AI news and funding updates from the last 24 hours(12th Jan 2025):

🏻 AI Funding Rounds:

✅ Nobel Hygiene, a diaper manufacturer, is seeking up to ₹200 crore in funding led by Neo Group's investment arm, highlighting a broader interest in AI applications across various industries.

🏻 AI Technology and Innovations:

✅ Researchers have developed Sky-T1, an open-source reasoning AI model competitive with early OpenAI models, for under $450 using synthetic data and efficient training methods. While not surpassing the latest OpenAI models, Sky-T1 demonstrates the increasing accessibility and affordability of developing powerful reasoning AIs.

✅ Oracle's Exadata X11M claims faster database performance than AWS and Azure, even on their own clouds, using AMD processors and targeting a multi-cloud strategy. While Oracle emphasizes its scale and performance, competitors like CockroachDB promote multi-cloud freedom and open-source alternatives like PostgreSQL are gaining traction.

✅ Nvidia has dramatically increased its investments in AI startups, participating in 83 funding rounds over the last two years, focusing on "game changers." These investments range from billion-dollar rounds in companies like OpenAI and xAI to over $100 million in startups like Runway and Enfabrica.

✅ Elon Musk's Grok AI identified a teen's wrist fracture missed by medical professionals, prompting timely treatment and avoiding surgery. Beyond medical uses, Grok offers real-time search, image generation, fact-checking, and travel planning capabilities.

✅ An X user successfully ran a llama2.c-based AI model on a 20-year-old Xbox 360, optimizing the code for its PowerPC architecture and memory limitations. This demonstrates the potential to run AI models on older, less powerful hardware, furthering accessibility beyond resource-intensive corporate systems.

✅ Google's AI Overview, intended to summarize web content, included a fake image of a tiny baby elephant from Etsy in its search results. This incident highlights ongoing issues with the AI tool's reliability and discernment of credible sources, raising questions about its usefulness.

✅ Kimberly-Clark's $2.5 million investment in its Bangalore Global Digital Technology Centre has resulted in an eightfold growth in staff, from 50 to 430 employees, in five years. This Bengaluru hub now drives global AI innovation and cost optimization for the company.