What is today’s beat?

RELEASES
🧨 China - The Three Musketeers
🧨 France - €100M to a French Quantum Computing Firm

NEWSROOM
🗞️ Seed Funding in Europe - a look at the top 12
🗞️ Waymo's Robotaxis Now Navigating LA Freeways
🗞️ Why everyone is freaking out about DeepSeek
🗞️ SoftBank's $500M Bet on Robotics Startup SkildAI
🗞️ Voice AI Innovator ElevenLabs Secures $250M Funding

BUILDER BYTES
⭐️ MariaDB now has vector search
⭐️ Hugging Face Integrates New Inference Providers
⭐️ Mastering AI-Driven Computer Interaction with Anthropic
⭐️ AWS Blogs for Web Developers and MLOps

COMMUNITY
🤩 Countries are coming online tomorrow, whole countries
🤩 Ensuring Privacy for Any LLM with Patricia Thaine - 716
🤩 Fraud Risk Solutions in Grocery, Retail, Banking, and Beyond

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🧨 NEWS 🧨

The Three Musketeers

Stocks have “plummeted” and people are loosing their shirts. It’s kind of like the toilet paper shortage during COVID - except this time the whining is coming from the west 🤔 - oh wait that’s the same too. Chinese tech firms are rapidly advancing in open-source AI, introducing models that rival Western counterparts in performance and efficiency. Let’s not loose our shirts over this one:

• DeepSeek's R1 Model
  Build with $6M compute cost (200x less than OpenAI for o1). Nuff said!

• Alibaba's Qwen2.5-Max
  Alibaba Cloud's Qwen2.5-Max outperforms DeepSeek's R1 in benchmarks such as Arena-Hard and LiveBench (unreleased benchmark btw).

• Doubao-1.5-Pro by ByteDance:
  The parent company of TikTok, ByteDance released Doubao-1.5-Pro which claims performance comparable to OpenAI's GPT-4
  (not o1 like Deepseek R1)

Let’s sum this up. Tons of hype but a HUGE win for open source. It will all settle down soon, and let’s remember that these may hit benchmarks but mainstream productization and other non-hype ideals related to commoditization will be the real winner. Final remarks: low cost releases like this are the result of reinforcement learning to scale for quick release, and it opens up the gate for a whole world of research and accessibility without massive capital.
⬇️ ⬇️ ⬇️ TRY THEM FOR FREE ⬇️ ⬇️ ⬇️ 

🧨 ALICE & BOB 🧨

€100M to a French Quantum Computing Firm

French quantum computing startup Alice & Bob has raised €100 million in a Series B funding round led by Future French Champions, AVP, and Bpifrance. This investment aims to accelerate the development of the world's first practical fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2030.

• Innovative Cat Qubit Technology
  Alice & Bob's proprietary "cat qubits" suppress bit-flip errors, reducing hardware requirements for fault-tolerant quantum computing.

• Strategic Use of Funds
  The funding will enhance system performance, improve error correction, and support the creation of the first error-corrected logical qubit. Additionally, it will finance a state-of-the-art lab and production facility, and expand the team.

• Strong Investor Confidence
  Existing investors Elaia Partners, Breega, Supernova Invest, and the European Innovation Council participated in the round, reflecting broad market confidence in Alice & Bob's approach and future impact.

Alice & Bob's advancements in cat qubit technology is the main driver in their recent investment. By reducing hardware complexity and focusing on fault tolerance, the company aims to make quantum solutions more accessible and applicable to real-world problems at speed and scale that would dwarf today’s standards. Have a look at their Roadmap to 2030 where they claim to break into mainstream markets.

🗞️ NEWSROOM 🗞️ 

What’s hot in tech right now?

Seed Funding in Europe - a look at the top 12
Highlights 12 European startups that secured over €1.1 billion in seed funding in 2024, driving advancements in AI, clean energy, and fintech.

Waymo's Robotaxis Now Navigating LA Freeways
Announces the commencement of Waymo's robotaxi testing on Los Angeles freeways, marking a significant step in autonomous vehicle deployment.

Why everyone is freaking out about DeepSeek
Explores how DeepSeek's cost-effective AI models are disrupting the industry, leading to significant market cap losses for major tech companies.

SoftBank's $500M Bet on Robotics Startup SkildAI
Reports on SoftBank's negotiations to invest $500 million in SkildAI, aiming to advance scalable foundational models for robotics.

Voice AI Innovator ElevenLabs Secures $250M Funding
Details ElevenLabs' recent $250 million funding round, boosting its valuation to over $3 billion, to enhance its natural speech synthesis technology.

⭐️ BUILDER BYTES ⭐️

What’s hot for builders right now?

MariaDB now has vector search
Blog to introduce native vector search capabilities in the latest release, enabling efficient handling of AI and machine learning workloads within the open-source database engine.

Hugging Face Integrates New Inference Providers
Adds inference providers—fal, Replicate, Sambanova, and Together AI—into the platform, enhancing model deployment options for developers.

Mastering AI-Driven Computer Interaction with Anthropic
A free course by DeepLearning AI who teams up with Anthropic to teach you how to integrating large language models for tasks like screen analysis and automated input generation - automating computer use.

AWS Blogs for Web Developers and MLOps
For web developers the OWASP Top 10 mitigation blog guides for compliance, and for ML & data science a tutorial on using MLflow to track experiements with SageMaker

🤩 COMMUNITY 🤩

What’s the latest beat?

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