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- OpenAI raises $110 Billion
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Howdy, it’s Barsee again.
Happy Monday, AI family, and welcome back to AI Valley.
Today’s climb through the Valley reveals:
OpenAI raises $110 Billion as it races toward IPO
Pentagon drops Anthropic, signs OpenAI
Google launches Nano Banana 2
Plus trending AI tools, posts, and resources
Let’s dive into the Valley of AI…
FLOW
Courtesy: Flow
Some problems don't solve themselves at a keyboard. Flow is perfect for walks: talk through the idea, the structure, the tradeoffs—then get back a clean draft you can paste into your doc or AI tool. It's like having a writing assistant that keeps up with your brain in motion.
*This is sponsored
THROUGH THE VALLEY
OpenAI has raised $110 billion in new private funding, one of the largest rounds ever, at a $730 billion pre-money valuation. The round includes $50 billion from Amazon and $30 billion each from Nvidia and SoftBank, and it remains open to additional investors. As part of the deal, OpenAI will expand its AWS partnership, committing to major compute usage and building models for Amazon products, while Nvidia will provide large-scale training and inference capacity. Much of the funding may come through services rather than cash. Some investment is tied to future milestones still to be met.
OpenAI signed a new Pentagon contract just hours after President Trump directed agencies to cut ties with Anthropic, citing its restrictions on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Anthropic had been the first AI lab approved for the Pentagon’s classified network, but refused certain military uses. The administration labeled it a “supply chain risk,” a term usually used for foreign threats. OpenAI said its agreement includes similar limits, though reports claim Anthropic’s Claude was still used in Iran-related operations shortly after the ban. The move drew criticism from Sam Altman and sparked online backlash, with Claude rising on the App Store as some users called for ChatGPT boycotts.
Google DeepMind has launched Nano Banana 2, officially named Gemini 3.1 Flash Image, as its new default image model. It runs on the Gemini 3.1 Flash system and uses real-time web data. Google says it cuts image generation costs by 25 to 50 percent, pricing 1,000 images at $0.067 and 4K outputs at $0.151. The biggest upgrade is text rendering, which is now clearer and more accurate, including text translation inside images. The model also improves instruction following, character consistency, and supports up to 4K resolution. It now replaces older image models across Gemini and related Google platforms.
TRENDING TOOLS
Now available: Automated Embedding in Vector Search for MongoDB Community Edition. Handle embedding generation and synchronization with Voyage AI models *
IronClaw > A secure, open-source alternative to OpenClaw
Notion Custom Agents - Anything you can do in Notion, your Agent can do for you
Skill Forge > Teach a task once. It records your actions and turns them into a replayable skill automation
Claude Cowork > Runs scheduled and recurring tasks automatically, evolving from chatbot to operational agent
ShortKit > A video infrastructure platform that lets you turn an app into a TikTok-quality feed
(*) signifies sponsored product
WHAT I'M CONSUMING
THE VALLEY GEMS
THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY
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