Famed investor Marc Andreessen recently talked about meetings with Biden administration staff who gave him the impression they wanted to control AI by working closely with two or three big AI companies, shutting everyone else out through burdensome regulations. Andreessen didn't name OpenAI, but it was implied it would have been a beneficiary of this alleged effort. However, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman dismissed Andreessen's comments as 'conspiracy theory' in a podcast this week with Bari Weiss. 'I mean, we were in a room with them, and other companies and the administration, but never like, 'Here's our conspiracy theory, we're going to make it so only a few companies can build AI and then you have to do what we say.' Never anything like that,' Altman said....

As we turn the page into 2025, my colleagues and I at Asymmetric Capital Partners are optimistic for what the next year holds for growth and innovation. We do not expect these gains to be shared uniformly, however, we see distinct winners and losers. On the positive side, we expect to see truly valuable AI companies outperform and prosper as flash-in-the-pan and hype companies falter. Simultaneously, we foresee the rise of vertical integration plays and those pursuing buy and build strategies for markets in need of technology streamlining. We also expect limited partners investing in technology to continue their shift toward capacity-constrained, returns-oriented upstarts (versus asset gatherers who have optimized for fees). Finally, we see the beginning of the end for the 2020-2021 cohort of overfunded growth companies. Yet, for many investors, the release marked a watershed turn in AI's practical availability. While many applications are quite compelling, we remain concerned that hype has exceeded reality in many instances. Additionally, for categories that do indeed make practical sense, so many competitors have been funded that it will be nearly impossible for average returns to be compelling in a winner-take-most market....

Frida Polli, a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, investor, and inventor known for her leading-edge contributions at the crossroads of behavioral science and artificial intelligence, is MIT's new visiting innovation scholar for the 2024-25 academic year. She is the first visiting innovation scholar to be housed within the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. Polli began her career in academic neuroscience with a focus on multimodal brain imaging related to health and disease. She was a fellow at the Psychiatric Neuroimaging Group at Mass General Brigham and Harvard Medical School. She then joined the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT as a postdoc, where she worked with John Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and a professor of brain and cognitive sciences. Her research has won many awards, including a Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. She authored over 30 peer-reviewed articles, with notable publications in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Neuroscience, and Brain. She transitioned from academia to entrepreneurship by completing her MBA at the Harvard Business School (HBS) as a Robert Kaplan Life Science Fellow. During this time, she also won the Life Sciences Track and the Audience Choice Award in the 2010 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship competition as a member of Aukera Therapeutics....

In the past three months, investors have plowed close to $1.2 billion into a geographically dispersed group of online banking providers, Crunchbase data shows. Three of the largest funding recipients ' One, Tyme and Current ' announced new rounds this past week. The single biggest haul went to One, a Sacramento, California-based startup offering online banking, debit cards and installment loans for purchases at Walmart, its majority stakeholder. Walmart and fintech investor Ribbit Capital led a $300 million round at a reported $2.5 billion valuation. Tyme, which offers digital banking in South Africa and the Philippines, picked up the next-largest round: a $250 million Series D. Brazil's Nubank led the financing, which sets a $1.5 billion valuation for the 5-year-old, Singapore-headquartered company. Current, based in New York, announced its latest fundraise last week: a $200 million financing that brings investment to date to more than $600 million. The company says its revenue grew by over 90% this year and that it is aiming for profitability in 2025....