It’s Wednesday, September 3rd: Discover how the AI Collective is transforming education with global webinars, workshops, and debates, and learn how to bring AI innovation to your campus as a University Liaison.
Discover what’s happening at AI Collective chapters worldwide with our new Events Portal. Search by city, date, or format, and join thousands of builders at events across 25+ chapters and on every continent.
🌁 Based in SF? Check out SF IRL, MLOps SF, GenerativeAISF, or Cerebral Valley’s spreadsheet for more!
🌎 Collective Education, Learn From Anywhere
Learn from anywhere. Webinars, workshops, and debates - open to all.
In just the last month, the AI Collective has hosted over 1,200 educators and learners across our growing network. Whether you’re joining a Collective Intelligence session to sharpen hands-on skills, or stepping into Collective Consciousness for live debates on the future of AI, you’ll be part of a truly global campus for frontier knowledge.
Every event is hosted on Roam, designed so you can learn, connect, and contribute from anywhere in the world.
👉 Explore the full Luma Calendar
👉 Save your seat for Thursday’s event (What AI Teams Get Wrong About Vector Databases)
🎓 Bring the AI Collective to Your University
We are building a network of students and faculty who want to shape the future of AI on their campuses and beyond. Join us as a University Liaison and help bring the AI Collective to your community.
University Liaisons are the bridge between their campus and the global AI Collective. The role is about sparking curiosity, creating conversation, and building partnerships that connect students, academics, and industry leaders.
This is where you step up: host events, grow your network, and shape the future of AI. Whether you are a student, faculty member, or someone interested in exploring university partnerships, there is a place for you in this program.
Fill out the Interest Form or email [email protected] to learn more and get involved.
AI News Roundup
What you need to know: weekly by AJ Green 🤝
💰 Anthropic hits $183B valuation with historic funding
News: Anthropic just closed a staggering $13B Series F funding round, boosting its valuation to $183B—nearly 3x what it was just six months ago. Claude’s rapid adoption in enterprise and coding use cases is driving this growth.
Details:
Claude now serves 300K+ enterprise customers, with $100K+ accounts up 7x in 2025.
Claude Code generates $500M/year, usage up 10x last quarter.
Qatar Investment Authority became Anthropic’s first Middle East investor.
Anthropic’s $3.5B March raise valued them at $61.5B; that’s now tripled.
Claude holds ~3.9% of the generative AI market, but ~29% of the enterprise AI assistant market, with most revenue from API usage.
Why it matters: Anthropic's valuation has soared from $61.5 billion to $183 billion in six months, marking extraordinary growth. With strong enterprise adoption and revenue from Claude Code, its fundamentals match the hype. Despite warnings of an AI valuation bubble, this funding round is among the largest in tech history, achieved at an unexpected speed.
🍌 Gemini 2.5 Flash Image Model ("nano-banana")
News: Google DeepMind has unveiled Gemini 2.5 Flash, a fast, cost-efficient multimodal model designed for real-time applications. Nicknamed nano-banana, it’s built for lightweight deployment while supporting image, audio, video, and text inputs.
Details:
Handles up to 1M token context windows for large conversations or documents.
Supports images, video, audio, and PDFs.
Processes up to 3,000 images per prompt (max ~7MB each).
Offers multi-turn image editing, style transfer, and object combining.
Includes visible and invisible AI watermarks.
Outputs ~274 tokens/sec.
Costs $0.30/M input tokens, $2.50/M output tokens (cheaper than Gemini Pro).
Available in Google AI Studio, Vertex AI, and via Gemini API.
Why it matters: ChatGPT’s image generation drove record growth—1M users in an hour, 100M signups in a week, and 700M images made. Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash could see similar adoption if access and integrations align, raising the bar for consumer and enterprise AI with multimodal features, low costs, and watermark safeguards.
Our Premier Partner: Roam
Roam is redefining remote work with a virtual workspace that mirrors the feel of a real office with co-working zones, private spaces and meeting rooms with built-in chat, video, audio, whiteboards and AI tools like meeting summaries and noise cancellation. Roam is supporting the AI Collective’s mission to connect builders, researchers, and leaders shaping the future of AI, reflecting their shared focus on thoughtful, human-centered collaboration.
Explore Roam and transform the way your team works together!
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About Grant Franzuela
Grant is a solution-focused product professional who aligns user needs with business goals through creative storytelling and analytical expertise. With a background in filmmaking, digital marketing, and product management, he turns complex features into compelling value propositions that boost user adoption and business growth.
About AJ Green
AJ Green is a founder, writer, VC scout, chairman, and respected community leader in the AI and startup space. A former athlete turned tech entrepreneur, AJ is on a mission to make AI the great equalizer scaling startups, connecting ecosystems, and turning disruption into opportunity.