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:

• Google’s Transformers Have Raised $1.3 Billion 🧑‍💻

• The VC Firm Giving Startups Money GPUs 📟

• Wednesday Wires 💰

• Asteroids ☄️

Google’s Transformers Have Raised $1.3 Billion 🧑‍💻

Six years ago, 8 researchers from Google Brain wrote a paper that has arguably transformed AI research and progress in a huge way.

The paper we’re talking about is “Attention Is All You Need”. This paper introduced the Transformers - The ‘T’ in GPT.

So yeah, that paper was a huuuge deal.

What do you do when you’ve written one of the most influential papers in recent history? Do you still work the 9-5 at Google?

Probably not. You’ve now got a lot of street cred in the AI world and a lot of VCs ready to throw big wads of cash at any idea you have.

And that is exactly what all of the authors did. These ex-Googlers have started companies that have raised a massive $1.3 billion collectively to-date.

Here’s a look at them.

1/ Pagoda

The company provides tools for building blockchain-based Web3 applications.

• Money Raised: $539 million

• Valuation: N/A

• Founders: Illia Polosukhin

2/ Adept AI

The company develops AI tools that can interact with a range of everyday software to complete tasks in response to natural language commands.

They have an amazing demo showcasing their capabilities which we HIGHLY recommend to checkout.

• Money Raised: $415 million

• Valuation: $1 billion

• Founders: Ashish Vaswani, Nikki Parmar

3/ Cohere

The best way to describe Cohere is simply - an OpenAI Competitor.

• Money Raised: $165 million

• Valuation: $6 billion

• Founders: Aidan Gomez

4/ Character.AI

CharacterAI develops a range of chatbots capable of engaging in open-ended conversations.

The company apparently lets you chat with avatars of famous personalities such as Albert Einstein and Elon Musk amongst many others.

• Money Raised: $150 million

• Valuation: $1 billion

• Founders: Noam Shazeer

5/ Inceptive

Inceptive focuses on applying AI to designing RNA molecules for applications like enabling new therapeutics.

• Money Raised: $20 million

• Valuation: N/A

• Founders: Jakob Uszkoreit

6/ Sakana AI

The company was founded quite recently and is “On a quest to create a new kind of foundation model based on nature-inspired intelligence”.

• Money Raised: N/A

• Valuation: N/A

• Founders: Llion Jones

The VC Firm Giving Startups Money GPUs 📟

Ever tried securing a GPU for your AI dream startup? If you nodded, you'd probably agree that finding a GPU is like finding a unicorn in your backyard these days.

Index Ventures, the global investor, came up with an idea: Let's partner with Oracle and get our startup buddies some of these magical chips. Specifically, Nvidia's H100 and A100.

Erin Price-Wright, the GPU fairy godmother from Index, breaks it down for us.

“ It’s less about the cost in particular but the fact that something like more than 95% of GPU capacity is already allocated to large players in this space because they make these pretty big pre-commitments with cloud vendors. “

Talk about playing hard to get!

Now, Index isn't building a GPU empire. They’re not buying these GPUs.

They just want to give startups a little nudge, a head start. So, here’s how the deal is stacked.

• Index makes the pre-commitment on behalf of startups and pays the cloud bill.

• Oracle manages the GPU cluster.

• Index’s portfolio companies get the GPU cluster for …. wait for it …. FREE.

The burning question? Are we drowning in too much money for generative AI?

Erin's verdict: It's just the beginning. But she anticipates a "cooling off" phase soon.

The power of AI is undeniable, but making it useful across the board? That's a different story and a story that’ll take time to unfold.

☄️ Asteroids ☄️

Google launches BigQuery Studio, a new way to work with data. This service simplifies data analysis and bridges the gap between data and AI teams. 📊 🔍

DeepMind partners with Google Cloud to watermark AI-generated images. SynthID embeds digital invisible watermarks detectable by algorithms, aiming to help identify AI-generated content and combat misinformation. 🤖❌ 

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has a clear message for employees resisting the return to the office: "It's not going to work out for you." Despite pushback and walkouts, Amazon remains firm on its three-days-a-week office policy. 🏢💼

⚒️ Trending Tools ⚒️

🪙 Clustr - The reality check for your crypto portfolio

💰️ Fairmint - Grant equity to anyone that adds value to your company

💵 Lean Finance - Affordable Finance Stack for early stage SaaS Startups

🧑‍💻 QRZam - Unlock Your Unique Potential With QR Codes.

💰 Wednesday Wires 💰

Lighter Capital just secured $130 million in capital commitments for a credit facility. The firm provides non-dilutive funding to tech startups via revenue-based financing. 💳️ 💰

Allseated, a platform for virtual event planning and venue showcasing, has secured $20 million in debt funding. The company is focusing on real-world events and spun off its "meetaverse" division. 🎉 🥽 

Kiki, a subletting startup, has raised $6 million in seed funding led by Blackbird Ventures. The app matches renters with listers and focuses on those traveling for extended periods, connecting people over property. 🏡🤝

📰 Recommended Reading 📰

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

2/ We recommend checking out AIModels.fyi. It's a free tool that lets you discover, select, and integrate the perfect AI model for your project. They also have a newsletter with a summary of the top new models and helpful how-to guides. Click here to check out.

3/ The Bay Area Times is the visual daily newsletter on business and tech. Click here to subscribe.

That’s it from us today folks! If you liked what today’s edition, here’s a message from our loving and hard-working team below:

“ We all crave the essentials in life - food 🥑🍕, shelter 🏠, and clothing 👕🩳- and we're no exception! Our must-haves? An ever-growing squad of adoring subscribers like you and for more of those lovely subs, we're counting on you to spread the word! So, blast that newsletter across the universe! ”