Odyssey Reaches Impressive $1.45 Billion Valuation

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
If you want to get access to this episode and my next 30 episodes all ad-free, so there'll be no ads on them, go check out my podcast, AI Chat. You can go search for that on Spotify or Apple. It's AI Chat. I'm going to post all of these news episodes, and I'm also posting interviews. Like I just interviewed the CEO of Cohere. They've raised over a billion dollars for their AI model, talking about what they're going to be spending the money on and the direction of the AI industry, along with all of this new stuff. So if you want to go check it out with no ads for free, it is AI Chat. Welcome to the podcast. Today, State Farm is under fire for cutting commissions to some of its insuring agents because of AI. We have some news that Allbirds is not going to be called Allbirds anymore. They're focusing, they're shifting their name, and they're going to be focusing on AI infrastructure, a wild switch up and pivot for that company. A company called Odysseus has just hit $1.45 billion in valuation. Amazon and AMD are both betting that their world models are valuable. And only 16% of Americans see AI as a net positive according to some Pew research. And that's in a specific subset of this research, but there's some pretty incredible statistics there. Threads, Instagram and TikTok are all giving users the ability to adjust our algorithms ourselves and not just have AI pick purely what we want. I want to talk a little bit about where we see that going, especially when one of their competitors, Pinterest, has just launched a brand new app called Ask Pinterest. This is a standalone AI shopping app, and it's interesting because this is a big pivot from what Pinterest has very publicly sort of been opposed to AI in the past. I am super excited to announce that AI Box is officially launching an MCP, which means that if you use a tool like Cloud and it doesn't have audio and it doesn't have image generation, you can use the MCP of AI Box to get the image generation and audio generation inside of Cloud. Or if you're using something like ChatGPT, which is about to kill the Sora video generation, you can get Google's VO3 video model inside of ChatGPT and use our MCP to get access to all of the AI models inside of the AI tools that you already use. If you want to check it out, I'm leaving a link in the description to aibox.ai.
This is something we are super, super excited about.
It is $8.99 a month and you get access to over 80 different AI models, image, audio, text, video, music, and you get them all inside of any of the AI tools that you already use. So go check it out. I hope that saves you a ton of time and money. Okay, let's talk about the first story here. And that is State Farm. There's recent backlash. There was a writer, Gene Eaglesham, who said, State Farm's AI-driven plan to impose a new contract on its 19,000 sales agents is causing an uproar. This was written in the Wall Street Journal. And essentially what's happening is there's a huge backlash because there is a change that is gonna reduce the income by up to 40% of these sales agents over at State Farm. It's also gonna cut their benefits. And this is all part of a strategy to adapt AI advancements. And State Farm right now is really trying to take on Progressive, who has basically surpassed State Farm as the largest personal auto insurer. Now, I don't know what part of the world I'm in. I use Geico. I just asked all of the different car companies. I was the cheapest one. Whenever I called around State Farm and Progressive they were way more expensive, so I have no idea why those are the two biggest. Maybe you guys can tell me if you listen. What I will say is as someone that is not in this industry or doesn't know much about this industry at all other than I'm a customer of it, I personally, when I hear that a sales agent is going to get their benefits cut by 40% or their income or their commission, sadly, I actually that doesn't bother me. I don't want to pay any commission to a sales agent. I just have to get insurance on my car. I really appreciate the way Geico lets me just go on the website, put what I want, select it, make all of the adjustments I want and just click buy. And I think in some cases, I actually do have to call the Geico agents to get stuff set up. But it always feels like this is kind of a bureaucracy. It's always kind of something that has been regulated into existence. I don't really want that regulation. I wish it was more free market with insurance. But because legally I'm required to get insurance, I just want the cheapest insurance possible. And that is me. So anyways, if AI can help do things cheaper for the consumer, which is myself, I'm happy. Now, for people that are getting their income cut, I am sorry that is sad. And I resonate there. But I truly believe in a free market. And if we can make this better for the consumer, that is kind of what I would say is the best outcome. So probably not a very popular opinion, but that's my thoughts on that. Okay, Allbirds is changing the name. This was a kind of a trendy shoe brand that came out of Silicon Valley. They're changing their name to Smartbirds. This is based in San Francisco. They've gotten a new chief executive that's going to be helping them with this. And they're switching from shoes to AI infrastructure. This was not a shift that anyone expected. But essentially what happened is I believe they were public. Their stock was cratering. It was at all time lows. You know, they were becoming unpopular. People were just worried this company was going to get delisted. And so they decided to sell off the rights to Allbirds, their shoe brand, take the money that they were able to get from that, and just dump it all straight into AI infrastructure. So, Nadia Carlsten is going to be in charge of the company. The former CEO, Joe Vernancio, is going to be leaving in April. They said that they were going to do this rebrand. So I remember this. They actually, I think, said they were going to call it like Newbird AI or something, but it appears that they're actually going to be just calling it Smartbird. But in any case, the new CEO, her background includes a stint as CEO at a Danish Center for AI Innovation. And I think they have some people that had experience over at Amazon. So this is going to be incredibly interesting. Here's a post that Nadia, the new CEO, posted on LinkedIn. She said, For many organizations, shared infrastructure simply isn't enough, whether driven by performance, cost security, or sovereignty needs. They need dedicated infrastructure, but they shouldn't have to become experts in GPUs, networking data centers, and cluster operations to realize the benefit of AI. So, they are fully switching all of their branding, all of their speak into just purely data centers. It's crazy just to see a company that they were publicly traded, they had some sort of assets, and they realized that this company wasn't going to be successful long term. They cut their losses, took the money, and just started doing data centers. That's a crazy pivot for a shoe brand, if I'm being honest. Okay, Audisias has just hit a $1.45 billion valuation. Amazon and AMD are both investing in them. It was a new round which was led by Natural Capital, and then you also had GV that was participating as well. This is a company that was just started in 2023, and they have now raised $337 million in total funding. AWS is now Audisias' preferred cloud provider, which, you know, this is how we see these deals, right? Amazon is going to put the money in, and they expect that they're going to be using their services, AWS. So you can see Amazon, Microsoft, Google, they put money into all of these different companies, NVIDIA even, right? And they're like, hey, you got to make sure you're using NVIDIA GPUs.