AI Business Asia: Samsung partners with Bytedance

In today’s newsletter:

• 1st half of 2024 is over, let’s look through the investments so far

• East Asian Power: Samsung’s collaboration with Bytedance

• Google’s run in with the Euoprean Commission

• 4 AI tools in the spotlight

• 2 new funds, and 4 new investments

Read time: 4-6 mins

How AI VC funding in the 1st half of 2024 can guide your AI startup strategy

As the amount of funding raised by AI startups continues to increase, a divergence in the market has become more pronounced this quarter, where camps debate over the following key positions:

• The “fight” between closed-source and open-source

• If the GPU shortage will continue into the mid-term, and strategies deployed in these camps

• When AI investments will bring forth a return on investment

This article will offer an overview of the AI VC funding landscape in the last 6 months, highlight some of the emerging trends in AI, and offer some realities for AI founders to consider.

Read more here.

News from Asia:

• Samsung’s exciting week:

  • Partnering with ByteDance by connecting Doubao LLM to the smart assistant and AI vision features of Galaxy Z Fold6 and Flip6

  • Acquisition of British startup Oxford Semantic for an undisclosed sum to beef up personalisation for on-device AI technology

• Singapore government is gearing up for more AI action:

  • Preparing land to woo more semiconductor giants to relocate

  • Extra $100M under the Financial Sector Technology and Innovation Grant Scheme (FSTI 3.0) to support quantum and AI technologies within the financial sector

• Shanghai will begin autonomous driving tests end of July

• Japan is not having it with AI searches, with Japanese media urging legal reform to address “copyright infringes”

News from the West:

• RIght on the back of EU’s stringent AI laws, Britain’s new government is looking to regulate AI models

• The European Commission is investigating whether Google’s genAI deal with Samsung is keeping other chatbots off Samsung phones

• Youtube creators are alleging that Apple, Nvidia and Anthropic used thousands of swiped videos without consent to train AI

• A comprehensive list of tech layoffs so far for 2024

• NVIDIA introduces Vision Language Models (VLMs) for dynamic video analysis, enabling users to interact with image and video input using natural language.

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