Brendan Smith didn’t intend to be in the critical minerals business.
But Smith and Grossman’s company, SiTration, has a different proposal: use its equipment to treat the wastewater and harvest more minerals in the process.
To turn the wafers into filters, Smith and Grossman tweaked an existing chemical treatment to etch minute pores in them.
For a larger mining site, the company would use about as much silicon as a medium-size solar farm, Smith said.
Although SiTration is starting with mining waste, including a pilot project with Rio Tinto, it’s also pitching its filtration systems to battery recyclers and metal refiners.
Hoop, a productivity startup founded by a group of early Trello employees, wants to use AI to help you automatically generate and track your to-do list.
Image Credits: HoopThe core idea behind Hoop is that it will use AI to automatically capture potential tasks from Google Meet and Slack meetings and Slack messages (with other platforms coming later, starting with email) and pull those into the Hoop to-do list.
Currently, Hoop is a bit of a single-player experience, but Garber tells me that the company plans to add more team features in the future.
“We are really, really focused on making [Hoop] as useful for the individual as possible before we expand to teams, but it’s a very natural thing for us to do,” Garber said.
And while Hoop right now mostly looks like a standard to-do list, the company plans to add different views over time as well.
The “AI ClipHero” feature creates short clips from livestreamed selling events, which often last for hours.
“Shoppable ‘explainer’ videos are the most powerful video commerce medium right now, with TikTok and Instagram becoming the primary way Gen Z discovers, learns about products and purchases products.
However, creating shoppable videos [requires] significant production times,” CommentSold CEO Guatam Goswami told TechCrunch.
AI-powered clipping software isn’t new, but not many companies have developed AI-powered tools specifically designed for live commerce.
Since launching in 2017, CommentSold now helps over 7,000 small- and mid-sized businesses deliver live shopping and e-commerce experiences.
Kiki World, a beauty startup launched last year, wants consumers to co-create products and co-own the company with the help of web3 technology.
Kiki co-founder Jana Bobosikova said she believes that being a loyal user of a brand in the Web 2.0 world could be a net negative experience.
Kiki is flipping that model by allowing its community members to vote on the features they want before the beauty products are made.
Although members’ product votes are recorded on Ethereum, Bobosikova said some participants don’t need to know they are taking action on blockchain.
But, as Simpson pointed out, Kiki has plans to eventually expand beyond the world of beauty.
Vibrant Planet looks to be one of those solutions.
The startup digitizes land mapping and uses AI to help its users — fire departments and government bureaus — better manage land and also better prepare for potential climate incidents like wildfires.
“[It’s] very collaborative with spatially overlapped plans.”Moving the mapping online also allows organizations to work together on land management solutions that work for everyone.
“Vibrant Planet is a science and technology platform that is creating what we call a common operating picture for wildfire resilience and nature resilience,” Wolff said.
And we’re using it in the natural resource management and wildfire resilience building space, because we have to, it’s very urgent.”
Last year, Salesforce, the company best known for its cloud sales support software (and Slack), spearheaded a project called ProGen to design proteins using generative AI.
“Many drugs — enzymes and antibodies, for example — consist of proteins,” Madani said.
Fed into a generative AI model, data about proteins can be used to predict entirely new proteins with novel functions.
Other companies and research groups have demonstrated viable ways in which generative AI can be used to predict proteins.
And DeepMind, Google’s AI research lab, has a system called AlphaFold that predicts complete protein structures, achieving speed and accuracy far surpassing older, less complex algorithmic methods.
Earlier today, Sentry announced its AI Autofix feature for debugging production code and now, a few hours later, GitHub is launching the first beta of its code scanning autofix feature for finding and fixing security vulnerabilities during the coding process.
This new feature combines the real-time capabilities of GitHub’s Copilot with CodeQL, the company’s semantic code analysis engine.
The company also promises that code scanning autofix will cover more than 90% of alert types in the languages it supports, which are currently JavaScript, Typescript, Java, and Python.
“Just as GitHub Copilot relieves developers of tedious and repetitive tasks, code scanning autofix will help development teams reclaim time formerly spent on remediation,” GitHub writes in today’s announcement.
To generate the fixes and their explanations, GitHub uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 model.
Prior to this, she worked in biotech, using AI to find medical treatments for rare diseases.
She also co-founded a data science consultancy and is a founding trustee of DataKind UK, which helps British charities with data science support.
We ask this question a lot at the Ada Lovelace Institute, which aims to make data AI work for people and society.
How can investors better push for responsible AI?
By asking questions about their investments and their possible futures – for this AI system, what does it look like to work brilliantly and be responsible?
The startup built its platform on top of the open source Stable Diffusion model, letting users enter text-based prompts to generate their creations.
The company was founded by Darya Sesitskaya, a former Snap design lead responsible for designing Snapchat’s AR camera, Lens Studio, Lens Cloud, and more.
She also worked at Wanna (formerly Wannaby), an AR technology company known for its virtual try-ons for sneakers, clothing, and watches.
Since launching its beta version, Shader has garnered approximately 3,000 downloads.
In the near future, we also plan to implement the ability to create voice-to-AR effects and 3D background replacements,” says Sesitskaya.
Water authorities and utilities have used acoustic sensors to canvas for leaks and signs of wear and tear for years.
One of these startups, Conservation Labs, is creating a water-listening sensor that attaches to the plumbing in residential, multifamily and office properties.
But as with many — if not most — AI- and algorithm-driven products on the market, it’s tough to know exactly how well Conservation Labs’ tech performs without extensively testing it first.
Like water-listening sensors, acoustic sensors that monitor machines is well-established tech.
Beyond Conservation Labs, startups like Noiseless Acoustics and OneWatt use AI-powered sensors to better understand the patterns of industrial equipment.
