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In Today’s Edition 

• Against all odds, an asteroid mining company appears to be making headway 

• Waymo says it has doubled its weekly paid robotaxi trips to 100,000 since May

• Walmart sold its entire stake in Chinese ecommerce company 

• The invisible problem with sending people to Mars

🚀Startups Nuts

Against all odds, an asteroid mining company appears to be making headway 

AstroForge recently announced that it successfully raised $40 million in Series A funding. The company aims to mine asteroids for platinum and other precious metals. It is working to launch a spacecraft in the fourth quarter of this year that will attempt to fly by a near-Earth, metallic-rich asteroid while capturing images and taking data. The company has planned a follow-up mission that involves a larger spacecraft docking with the targeted metallic asteroid using magnets.

Other News

• Story, a blockchain-based platform for IP owners to track usage, raised $80m in Series B funding at a $2.25b valuation

• Redo, a Heber City, Utah-based provider of returns management software, raised $24m in Series A funding

• The Rounds, a Philadelphia provider of e-commerce restocking solutions, raised $24m in Series B funding

• PreciseDx, a New York-based oncology diagnostics company, raised $20.7m in Series B funding

• Trunk Tools, a New York provider of automation solutions for construction documentation, raised $20m in Series A funding 

• AllCity Network, a digital sports network, raised $12m in Series B funding

• Efficient Capital Labs, a provider of revenue-based financing to emerging market SaaS businesses, raised $11m in Series A funding 

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🏭Business Nuts 

Waymo says it has doubled its weekly paid robotaxi trips to 100,000 since May 

Waymo is now providing more than 100,000 paid robotaxi rides per week in the US. It serves the most trips in San Francisco. The company claims that its driverless vehicles have driven over 14.8 million rider-only miles. It also claims that the Waymo Driver is 3.5 times better at avoiding crashes that cause injuries and 3 times better at avoiding police-reported crashes than human drivers.

Other News

• PayPal has broadly hinted that it plans to develop a competing wallet on iOS now that Apple has opened up the iPhone's NFC capabilities.

• Fanfix, Brand-safe monetization platform  has paid out over $100 million to thousands of creators in just three years.

• Walmart sold its entire stake in Chinese ecommerce company JD.com, estimated to be valued at around $3.7b.

• The Donut, an Austin, Texas-based newsletter platform, acquired Press Sports, an Atlanta-based social media platform for young athletes that General Catalyst, Overline VC, and Sound Media Ventures backed. 

• Hyatt Hotels agreed to buy lifestyle hotel company Standard International for up to $335m ($150m upfront).

• TJX Cos acquired a 35% stake in Dubai-based discount retailer Brands for Less for $360m.

• Bitfarms agreed to buy rival crypto miner Stronghold Digital Mining in a $175m all-stock deal ($125m in equity value).

📱Tech Nuts

OpenAI's Most Advanced Model Can Now Be Customized. Here's How 

OpenAI's GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini can now be fine-tuned and customized by developers for business use. Developers can now use their own datasets to enhance the model's knowledge base with proprietary information and control how the model responds to specific questions. It costs $25 for every 1 million tokens used to fine-tune GPT-4o - $3 for GPT-4o mini. 1 million tokens is roughly equivalent to 2,500 pages in a standard-size book.

Other News

• OpenAI partners with Condé Nast i.e. content Acc. to the deal, content from Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, Wired, and more, will be shown in ChatGPT and SearchGPT prototype.

• Microsoft introduced three new open-source AI models, named mini-instruct, MoE-instruct, and vision-instruct, which excel in logical reasoning and support multiple languages but face challenges in factual accuracy and safety.

• A leaked recording revealed that AWS CEO Matt Garman believes software developers may soon stop coding as artificial intelligence takes over many of their tasks.

• Google  will face a class action lawsuit accused of collecting Chrome users' data without their consent, after a federal appeals court reversed a 2022 dismissal that failed to evaluate Google's disclosures for user understanding.

• Meta has introduced new web crawling bots designed to collect data for training its AI models and related products without being easily blocked by website owners.

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🎁Miscellaneous

The invisible problem with sending people to Mars

There are obvious challenges to getting people to Mars, but the biggest obstacle might be something that's totally invisible and often overlooked: space radiation. Scientists are just beginning to learn about the many ways that exposure to space radiation can impact human health. The effects of space radiation may also combine with other factors such as sleep deprivation and microgravity - there is not enough information yet about how these factors interact. Finding ways to mitigate these effects will determine whether people will ever be able to visit Mars safely.

💡What else are we reading and seeing?

• Effective Changelogs

• Startup shutdowns are on the rise

• What is an AI PC? And should you buy one?

• Mastering AI maturity: the path to outperforming competitors

• Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And it's only getting worse

• How the Inflation Reduction Act sparked a manufacturing and clean energy boom

🔥 Few tools many people are finding useful

• MolyPix - Create beautiful, easy-to-edit designs you want

• Codegen - Programmatically analyze and manipulate your codebase

• Stori 2.0 - Automated personal and business branding for entrepreneurs

• Evidently AI - Evaluate, test, and monitor your AI-powered products with your team

• Zed AI - Bring LLMs directly into your code editor with Anthropic’s new Fast Edit mode

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