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The Public Investment Fund may be cooking up a world-scale AI play, with officials said to be exploring the setup of a USD 40 bn fund to invest in artificial intelligence, the New York Times reports. The fund would make PIF the world’s largest investor in AI and it could start investing as early as the second half of this year.
Possibly on board: Andreessen Horowitz, also known as A16Z, long one of Silicon Valley’s highest-profile venture capital firms. Co-founder Ben Horowitz is said to be a friend of PIF Governor Yasir Al Rumayyan, with the two having reportedly spent time together socially last month in Las Vegas for the Super Bowl.
The fund would invest in everything AI, from chipmakers, AI companies to data centers, the Times says in its exclusive.
This means we all have two must-reads this morning: A16Z co-founder Marc Andreessen is a polarizing figure in some circles, but he’s been the clearest and most enthusiastic communicator on the notion that “software is eating the world,” an idea he first pushed in a seminal 2011 essay. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that he sees massive potential in AI.
Go deeper yourself in two essays that made big waves last year — and that still resonate across the Valley:
LinkedIn wants you to level up your high scores and your résumés. The Microsoft-owned company whose main purpose has, since inception, been networking, is now looking to break into gaming, reports TechCrunch.
The move isn’t fully baked just yet: App researchers stumbled on code that tipped them off to what Microsoft was up to, and a LinkedIn spokesperson confirmed the findings to TechCrunch. The company seems to be trying to get on the puzzle-mania bandwagon that launched simple games like Wordle to USD mn valuations. Three games the company seems to be working on are titled Queens, Interference, and Crossclimb.
Why? To boost the time people are spending on the platform. LinkedIn has a daily user accessrate of 16.2%, and a monthly user access rate of 48.5%. While it is technically a social platform, people don’t really consider it a place to congregate.
How will it work? App researcher Nima Owji, who broke news of the code, says it seems like scores will be organized by place of work, with employees being ranked on a company-wide leaderboard.
