think

Blockchain Technology: The Solution for Identifying Deepfakes and Verifying Content Authenticity

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Two months ago, media giant Fox Corp. partnered with Polygon Labs, the team behind the Ethereum-focused layer-2 blockchain, to tackle deepfake distrust. Fox and Polygon launched Verify, a protocol that aims to protect their IP while letting consumers verify the authenticity of content. “When you put that content on chain, you can now validate that content was created by a certain individual or brand,” Blank said. This story was inspired by an episode of TechCrunch’s podcast Chain Reaction. Subscribe to Chain Reaction on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to hear more stories and tips from the entrepreneurs building today’s most innovative companies.

Second Fund for Inclusivity-Centered Ada Ventures Raises $80M in Capital

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With the second fund, Ada says it will invest between £250,000 and £1.5 million in pre-seed and seed stage startups, with a “significant amount” allocated for follow-ons. So far, 12 investments have been made from the second fund. Ada claims 30% of the investments from Fund I and Fund II were sourced this way. Warner retorted: “There are 350+ fantastic female VC partners in Europe. : “I think every leader of every VC fund needs to do whatever we can to attract the best talent in the industry.

“New Leadership, Same Mission: How Slack’s CEO Plans to Restore Balance Amidst Turmoil”

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Slack’s new CEO looks to bring stability after a turbulent period Three chief executives in one year will do thatIt’s not often you see an established company burn through three CEOs in less than a year. But through circumstances beyond its control, that’s what has happened at Slack, the company Salesforce acquired in 2020 for $28 billion. Jones herself had replaced company co-founder Stewart Butterfield when he announced that he was leaving at the end of 2022. “And then you think about Salesforce having this incredible set of customer data, some of the world’s most valued data. Even though Harris brings a long history of building Salesforce, Slack is losing a person who has a deep understanding of Slack’s technical underpinnings.

“Exploring AI Impact: An Interview with Oxford Professor of Data Ethics, Sandra Watcher”

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We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Sandra Wachter is a professor and senior researcher in data ethics, AI, robotics, algorithms and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute. She’s also a former fellow of The Alan Turing Institute, the U.K.’s national institute for data science and AI. What are some issues AI users should be aware of? Bad data, bad algorithms and bad design choices lead to worse products.

“Professor Sarah Kreps: Empowering Women in the Field of Artificial Intelligence”

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Sarah Kreps is a political scientist, U.S. Air Force veteran and analyst who focuses on U.S. foreign and defense policy. She’s a professor of government at Cornell University, adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School and an adjunct scholar at West Point’s Modern War Institute. Kreps’ recent research explores both the potential and risks of AI tech such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, specifically in the political sphere. In an opinion column for The Guardian last year, she wrote that, as more money pours into AI, the AI arms race not just across companies but countries will intensify — while the AI policy challenge will become harder. Developing AI in these publicly interested way seemed like a valuable contribution and interesting interdisciplinary work for political scientists and computer scientists.

The Lesser Creep Chronicles of Apple Vision Pro: Brian’s Alter Ego

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If anything, it was the VisionOS 1.1 update that showed me that I still have the capacity to grow. I can tell you agree from the fact that you’re carrying on a normal FaceTime call without stopping every few seconds to tell me how weird my Apple Vision Pro Persona looks. The headset made me re-enroll my face to get this new persona – and frankly, it’s for the best. I’m not saying my new face definitely won’t frighten children, but I don’t think they’re going to lose much sleep over it. I should mention that even in its 1.1 iteration, the Persona feature is still technically in beta – albeit a beta open to anyone with a Vision Pro.

“Parochial, Magic-Driven Thinking: Signal’s Meredith Whittaker Denounces Anti-Encryption Efforts”

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AI is “not open in any sense,” the battle over encryption is far from won, and Signal’s principled (and uncompromising) approach may complicate interoperability efforts, warned the company’s president, Meredith Whittaker. “The overall theme I’m seeing is a deep desire for accountability in tech, which we saw sort of animated mid-2010s. That, then, has been weaponized; and I think we’re seeing surveillance wine in accountability bottles,” she said. It’s a form of, again, parochial, magical thinking here,” said Whittaker. But then Google published a couple of days later, like Microsoft is actually the monopoly because it has the OpenAI and sort of the Azure monopoly, right?

“Nubank’s CEO Reveals Insights on Profit Increase and Departure of Tourist Investors in LatAm”

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Nubank CEO dishes on the neobank’s profit surge and how tourist VCs in LatAm have gone homeListen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our interview show, where we sit down with a guest, think about their work, and unpack the rest. This week, we talked to David Vélez, the co-founder and CEO of Nubank, the $50 billion São Paulo, Brazil-based digital bank that offers credit cards, checking accounts and life insurance to consumers.

“Rabbit’s Jesse Lyu on the Power of Startups: Thrive Quickly or Risk Failure, But Never Give Up”

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Rabbit co-founder and CEO Jesse Lyu isn’t afraid of death… the death of the company, at least. Rabbit’s r1, the pocket AI assistant that attracted considerable hype after its debut at CES, is certainly an original proposal. “We immediately tried using super-prompts to get this language model to do things, and the result was very miserable,” he recalled. “I mean, the first lesson I ever learned from Y Combinator two years ago, is that 99% of startups will die. I think it’s good to have this level of competition that’s only going to help us grow faster, or die faster, which is the nature of startups.

“Introducing Syrenna’s WaterDrone: The Futuristic ‘Underwater Weather Station’ for Monitoring the Ocean”

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As crucial as the ocean is to countless industries, we lack the kind of systematic knowledge of it that we have of the surface. This is partly due to the simple fact that the ocean is gigantic and there’s simply no way (or need) to monitor all of it. Cheap solutions like buoys are great but limited to surface measurements, and are subject to the whims of weather and currents. “There is such a clear need for safe, reliable and continuously updated data about water quality,” said Ester Strommen, CEO and co-founder of Syrenna. Free-floating, free-divingI saw a prototype of the WaterDrone, as they call it, while visiting startups last spring in Oslo, where Syrenna is based.