Author: kissdev

[ad_1] Parker Conrad, founder of Rippling, an HR startup valued at $13.5 billion, shared some interesting thoughts about AI during a recent appearance on our Found podcast.  “No one actually wants to chat with their HR software beyond the sort of novelty of like, oh, my gosh, it responds to me,” he said. He also thinks that too many software companies have been adding not-really useful, novelty AI features into their products.  “There’s just a lot of really insubstantial stuff out there in the AI world,” Conrad said, adding that it’s “not to say that AI is not going to…

[ad_1] AI models have proven capable of many things, but what tasks do we actually want them doing? Preferably drudgery — and there’s plenty of that in research and academia. Reliant hopes to specialize in the kind of time-consuming data extraction work that’s currently a specialty of tired grad students and interns. “The best thing you can do with AI is improve the human experience: reduce menial labor and let people do the things that are important to them,” said CEO Karl Moritz Hermann. In the research world, where he and co-founders Marc Bellemare and Richard Schlegel have worked for…

[ad_1] Simulating the real world is a tremendously complex problem if you want to do it at any useful level of fidelity. Traditional techniques are holding back design teams at vehicle and aerospace companies, but BeyondMath is putting AI on the task with a new way of simulating the world that could save them days or weeks of waiting. “Unlike language, where we don’t have mathematical models to describe what the next word should be, when it comes to physics, we do have those models. And what we’re seeing is that machine learning is actually quite good at computation, not…

[ad_1] The AI industry continues to release tons of new models, and companies looking to stay competitive are racing to adopt them for their purposes. In fact, nearly 10% of businesses plan to spend a whopping $25 million this year on AI initiatives, according to tech consulting firm Searce. But while lots of money is being spent on AI, it’s unclear the ROI is there. Half of all AI leaders aren’t sure how to calculate or demonstrate the value of AI projects, according to Gartner. Ex-Airbnb data scientist Chetan Sharma makes the case that figuring out AI ROI is no…

[ad_1] Construction companies deal with a lot of documents — so many that it can be difficult to process and manage them all. According to one recent survey, a third of construction professionals found accessing documents to be a challenge in completing a project, while a fourth said that inaccurate project paperwork has contributed to a construction delay. Sarah Buchner knows this well. Originally a carpenter, she founded a startup, Trunk Tools, that provides automation tools to organize unstructured construction documentation. “I grew up in a poor environment in a small village in Austria and started working as a carpenter…

[ad_1] The U.S. Department of Defense is a mammoth organization. It not only employs millions of service members and hundreds of thousands of civilian employees, but also has the world’s largest military budget that’s used to buy and maintain more equipment than can likely fit into a single paragraph.  It’s a lot to coordinate. Operators within the various agencies of the DOD must make decisions about how to plan their operations, coordinate resources, and stay within budget for events that are likely contested — whether that’s from a hurricane or an adversary. Two years after it was incubated, Virginia-based startup…

[ad_1] The AI boom is fueling the demand for data centers and, in turn, driving up water consumption. (Water is used to cool the computing equipment inside data centers.) According to FT, in Virginia — home to the world’s largest concentration of data centers — water usage jumped by almost two-thirds between 2019 and 2023, from 1.13 billion gallons to 1.85 billion gallons. Many say the trend, playing out worldwide, is unsustainable. Microsoft, a major data center operator, says 42% of the water it consumed in 2023 came from “areas with water stress.” Google, which has among the largest data…

[ad_1] OpenAI and Anthropic spend billions of dollars a year training models like GPT-4 and Claude, but competitive price dumping is making the business around these platforms rather precarious. Aidan Gomez, CEO of competing AI provider Cohere, says that selling access to models is quickly becoming a “zero margin business” in a podcast appearance on Monday. For now, these AI models cost more than they make. “If you’re only selling models, for the next little while, it’s gonna be a really tricky game,” said Gomez in an interview with 20VC’s Harry Stebbings. By “selling models,” he means selling API access…

[ad_1] On Sunday, former President Donald Trump posted a collection of memes on Truth Social — the platform owned by his media company — that make it seem like Taylor Swift and her fans are coming out in support of his candidacy. But as new legislation takes effect, these images could have deeper implications about the use of AI-generated images in political campaigns, especially when those images misrepresent a celebrity’s likeness. “One of the things I’m seeing a lot of in my practice right now is the rise of AI impersonators across the board for endorsements,” Noah Downs, an IP…

[ad_1] AMD, the chipmaker hot on the heels of Nvidia in the AI race, today announced a big acquisition to boost its position as an “ecosystem” partner for companies building big AI businesses: It is acquiring ZT Systems, which provides compute design and infrastructure for AI, cloud and general purpose computing, for $4.9 billion. The deal is a mix of cash and stock and includes a contingent payment of up to $400 million if certain performance metrics are met. The plan is to incorporate ZT Systems’ computing infrastructure design business. AMD said it will look to sell ZT Systems’ data…