Samwise Tech/AI/Robotics Newsletter
Tuesday, May 5, 2026
Anthropic and OpenAI Launch Rival Enterprise AI Joint Ventures Backed by Wall Street Giants
Both Anthropic and OpenAI announced parallel enterprise joint ventures on Monday, each partnering with major Wall Street asset managers to accelerate corporate AI deployment. Anthropic's venture, backed by Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and Hellman & Friedman, is valued at $1.5 billion and includes $300 million commitments from each founding partner. OpenAI's competing vehicle, called The Development Company, raised $4 billion across 19 investors — including TPG, Brookfield, Advent, and Bain Capital — against a $10 billion valuation. The ventures will create standardised AI deployment templates for portfolio companies, giving both labs new distribution channels as they eye IPOs.
Sources: TechCrunch
Cerebras AI Chip Startup Headed for Blockbuster Nasdaq IPO With $10B in Orders
AI chip startup Cerebras Systems is on track for a blockbuster Nasdaq IPO in mid-May 2026, with banks already fielding roughly $10 billion in orders for the $3.5 billion offering. The company filed to sell 28 million shares at $115 to $125 each, implying a valuation of up to $26.6 billion at the top of the range. Cerebras generated $510 million in revenue in 2025 and holds a deal with OpenAI reportedly worth more than $10 billion, plus a recently announced arrangement to supply chips to Amazon Web Services. The oversubscribed book signals strong investor appetite for AI infrastructure hardware plays.
Sources: TechCrunch
Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation as Enterprise Demand for Conversational AI Agents Surges
Enterprise AI startup Sierra raised a $950 million funding round led by Tiger Global and GV, pushing its valuation above $15 billion. Sierra builds conversational AI agents for customer-facing enterprise workflows — including support, sales, and account management — and counts companies such as Salesforce and Siemens among its customers. In April, Sierra launched Ghostwriter, an agent-building tool that allows non-engineers to describe a workflow in natural language and receive a fully deployed AI agent in return. The round underscores surging enterprise demand for AI agents that can handle complex, multi-step customer interactions without human escalation.
Sources: TechCrunch
Image AI Models Drive 6.5x More App Downloads Than Chatbot Upgrades, Appfigures Report Finds
Image model releases are driving substantially more growth for AI mobile apps than conversational model upgrades, generating 6.5 times more downloads, according to a report from app intelligence provider Appfigures. OpenAI's 4o image generation model led to an estimated $70 million in gross consumer spending in the 28 days after its launch. Google's Gemini added 22 million incremental downloads in the 28 days following its Gemini 2.5 Flash image model release last August, while ChatGPT added more than 12 million installs after GPT-4o images. The data marks a strategic shift: image capabilities have replaced model intelligence as the primary driver of AI consumer app adoption.
Sources: TechCrunch
Harvard Study Finds AI Outperforms Doctors on Emergency Room Diagnoses in Head-to-Head Test
A study published in Science and led by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center found that OpenAI's o1 and GPT-4o models outperformed two internal medicine attending physicians on emergency room diagnoses. Examining 76 real ER patient cases, the AI models scored higher accuracy than the human doctors across the same set of clinical scenarios. Researchers cautioned that the study is small and does not reflect how AI would perform integrated into actual clinical workflows, but the findings add to a growing body of evidence suggesting AI can match or exceed specialist-level performance on structured diagnostic tasks.
Sources: TechCrunch
California Issues 100 Pages of New Rules on Ticketing Robotaxis and Testing Self-Driving Trucks
California's Department of Motor Vehicles released two new sets of rules — totalling 100 pages — governing how law enforcement can cite autonomous vehicle companies for traffic violations committed by their self-driving cars. Under the 'Notice of Autonomous Vehicle Noncompliance' rules, AV manufacturers must report any traffic citation to the DMV within 72 hours of receiving it from police. The regulations also expand AV testing to heavy-duty vehicles for the first time, requiring self-driving truck companies to pass a phased permitting process identical to the one light-duty robotaxi operators follow. The violations carry no monetary fines but create a formal compliance record DMV can use to suspend permits.
Sources: TechCrunch
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Tells Milken Conference AI Is Creating Jobs, Not Destroying Them
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pushed back against widespread fears of AI-driven mass unemployment during a conversation with MSNBC's Becky Quick at the Milken Institute conference on Monday. Huang argued that AI is 'creating an enormous number of jobs' and described it as the United States' 'best opportunity to re-industrialize.' He contended that AI factories, inference infrastructure, and the broader AI industry all require substantial human workforces. Huang also warned that fear-driven AI narratives risk discouraging Americans from engaging with the technology, potentially ceding ground to countries that embrace AI development more aggressively. Nvidia's market cap currently stands at approximately $5.2 trillion.
Sources: TechCrunch
Tech Pulse
Top Frontier Models (SWE-bench Verified): Claude Mythos Preview (93.9%) | Claude Opus 4.7 Adaptive (87.6%) | GPT-5.3 Codex (85.0%)
Top Open Source Models: DeepSeek V4 Pro (78.0%) | Kimi K2.6 (76.9%) | Qwen 3.5 397B (76.4%)
Top Small Models (15–50B): Qwen2.5-Coder 32B (72.1%) | DeepSeek-R1 32B (67.3%) | Mistral Medium 3.5 (63.8%)
Top Edge Models (0–15B): Qwen 3.5 14B (58.4%) | Gemma 4 12B (54.7%) | Llama 4 Scout (51.2%)
AI Leaders (market cap): NVIDIA $5.2T | Alphabet $4.2T | Microsoft $3.2T
Robotics Leaders (market cap): Intuitive Surgical $158B | Fanuc $38.9B | ABB ~$70B
Curated by JD · samwise.agency
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