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- OpenAI nears record funding round
OpenAI nears record funding round
PLUS: Anthropic reveals how Claude thinks
Rowan Cheung
March 28, 2025
Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI's market dominance is set to receive a $40B stamp of approval — a record-breaking funding round that would value the ChatGPT maker at a whopping $300B.
With the AI leader currently burning billions but projecting a massive $125B in revenues by 2029, are investors making the safest bet in tech history…Or the riskiest?
P.S. Our next workshop is today at 4 PM EST — join and learn how to use the latest AI tools to take your content creation to the next level!
In today’s AI rundown:
OpenAI nears $40B funding round
Anthropic reveals how Claude ‘thinks’
Add Deep Research to your AI code editors
Qwen’s QVQ-Max visual reasoning model
4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
OPENAI
Image source: Grok / The Rundown
The Rundown: OpenAI is reportedly finalizing a massive $40B funding round led by SoftBank, which would make it the largest private funding in history — and nearly double the ChatGPT maker's valuation to $300B.
The details:
SoftBank will invest an initial $7.5B, followed by another $22.5B later this year with other investors including Magnetar Capital, Coatue, and Founders Fund.
OpenAI expects its revenue to triple to $12.7B in 2025 and become cash-flow positive by 2029 with over $125B in projected revenue.
The company reportedly lost as much as $5B on $3.7B of revenue in 2024, attributed to AI infrastructure and training costs.
The funding will also partially support OpenAI's commitment to Stargate, the $300B AI infrastructure JV announced with SoftBank and Oracle in January.
Why it matters: OpenAI’s for-profit turn is looking to be a record-breaking one, and both company projections and investor wallets are signaling that the AI boom is not slowing down any time soon. The competition may be getting tougher — but as we’ve seen this week, no company dominates mindshare in the AI world quite like OpenAI.
TOGETHER WITH TURING
The Rundown: Heading to Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas? Turing and Fireworks AI invite you to an exclusive evening reception on April 10 — where you can connect with fellow leaders in the AI community and unwind after a day packed with insights.
Register today to:
Network with fellow Google Cloud Next attendees
Connect with the top leaders in AI / LLMs
Enjoy fantastic food and creative cocktails
ANTHROPIC
Image source: Anthropic
The Rundown: Anthropic released two research papers that reveal how its AI assistant Claude processes information, helping to better understand internal mechanisms that explain capabilities like multilingual reasoning and advanced planning.
The details:
The researchers developed an "AI microscope" that reveals internal “circuits” in the model, showing how Claude transforms input to output in key tasks.
Claude uses a universal "language of thought" across different languages, with shared conceptual processing for English, French, and Chinese.
When writing poetry, Claude plans ahead several words, identifying rhyming options before constructing lines to reach those planned words.
The team also discovered a default that prevents speculation unless overridden by strong confidence, helping explain how hallucination prevention works.
Why it matters: The closer we get to superintelligent AI, the more important understanding how models process internally becomes. With research already detailing AI’s deceptive qualities and more powerful systems being integrated into life across the globe, cracking the inner workings becomes more crucial by the day.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to connect Firecrawl's Deep Research to your AI code editors, like Cursor and Windsurf, to access real-time web information directly in your coding environment.
Step-by-step:
Visit Firecrawl, create an account, and generate your free API key from the Dashboard.
For Windsurf: Click "Configure MCP," paste the provided JSON code, replace the API key placeholder with your key, and refresh the server list.
For Cursor: Go to Settings > MCP > Add New MCP Server, name it "firecrawl-mcp," select "command", and enter it with your API key.
Start using Deep Research by typing queries like "Deep Research the latest advancements in React state management" in your editor's chat.
Pro tip: You can find the JSON code (for Windsurf) and the command (for Cursor) here. Also, be specific with your research queries for more focused and relevant results.
PRESENTED BY SAMBANOVA
The Rundown: SambaNova just released a new Deep Research AI Agent that produces detailed reports and analysis in seconds, not minutes or hours — allowing you to run complex research at a fraction of the time and cost.
The details:
Research tasks take just 5-30 seconds to complete, so you can quickly iterate on the final report
Fully open source – connect your own data sources
Integrates with SambaNova Cloud, which delivers lightning-fast inference on the best open source models, including DeepSeek R1 671B at over 255 tokens/second
Sign up to try Fast Deep Research for yourself!
ALIBABA
Image source: Alibaba
The Rundown: Alibaba's Qwen team released QVQ-Max, a new visual reasoning model that goes beyond basic image recognition to analyze and reason about visual information across images and videos.
The details:
The model is an evolution of QVQ-72B-Preview, expanding capabilities across mathematical problem-solving, code generation, and creative tasks.
QVQ-Max features a "thinking” mechanism that can be adjusted in length to improve accuracy, showing scalable gains as thinking time increases.
Other complex visual capabilities shown include analyzing blueprints, solving geometry problems, and providing feedback on user-submitted sketches.
Qwen said that future plans include creating a complete visual agent capable of operating devices and playing games.
Why it matters: This is Qwen’s third model release this week! Between Omni, Qwen2.5-VL, and now QVQ-Max, the Chinese powerhouse continues to crank out capable models across the AI spectrum. With China flooding the market with advanced systems, the gap between the U.S. and China has never been smaller.
QUICK HITS
⚡Kilo Code for VS Code - AI agent extension that generates code, automates tasks, and provides suggestions. Get $15 Claude 3.7 tokens now.*
🎆 Ideogram 3.0 - New text-to-image AI with text & graphic design capabilities
🤖 Qwen2.5-Omni-7B - Alibaba’s multimodal AI for consumer hardware
📦 Amazon Interests - Shop and discover new products with natural language
* Sponsored Listing
🧠 Mistral AI - AI Solution Architect, Deployment
📅 Databricks - Executive Assistant
⚙️ OpenAI - ML Infrastructure Engineer
📱 Meta - Social Media Manager, Technology
OpenAI released an updated version of GPT-4o to paid users, featuring better prompt adherence, improved coding and creativity, and more “freedom.”
Butterfly Effect, the Chinese startup behind the Manus AI agent, is seeking new funding at a $500M valuation as it faces massive cash burn from Claude API costs.
OpenAI is delaying the rollout of its 4o image generation to free users and imposing rate limits, with CEO Sam Altman saying the demand is “melting” the company’s GPUs.
AI infrastructure giant CoreWeave reduced its IPO target from $4B to $1.5B ahead of its Nasdaq debut on Friday, with Nvidia stepping in as an anchor investor.
Archetype AI introduced “Lenses” — a new category of physical AI applications for its Newton model that transform sensor data into actionable insights.
PwC unveiled agent OS, a platform to integrate multi-platform AI agents into enterprise workflows up to 10x faster than traditional methods.
Lockheed Martin is partnering with Google Public Sector to integrate genAI into its AI Factory ecosystem, aiming to enhance national security applications.
COMMUNITY
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See you soon,
Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team
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