Zora co-founder Jacob Horne and Goens see crypto and AI as two complementary technologies that can benefit from one another.
“Crypto wants information to be on-chain so that it can be valued and add value to the system,” Goens said.
“And then AI wants information to be on-chain so that it can be freely accessed and utilized by the system.
“We need systems that can help bring all of these things on-chain and that’s what we’re trying to do at Zora,” Goens said.
This means these AI creators have the ability to capture value from their models’ outputs when people mint them and the payouts are split in half automatically.
AI2 Incubator, spun out of the Allen Institute for AI in 2022, has secured a windfall $200 million in compute that startups going through its program can take advantage of to accelerate early development.
“Our community of hundreds of AI practitioners are desperate for compute,” said managing director Jacob Colker.
A million dollars of dedicated compute goes a long way for pre-seed startups, which is where AI2 focuses (we’ve covered WellSaid Labs, Xnor.ai, and others from their program).
Colker suggested it would cover most compute needs even for companies developing new foundation models.
They’ve helped build more than 30 startups and last year raised a $30 million fund to continue the work.
Mindfulness and meditation apps have tremendous potential in the world of extended reality.
The full immersion created by headsets like the Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro offer great potential to kickstart such practices, which are notoriously difficult to both begin and maintain.
As such, partnership between leading meditation app Headspace and Quest-maker Meta is a no-brainer.
At the very least, the experience seems engaging in a way not normally associated with meditation apps.
The app is available now for Meta Quest 3, Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest Pro.
Adding usernames to a messaging app may seem like a standard feature, but for Signal, such identifiers were anathema to its mission of total privacy and security — until now.
The new feature sounds simple: you register a username and that appears instead of your phone number.
But why do this at all when everyone already has contact names, and Signal is totally private anyway?
That is not just happening in India, we’re seeing a number of jurisdictions where to obtain a phone number, you are required to provide more and more personal information.
But it replaces the phone number when you go to initiate contact.” (Signal does append numbers to chosen usernames to ensure they are unique.)
The venture capital stars were shining in Los Angeles this week at the Upfront Summit, an invite-only VC conference founded by Mark Suster and known for going all-out.
AI was the talk of the town again and even some celebrities graced the stage, including Lady Gaga, Cameron Diaz, Katy Perry and Novak Djokovic.
What may have been a little different this year, though, is that it’s been a tough one for venture capital and startups seeking venture capital.
Keith Rabois, managing director at Khosla Ventures, briefly addressed rumors about what led him to leave Founders Fund earlier this year.
Rabois didn’t come out and call people there “lazy,” though he did note that he knows founders who look elsewhere for talent.
A 2021 study found that if farmers didn’t use pesticides, they would lose 78% of fruit production, 54% of vegetable production, and 32% of cereal production.
At the same time, the way pesticides are delivered is not ideal: The only way to guarantee enough pesticide distribution is to spray too much.
By reducing foliar pesticide usage by 30% to 50%, AgZen’s technology might help mitigate these impacts, aligning with the critical need for improved spray efficiency highlighted in recent reports.
AgZen is preparing to launch RealCoverage commercially later this year through a lease-to-own program, which helps put the system into financial range for farmers.
The company suggests that by reducing the amount of chemicals used, the system pays for itself within a season.
Lizcore, a sport tracking startup out of Barcelona, caught our eye on the 4YFN show floor at MWC this week.
Lizcore’s system requires gyms to buy in and install its smart base units and top-out holds for each boulder problem.
It’s activity and progress tracking with minimal effort so climbers can concentrate on the real work — of training, climbing, sending and repeating.
So climbers could even use the minimalist wearable to forget having to bring their own wallets to the gym.
Lizcore says the system gives gyms data about quiet vs busy times for different climbing areas and walls.
Something I’ve always admired about Lenovo is the way the Chinese tech giant really lets its freak flag fly.
In fact, visiting the company’s booth nestled in the way, way back of Hall 3 has long been a highlight of MWC for me.
This year’s big scrum gatherer was Lenovo’s long-rumored transparent laptop.
Broadly speaking, it looks like a laptop, with a transparent pane where the screen should be.
Lenovo loves making weird tech for weird tech’s sake, and that’s totally fine.
We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized.
Miranda Bogen is the founding director of the Center of Democracy and Technology’s AI Governance Lab, where she works to help create solutions that can effectively regulate and govern AI systems.
For the most part, AI systems are still missing seat belts, airbags, and traffic signs, so proceed with caution before using them for consequential tasks.
Consider how the success of the AI system you are working on has been defined, who that definition serves, and what context may be missing.
Intense competitive pressure to release the newest, biggest, and shiniest new AI models is leading to concerning underinvestment in responsible practices.
Phrasing requests in a certain way — meanly or nicely — can yield better results with chatbots like ChatGPT than prompting in a more neutral tone.
So what’s the deal with emotive prompts?
Nouha Dziri, a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI, theorizes that emotive prompts essentially “manipulate” a model’s underlying probability mechanisms.
Why is it so trivial to defeat safeguards with emotive prompts?
Another reason could be a mismatch between a model’s general training data and its “safety” training datasets, Dziri says — i.e.
