It is, after all, a lot easier to generate press for robots that look and move like humans.
For a while now, Collaborative Robotics founder Brad Porter has eschewed robots that look like people.
As the two-year-old startup’s name implies, Collaborative Robotics (Cobot for short) is interested in the ways in which humans and robots will collaborate, moving forward.
When his run with the company ended in summer 2020, he was leading the retail giant’s industrial robotics team.
AI will, naturally, be foundational to the company’s promise of “human problem solving,” while the move away from the humanoid form factor is a bid, in part, to reduce the cost of entry for deploying these systems.
Today, Groq announced that it’s forming a new division — Groq Systems — focused on greatly expanding its customer and developer ecosystem.
In forming the new unit, Groq has acquired Definitive Intelligence, a Palo Alto-based firm offering a range of business-oriented AI solutions including chatbots, data analytics tools and documentation builders.
Prior to launching Definitive Intelligence, Madra and Sherry co-launched Autonomic, a cloud-based platform for connecting mobility systems, that Ford acquired in 2018.
Prior to the acquisition, Definitive Intelligence had raised $25.5 million in venture capital.
Definitive Intelligence is Groq’s second acquisition after Maxeler Technologies, a high-performance compute and AI infrastructure solutions firm, in 2022.
So in response, Google — thousands of jobs lighter than it was last fiscal quarter — is funneling investments toward AI safety.
This morning, Google DeepMind, the AI R&D division behind Gemini and many of Google’s more recent GenAI projects, announced the formation of a new organization, AI Safety and Alignment — made up of existing teams working on AI safety but also broadened to encompass new, specialized cohorts of GenAI researchers and engineers.
But it did reveal that AI Safety and Alignment will include a new team focused on safety around artificial general intelligence (AGI), or hypothetical systems that can perform any task a human can.
The AI Safety and Alignment organization’s other teams are responsible for developing and incorporating concrete safeguards into Google’s Gemini models, current and in-development.
One might assume issues as grave as AGI safety — and the longer-term risks the AI Safety and Alignment organization intends to study, including preventing AI in “aiding terrorism” and “destabilizing society” — require a director’s full-time attention.
Entrepreneurs navigating the later stages of a startup face a minefield of funding options, and not all of them are suitable for their business.
I’ve seen too many brilliant and hard-working entrepreneurs end up with too little, so it’s critical to understand the different financing options available to you.
As the founder and CEO of Runway Growth Capital, I’ve had the pleasure of working with hundreds of startups (large and small) and witnessing the wide range of funding options available to founders.
Funding a late-stage startupThe disparity in what different forms of financing can mean has profound implications for founders, yet too little is known about them.
The disparity in what different forms of financing can mean has profound implications for founders, yet too little is known about them.
