xAI raises $20B led by NVIDIA

Our 231st episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Recorded on 01/16/2026

Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris

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In this episode:

• Anthropic's new cowork tool integrates Claude code, potentially simplifying multiple computing tasks from editing videos to compiling spreadsheets.
• Significant funding rounds see Anthropic raising $10B at a valuation of $350B, while XAI raises $20B, underscoring the immense market interest in AI startups.
• Nvidia faces supply challenges for H200 AI chips due to overwhelming demand from China, despite high costs per unit and its potential impact on U.S. company revenue.
• Policy debates highlight tensions around U.S. export controls to China, with leaders like Justin Lin from Alibaba and Jake Sullivan, former national security advisor, weighing in on the ramifications for the AI industry's future.

Timestamps:

• (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
• (00:01:30) News Preview
• Tools & Apps
• (00:02:13) Anthropic’s new Cowork tool offers Claude Code without the code | TechCrunch
• (00:09:45) Google’s Gemini AI will use what it knows about you from Gmail, Search, and YouTube | The Verge
• (00:12:45) Google removes some AI health summaries after investigation finds “dangerous” flaws - Ars Technica
• (00:16:29) Gmail is getting a Gemini AI overhaul
• (00:18:12) Slackbot is an AI agent now | TechCrunch
• Applications & Business
• (00:20:11) Anthropic Raising $10 Billion at $350 Billion Value
• (00:22:25) Elon Musk xAI raises $20 billion from Nvidia, Cisco, investors
• (00:24:47) NVIDIA Needs a Supply Chain ‘Miracle’ From TSMC as China’s H200 AI Chip Orders Overwhelm Supply, Triggering a Bottleneck
• (00:29:26) OpenAI signs deal, worth $10B, for compute from Cerebras | TechCrunch
• (00:31:49) CoreWeave in focus as it amends credit agreement
• (00:34:30) LMArena lands $1.7B valuation four months after launching its product | TechCrunch
• Projects & Open Source
• (00:35:54) Nemotron-Cascade: Scaling Cascaded Reinforcement Learning for General-Purpose Reasoning Models
• (00:43:15) mHC: Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections
• (00:49:53) IQuest_Coder_Technical_Report
• (00:54:58) TII Abu-Dhabi Released Falcon H1R-7B: A New Reasoning Model Outperforming Others in Math and Coding with only 7B Params with 256k Context Window - MarkTechPost
• Research & Advancements
• (01:01:42) Deep Delta Learning
• (01:07:47) Recursive Language Models
• (01:13:39) Conditional memory via scalable lookup
• (01:18:54) Extending the Context of Pretrained LLMs by Dropping their Positional Embeddings
• Policy & Safety
• (01:26:06) Constitutional Classifiers++: Efficient Production-Grade Defenses against Universal Jailbreaks
• (01:31:00) Nvidia CEO says purchase orders, not formal declaration, will signal Chinese approval of H200
• (01:32:24) China AI Leaders Warn of Widening Gap With US After $1B IPO Week
• (01:37:25) Jake Sullivan is furious that Trump removed Biden’s AI chip export controls | The Verge

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