Most Read: Meta’s Massive Open Source Model, CrowdStrike CEO Called Before Congress

Here are the most-read stories on AI Business this week:

Meta Unveils Largest Open-Source AI Model In History

Meta has unveiled Llama 3.1 405B, a giant 405 billion parameter model that stands as the largest open source AI system in history.

Meta only launched the Llama 3 line of models in April but has since been working on a mammoth version of the model that’s a whopping 400 billion parameters in size.

The company unveiled that giant model, which stands at 405 billion parameters, an enormous AI system that Meta described as “in a class of its own.”

Meta’s latest release offers a powerful underlying model for use cases including multilingual conversational agents or long-form text summarization, with a revised Stack API enabling users to implement it easily.

Meta said the new giant model will let the AI research community “unlock new workflows, such as synthetic data generation and model distillation.

Read more about the massive Llama 3.1 4OB model

CrowdStrike CEO Called Before Congress Over Worldwide IT Outage

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz has been called to testify before Congress regarding last week’s worldwide IT outage caused by the company’s software update.

Lawmakers on the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection have written to Kurtz, calling on the executive to provide details about the incident.

Related:AI Takes Center Stage at 2024 Paris Olympics

Last week, CrowdStrike published an update to its security software, only for it to cause systems running on Microsoft Windows worldwide to glitch and completely crash.

Airlines across the globe were grounded and businesses were locked out of their payroll software as PCs displayed the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death.”

“The American public deserve[s] to know in detail how this incident happened and the mitigation steps CrowdStrike is taking,” Congressmen Mark Green and Andrew Garbarino wrote in a letter calling Kurtz to testify before the House.

Find out more about the IT outage, one week on

Nvidia, Pfizer Back AI Drug Discovery Startup

Israeli startup CytoReason has secured $80 million in funding to accelerate the development of its AI-powered platform for disease modeling and drug discovery. 

Founded in 2016, the startup’s platform creates computational disease models for predictive therapeutics. Its AI-powered tool is designed to assist researchers looking for potential disease treatments.

Nvidia, Pfizer, OurCrowd and Thermo Fisher Scientific invested in the startup, which plans to use the funds to accelerate its growth.

CytoReason plans to invest in expanding the application of its computational models and grow its proprietary corpus of molecular and clinical data.

Related:CrowdStrike 'Updates' Deliver Malware and More as Attacks Snowball

Uncover more about CytoReason and its drug development platform

Anthropic, Menlo Ventures Launch $100M AI Startup Fund

Anthropic, the Amazon-backed AI developer behind Claude, is partnering with Menlo Ventures to launch a $100 million fund to invest in AI startups.

The Anthology Fund will invest in next-generation AI startups from seed to expansion stages with investments starting at $100,000.

Startups will also receive $25,000 in free Anthropic credits, quarterly conversations with Menlo and Anthropic leaders and biannual demo days hosted by Anthropic president Daniela Amodei and other Menlo partners.

The Anthology Fund targets U.S. startups, though Menlo said it will back “exceptional companies internationally.”

Learn more about the new Startup Fund

The C-Suite Challenge as AI Goes Mainstream

Rahul Kalia, IBM Consulting Services’ managing partner for U.K. and Ireland writes in an op-ed that business leaders must strike a balance between caution and courage by letting go of what has worked before and opening the door to new possibilities when implementing AI.

Read: The C-Suite Challenge as AI Goes Mainstream