to fuel a trillion-dollar market for humanoid robots.

Best known for his popular longevity YouTube channel, Stanfield is a medical doctor with an interest in longevity science. Like some other folks on this list of longevity influencers, Stanfield can be a bit iconoclastic, challenging orthodoxy on things like resveratrol and fisetin.

Just like in his well-sourced videos, Stanfield’s Twitter feed is heavy with links to research papers and studies on longevity-related topics, from recent mouse studies out of the Interventions Testing Program, to threads on diet based on new trials. The downside is in his Twitter feed you don’t get to hear that sweet Kiwi accent you get from his videos.

Followers: 24,000

Founder and CEO of AI drug discovery Insilico Medicine (which has raised over $400 million under his leadership), Alex Zhavoronkov seems to be everywhere in longevity circles. From serving on the board of Peter Diamandis’s X-Prize Foundation (which recently announced its longevity X-Prize), to founding biological age testing company Deep Longevity, to somehow having the time to publish over 170 peer-reviewed studies.

In this episode, Peter and Elon hop on X Spaces to discuss Data-driven optimism, solving grand challenges, uplifting humanity, Digital Super Intelligence, Longevity, Education, and Abundance in 2024.

Elon Musk is a businessman, founder, investor, and CEO. He co-founded PayPal, Neuralink and OpenAI; founded SpaceX, and is the CEO of Tesla and the Chairman of X.

Listen to spaces on X: https://x.com/PeterDiamandis/status/1742713338549997884?s=20

Elon Musk Discusses AI, Longevity, and Bots with Peter Diamandis.
Technology, innovation, and optimism are crucial for solving global challenges and crafting a better future for humanity.

Questions to inspire discussion.

What are the challenges of the next iteration of Starlink satellites?
—Elon Musk discusses the challenges and potential of the next iteration of Starlink satellites, including the need to emulate a cell tower on the ground for phones to accept the signal.

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