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Hi Everyone. This is Take Off. We're like a hidden Easter egg in your favorite video game - surprising, delightful, and adding an extra layer of fun to your tech news consumption.

Here's what we're serving up today:

• AMD Stepping Up 🪜

• Wednesday Wires 💰

• Asteroids ☄️

AMD Stepping Up 🪜

NVIDIA released its first Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) - The GeForce 256 back in 1999 when they found that it could power rendering engines to process 10 million polygons per second, setting the stage for a revolution in 3D gaming.

Fast-forward 24 years and GPUs seem to be the most critical pieces of hardware powering another technological renaissance - the AI revolution.

And everyone even remotely familiar with AI knows that NVIDIA’s making bank on this.

Now, any self-respecting gamer will raise their hand and shout, “Hey! What about AMD’s Ryzen?”.

And you’d be right. But while AMD’s been flexing their gaming muscles, they’ve been a tad behind in the AI relay race.

To get a leg up, AMD recently announced the acquisition of Nod.ai, a startup specializing in optimizing AI software for high-performance hardware.

NVIDIA’s Competitive Moat

The reason why NVIDIA is the ultimate kingpin ushering the AI era isn’t just simply because of their hardware capabilities.

It’s the synergy between the software and the hardware that gives NVIDIA its competitive moat and is the reason why NVIDIA has a market share of more than 70% for AI chips.

ML nerds will know exactly what we’re talking about - Compute Unified Device Architecture or more famously known as CUDA.

The CUDA platform is a software framework that was developed by NVIDIA that enables developers to build GPU-enabled applications on top of it. More specifically, NVIDIA’s GPU-enabled applications.

Early AI researchers started building neural networks on top of CUDA and consequently NVIDIA’s GPUs which ultimately spread to more widespread adoption of the software-hardware stack and the rest as we know is history.

Imitation is the Best Form of Flattery

It seems like AMD is trying to go a similar route with this acquisition. It wants to center its growth strategy on an open source software ecosystem that simplifies the adoption process for customers through developer tools and models.

The acquisition is expected to significantly enhance AMD’s ability to provide AI customers with open software that allows them to easily deploy highly performant AI models tuned for AMD hardware.

Do you think AMD has a chance of dethroning NVIDIA? Let us know by replying.

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Get the news straight from the source.

☄️ Asteroids ☄️

23andMe faced a security hiccup with hackers claiming to have swiped user data and wanting big bucks for it. The company's pointing fingers at reused passwords. 🧬🚫

Ilya Pozin's startup, Telly, aims to revolutionise TV by offering a two-screen, ad-supported model for $0. Instead of paying, users get ads and Telly collects data. 📺💡 

Utah is suing TikTok, claiming it's too addictive for kids and hides ties to its parent company in China. This follows several US states raising eyebrows at the app. 📱🤨 

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💰 Wednesday Wires 💰

InsuranceDekho, incubated by CarDekho, just raised $60 million, hitting a $600 million valuation! They're making waves in India's insurance scene, especially in smaller cities, with big plans ahead. 💡📈

Japanese VC Beyond Next Ventures raises $67.7M in a first close of its deep tech fund. Aiming to amplify global reach and valuations, they're targeting robotics, biotech, and more in Asia! 🤖🧬

Acceldata secured an extra $10M for its Series C, pushing past $100M total! They're diving deep into data observability, helping businesses monitor their data health. Big players like Oracle and Walmart's PhonePe are already on board! 📊🚀

📰 Recommended Reading 📰

1/ Learn how to maximize your credit cards and travel in style. Click here to check it out.

2/ Checkout the latest marketing tools, techniques and news read by teams at Apple, Microsoft and more by clicking here.

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