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The Week In Short The OpenAI / Hugging Face hack stirred up discourse about the dangers of rogue AI, while the model-makers move to bring in big cybersecurity bucks. Dimension founder Zavain Dar explains what Silicon Valley can learn from Chinese AI companies on the podcast. Inference provider Baseten scoops up an early-stage infrastructure startup. Mistral brings in billions but can’t shake its identity crisis. A new Ramp report shows AI spending per employee dipped in August.

Sound Ventures’ Alex Heath, Effie Epstein, and Guy Oseary Alex Heath — a top tech journalist known for his interviews with tech heavyweights and for his consumer technology scoops — is joining Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures as a partner. He’s signing on to the Los Angeles-based firm as it’s targeting a $300 million fifth fund with an expected first close this month. “I am hanging up my capital J journalist hat,” Heath told me in a conversation Wednesday.

We’re three weeks out from the Machine Earning AI Summit, bringing together the leading founders, investors, and operators focused on AI finance and commerce. There’s still a bit of room left for top founders and investors to attend. If you’re interested in coming, you can apply on our site here. Apply to Attend We’re sharing the names of two additional speakers alongside our first set of discussion group leaders at our one-day summit.

The Week in Short Tim Cook’s retirement at Apple highlights how few unifying leaders there are in Silicon Valley today. Tech CEOs call for lax AI regulations from international dignitaries at the G20 Innovation Ministerial. Too many AI auditors come from a similar POV. Anthropic and OpenAI’s professional power-users account for most of their enterprise revenue. Nvidia and Hugging Face announce the chipmaker’s $12.9 billion acquisition agreement. OpenAI pulls back the curtain on its new Astra model.

Now headquartered in Bengaluru, India Quotient has eight investment members and three partners, with the latest, Kanika Agarrwal (far left) joining the firm in 2023. Anand Lunia is at the center. Anand Lunia, the tall, lanky, and bespectacled co-founder of the VC investor India Quotient, made a name for himself with his firm’s 2015 seed investment in ShareChat, an Indian local-language social network. The company was the poster child for Lunia’s India-first philosophy.

Venture capitalists are betting that a barrage of AI agents will soon arrive and upend the marketplaces for e-commerce and payments. Most of the action today is in building the infrastructure and tools for the day when agents can be trusted with a customer’s credit card and shopping choices. How close we are to that day is one of several very big questions facing the nascent AI commerce industry.

The Week in Short Nvidia again reported soaring revenue and earnings, and acquired Hugging Face and much of Poolside, generating two big VC exits while raising questions about the company’s growing reach. Top tech companies issue an urgent call for action on AI cyber risks as the OpenAI hack incident gets more scrutiny. Sam Parr talks strategy behind big media exits on the podcast. Decent earnings from Salesforce sent its stock up more than 20% and dented the SaaSpocalypse story.

Two startup personal assistants have venture capitalists in a tizzy right now: Town, the affable enterprise personal assistant, is in talks to raise at a $1 billion valuation in a round led by Index, sources tell us. The corporate personal assistant, started by former Plaid CTO Jean-Denis Greze and former Google applied AI product director Tony Vincent, received earlier backing from Andreessen Horowitz and Forerunner.

It was mostly by chance that the acquisitions of Cursor and OpenRouter landed just four days apart. But for a16z’s infrastructure team, which had a hand in both, it made for an especially glorious victory lap: Cursor was the biggest M&A exit of all time, and OpenRouter was a monster too, returning more than 50x in just two years.

The Week In Short Between Cursor and OpenRouter, a16z’s infrastructure practice had a week for the venture history books. OpenAI and Anthropic show strong revenue figures, but hang-ups remain ahead of their planned mega IPOs. Sequoia tops the leaderboard for most investments in newly minted unicorns. A missile startup raises a 10-figure funding round while chip deals stay white hot. A new report says Nvidia is ramping up special chips for China.