Welcome to the newest edition of ID Tech’s AI update. Here’s the latest big news on the shifting landscape of AI and identity technology
MidJourney has launched a much-anticipated update to its text-to-image AI platform, which can produce images in a range of styles, including impressive realistic images of people who don’t exist. It’s now even easier to fine-tune images with its new Draft Mode, which allows rapid iteration of produced images, and Voice Mode, which allows the user to make those edits conversationally.
Runway, meanwhile, has made it much easier to create videos with consistent characters and settings through its new Gen-4 platform. It promises “infinite character consistency with a single reference image,” and impressively realistic videos—along with the possibility of making cartoons, moving paintings, and pretty much any other kind of video media. The company also closed a funding round that valued it at $3 billion.
Sesame AI is in talks to raise over $200 million in a funding round expected to be co-led by Sequoia Capital and Spark Capital. The funding round would value the company at about $1 billion. Sesame AI is known for its realistic, emotive conversational AI voices. It recently open-sourced its CSM-1B model, a 1-billion-parameter speech generation system, under the Apache 2.0 license.
Rapidus is in talks with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon to mass produce chips for AI applications, according to CEO Atsuyoshi Koike. The Japan-based firm is looking to close the competitive gap with rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co over the next couple of years; TSMC believes it will get 2-nanometer chips in production this year, and Rapidus thinks it can catch up to that by 2027.
ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent, and other Chinese firms have collectively placed $16 billion in orders for Nvidia chips in the first three months of this year. There are sanctions preventing the sale of advanced AI chips to China-based companies, but these orders concern the H20, the most sophisticated AI chip that Nvidia is legally allowed to sell to them under the current sanctions regime.
xAI has bought X for $45 billion. Both the AI startup and the social media platform were already owned by Elon Musk, who believes that combining them “will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.” The all-stock transaction has valued xAI at $80 billion. Meanwhile, rival OpenAI has secured a $300 billion valuation after its latest $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank.
Intel has announced a surprise partnership with IBM, which is now hosting Intel’s Gaudi 3 AI accelerators on IBM Cloud. The collaboration is meant to help businesses scale generative AI workloads more efficiently. Right now the compute is restricted to IBM’s Frankfurt and Washington D.C. cloud regions, but there are plans to expand to the Dallas region in Q2.
The chatbot’s take: We asked for a bit of perspective on some of these valuations.
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April 4, 2025 – by Alex Perala
