Top stories today:

1. IBM, Meta launch pro-open source AI Alliance
2. Mistral AI in final stages of raising $482M at ~$2B valuation
3. Runway partners with Getty for enterprise AI video models

0. Data and calendar

1. IBM, Meta launch pro-open source AI Alliance, in partnership with 50 others

• Goals include: to “responsibly advance the ecosystem of open foundation models,” “develop and deploy benchmarks and evaluation standards,” and “foster a vibrant AI hardware accelerator ecosystem.

• Group includes AMD, Cerebras, Dell, Hugging Face, Intel, Oracle, and Stability AI.

Our view: NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Anthropic not being included in this is very telling

• Leaders love closed-source, number 2's love open-source. If you are the dominant leader in a category, being closed-source helps you maximize your profits.

  • If you are not the leader, and especially if the software in question is not your business model (i.e. Meta's case), open source is a way to gather developer and user support around your platform, and hopefully take away market share from the leader.

  • You see this very clearly with iOS vs. Android.

2. Mistral AI in final stages of raising $482M at ~$2B valuation from a16z

• €325M in equity, with €200M from a16z.

  • €120M in convertible debt from NVIDIA and Salesforce.

  • Each of the 3 co-founders is selling €1M+ in secondary.

• Company founded in 2023.

Mistral's open-source 7B LLM, and its derivative Zephyr 7B, are the best 7B foundational models today

4. Runway partners with Getty Images for enterprise AI video models