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- 🤖 A new AI unicorn emerges
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Welcome, AI enthusiasts.
Another day, another eye-popping AI funding round.
Is this new AI defense unicorn another signal of the technology’s militarized future? Let’s dive in…
In today’s AI rundown:
🚨 Helsing scores record $223M for defense AI
✨ a16z’s top 50 consumer AI product list
🛠️ 8 New AI tools
😎 Automate PowerPoint creation with Claude
🤖 3 Quick AI updates
Read time: 3 minutes
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
HELSING
Image source: Helsing
The Rundown: European defense AI startup Helsing just raised a massive $223 million Series B round led by General Catalyst — potentially making it Europe's largest AI unicorn company.
Key points:
With previous backing from Spotify founder Daniel Ek, Helsing’s new raise puts the company’s valuation at around $1.7B.
Helsing's AI platform aims to boost defense and security for democracies, expanding live data applications.
The round could make Helsing the largest European AI company, nudging past the recent French-based Mistral AI raise.
The relevance: Helsing’s raise is another example of AI's increasing influence in world security — underscoring the growing relevance of tech in governance and defense strategies.
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A16Z
Image source: a16z
The Rundown: Venture capital firm a16z analyzed web traffic data on the top AI consumer products, uncovering insights as part of a broader study on the economics of generative AI.
Key points:
ChatGPT currently dominates, representing 60% of all traffic — with Character.ai at a distant second in the usage rankings.
The rest of the top 10 include Bard, Poe, QuillBot, Photoroom, Civitai, Midjourney, Hugging Face, and Perplexity.
Surprisingly, many "GPT wrappers" made the top 50 — with a roughly evenly split between proprietary models, fine-tuned open source models, and public third-party models.
Despite hype, even the biggest AI products like ChatGPT are still small vs mainstream apps like YouTube and Facebook.
Why it matters: ChatGPT’s AI product dominance is impressive — but it’s certainly eye-opening to see its scale relative to the biggest mainstream consumer apps. While it currently feels like the AI buzz is everywhere, these statistics show it’s still very early days.
TRENDING TOOLS
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🪄 Framer AI- Generate a website in minutes from prompts (link)
🎥 Descript- A powerful all-in-one video and podcast editing tool using AI (link)
💌 HoppyCoppy- Generate better emails and newsletters in seconds with AI (link)
📽 Fliki - Video creation made 10x simpler & faster with AI (link)
🧠 Originality AI - AI Content Checker and Plagiarism Check (link)
Browse the most popular tools ever featured with our tool database.
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AI TRAINING
Still building presentations from scratch? Let Claude's AI generate professional, customized decks for you instead with the following workflow.
Go to http://claude.ai
Prompt Claude to write an outline of the slides on your topic as an expert would.
Prompt: You're an [expert role]. Write an outline of a PowerPoint presentation (X # of slides) about [your topic]. Focus on the benefits of [topic specificities].
Ask Claude to generate the full VBA code.
Prompt: Write the entire VBA code (from the first slide to the last one) to create the PowerPoint slides for this deck. The text should be centered on the slides and left-aligned.
In PowerPoint, insert the VBA code via Alt+F11 (Windows) or Option+F11 (Mac).
Click on "Insert" then "Module", paste the code and click on the Play button
Customize the design using PowerPoint's built-in themes.
QUICK HITS
⚡️ Build‑along AI workshops at ZapConnect (sponsored)
Learn to embed AI into your tech stack, create AI-powered Zaps, and build your very own AI chatbots from scratch. Also, check out our special keynote with Sam Altman, Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI.
Software maker Databricks just nabbed a cool $500M raise, boosting its value to an eye-popping $43B. The company is doubling down on AI (including backing from Nvidia) with its own ChatGPT-style LLM creator.
Adobe is opening up its AI tools to the masses, taking Firefly out of beta and launching a standalone app that won’t require Adobe subscriptions. The team is also cooking up a new way to pay stock contributors for allowing them to training its AI on their content.
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THAT’S A WRAP
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