| Hi everyone, it's Rachel in San Francisco! Do you hear that noise? It's a drum roll for Bloomberg's second annual list of the top 10 AI startups to watch. But first... Three things you need to know today: • Alphabet's revenue jumped on search ads and cloud computing
• Hackers leaked documents from a Pentagon IT provider
• The arrest of a tech star in South Korea traces a fall from grace Though we're just over halfway through 2024, it's already been a wild year for artificial intelligence startups, with an explosion of innovation, funding, hype and drama at companies large and small. Consider, for instance, that in the months since January, the following is just a sprinkling of what's been going on in that world: OpenAI set off a frenzy for high-quality AI-generated video by previewing its Sora video tool. Scarlett Johansson successfully pressured OpenAI to remove a voice from ChatGPT that sounded like her. Elon Musk's startup xAI raised $6 billion. And AI search engine Perplexity AI became one of a growing number of startups to get into a copyright spat with media companies. So it's against this backdrop that we present you our second annual list of top 10 AI startups to watch this year. With so much going on, it was difficult to decide which companies should make the cut. Some of the startups chosen for our list were obvious: AI rivals OpenAI and Anthropic, for instance, have made strides in the development of large language models, and have debuted technology that can summarize huge amounts of text, answer questions and analyze pictures. Both continue to exert massive influence across the sector and on tech giants, locked in a never-ending contest with rivals like Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google to release the best new models, large and small. Other names on the list might surprise you: Suno and ElevenLabs, for instance, haven't raised big sums of money relative to some other AI heavyweights, but both are building technology that may be hugely consequential. Suno's AI can generate shockingly complex-sounding songs — including vocals — making it easy for anyone to create music in any genre. Yet it has angered the famously litigious US music industry: In June the world's biggest record labels sued the company, along with a competing startup, Udio, alleging they unlawfully trained their AI models on copyrighted tunes. And ElevenLabs' voice-cloning software has gotten so good as to be helpful and harmful. US Representative Jennifer Wexton of Virginia, for instance, recently posted on X that she created a copy of her voice to help her communicate after a neurological disease affected her ability to speak. In a more worrisome vein, however, someone used the service to fake audio of President Joe Biden urging people not to vote in a New Hampshire primary, prompting the company ban the user. To underscore how tricky it was to figure out who should be on this year's list: We added a new section with six emerging startups we're also keeping an eye on. These range from OpenAI alum Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence Inc., which is dedicated to building harmless, powerful AI, to Cognition, an AI coding company that is trying to unseat the current leader in that space, Microsoft Corp.'s GitHub Copilot. Take a look at our picks, and let us know what you think — especially if there's a startup you don't see that you think should make the cut next year! —Rachel Metz Roblox, a platform for kids to design and play video games, is now visited by 78 million daily active users. But the site is fighting to keep child predators at bay — and not always winning. Tiktok is targeting Spain and Ireland for a renewed e-commerce push in Europe. Tesla's profit fell short of estimates on a weaker electric vehicle market. Texas Instruments reassured investors with an outlook that suggests its customers are beginning to order chips again. Cybersecurity startup Wiz rejected a $23 billion takeover offer from Google. | 
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