South East Asia Trends: Future of AI Applications, Microsoft + BlackRock's $30B AI Infra Fund

In today’s newsletter:

• ABA Podcast EP4 Teaser: CEO of Weaviate

• Insights: Southeast Asia AI trends to watch in the next five years

• Lenovo begins manufacturing in India

• Slack plans to become an AI agent hub

🎙️ ABA Podcast #EP4 Teaser: CEO of Weaviate, Forbes Top 50 AI startups.

In this upcoming episode, Leo interviews Bob van Lujit, Co-founder and CEO of Weaviate, Forbes 2024 AI 50—one of the most popular Vector DB solutions, with over 1 million downloads to date.

Bob shares his insights on how Weaviate transforms the landscape of semantic search and unstructured data management.

Weaviate has achieved significant milestones:

• Featured on Forbes AI 50 as one of the most promising AI startups in 2024;

• Surpassed 1 million monthly downloads, indicating strong developer and enterprise adoption;

• Raised $50M in Series B funding in 2023, led by Index Ventures and Battery Ventures;

• Trusted by leading organizations such as NASA and Instabase for advanced AI applications like semantic search and retrieval augmented generation (RAG).

What to expect in this episode:

• The journey: How Bob and his team built Weaviate from concept to a global leader in vector databases;

• The solution: Demystifying vector databases, hybrid search, and RAG — and how Weaviate is revolutionizing these areas;

• Use cases: Real-world applications of Weaviate’s technology, from AI feedback loops to powering search engines like Perplexity;

• The future: How Bob envisions AI’s future in enterprise adoption.

Some of the key questions discussed:

1. What business problems are Weaviate solving, and how is it fundamental to LLMs and GenAI apps?

2. How does hybrid search differ from traditional search, and what are its benefits?

3. What’s the biggest challenge in AI adoption today, and what’s next for Weaviate?

The full episode will drop this Friday, 20th September, 2024

Youtube | Spotify | Apple  | RSS 

Southeast Asia AI Trends to Watch in the Next Five Years, and What Does it Mean For Us?

Southeast Asia is set to experience significant economic gains from AI.

• SEA region is estimated to have a $950 billion increase in GDP due to AI by 2030.

• Investments like Microsoft’s $1.7 billion in Indonesia, ByteDance’s $2.13 billion, and AWS’s plans of $6.2 billion in Malaysia highlight the region’s focus on AI and digital infrastructure.

• Statista projects the SEA AI market to grow to $30.3 billion by 2030, with current investments targeting long-term potential rather than immediate returns.

In this article, we break into:

• Southeast Asia's AI potential;

• What are the investors looking for?

• Emerging trends that are gaining traction; and

• Hurdles in AI's success in the SEA region.

News from Asia:

• Beijing is going ahead with a national law for labelling AI-generated content.

• Hong Kong government to release new AI guidelines for the finance sector by the end of October. 

• Lenovo begins manufacturing AI servers in India to produce 50,000 AI rack servers annually to meet growing demand.

• Chinese AI start-up founder Yang Zhilin on OpenAI's latest model, o1, for its reasoning abilities.​

• Shengshu’s Vidu AI text-to-video generator outcompetes rivals with fast, high-definition outputs and dynamic visuals.

News from the West:

• Microsoft and Blackrock launched a $30 billion fund for AI infrastructure, and Nvidia joins as a technical expert.

• Slack plans to become an AI agent hub, integrating tools from Salesforce, Adobe, and Anthropic.

• Salesforce Ventures doubles its AI fund to $1 billion, signaling further commitment to AI innovation.​

• Intel to make custom AI chips for Amazon.

• Runway and Luma AI’s rush to release APIs for AI video generation stirs concerns about ethical oversight.