Cologne, Germany, and India are currently at the center of significant developments, with Germany's Rose Monday carnival satirizing world leaders and India hosting a major AI summit while also seeing its first AI company's IPO debut. The annual carnival in Cologne featured floats mocking figures like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, while India's AI Impact Summit is attracting major tech executives and heads of state.
The Cologne carnival, a space for political commentary, saw revellers walking beside floats that satirized global leaders. The sharpest designs came from sculptor Jacques Tilly, whose work has drawn legal threats, according to Euronews. The event highlights how Germans use humor to process serious politics.
Meanwhile, India is hosting a four-day AI Impact Summit this week, aiming to attract more AI investment to the country. The summit is expected to draw 250,000 visitors and will feature executives from major AI labs and Big Tech companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei are among the attendees, along with Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is scheduled to deliver a speech with French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday, according to TechCrunch. India has earmarked 1.1 billion for its state-backed venture capital fund, which will invest in artificial intelligence and advanced technologies.
However, the debut of Fractal Analytics, India's first AI company to IPO, did not go as planned. The stock listed below its issue price and closed down, signaling investor concerns. The company's market capitalization is about 1.6 billion, a step down from its recent private-market highs, according to TechCrunch.
In other AI-related news, U.S. VCs are actively seeking deal flow outside of the U.S. Andreessen Horowitz led a 2.3 million pre-seed round into Dentio, a Swedish startup that uses AI to help dentists practices with admin work, according to TechCrunch. Additionally, Flapping Airplanes, a new AI lab, is focused on finding less data-hungry ways to train AI. The lab has secured 180 million in seed funding, according to TechCrunch. "We want to try really radically different things," said one of the co-founders.
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