Conservative MP delivers an AI-generated speed in the House of Commons

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December 22, 2022

Conservative MP AI-generated speed House of Commons

A Conservative MP, Luke Evans, has delivered an AI-generated speech in the House of Commons. He used a chatbot called ChatGPT to generate his speech. Evans started his speech by telling the House that it may be the first time someone has done this.

The AI program generated the speech for the prompt, a Churchillian speech on the state of the UK over the last 12 months. When questioned by Labour’s Kevin Brennan, the MP for Cardiff West, Evans emphasized the importance of AI and algorithms in shaping tomorrow’s society.

AI and algorithms are set to significantly impact education, society, the labor market, diagnosis, and tools, and it needs a far broader debate than today, Evans said. He noted that this year had seen a seismic change in which AI can be used differently.

However, he proposed for regulating algorithms and AI to run concurrently, in synergy with the technology the UK is currently developing.

Later, Brennan joked that even his speech was written by an AI program. Evans further said that they all must face the fact that he may not be the first member to have used AI to deliver speeches.

He said someone might have already done it and not confessed it to the House of Commons. He then cautioned the House about the potential impacts of this technology.

Perfect raises $13M in seed funding

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Manjiri Gaikwad

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December 22, 2022

Perfect, an Israel-based human resource technology startup, has raised $13M in a seed funding round. Target Global, Joule Venture, and RTP Global led the seed funding round. Individual investors like Chemi Peres, the Kalish brothers, Dan Naftali, Uri Levy, Young Sohn, Leon Recanati, Oren Rozenbech, Tomer Pomerantz, and Nir Adler also participated in the round.

Perfect is an AI-enabled platform that helps organizations to fill staff vacancies by mapping the profiles of millions of technology-focused professionals. The company mentions that it wants to break LinkedIn’s monopoly on the talent-searching market, so it relies on generative AI to help companies search for the ideal candidates they are looking for. Perfect scans hundreds of public data sources, like social media and other databases, to search for ideal candidates whose skills match the company’s requirements.

According to Perfect, it has mapped profiles and career graphs of millions of US-based technology professionals. Perfect constantly scans public sources for live signals about companies, such as layoff indications, senior role changes, and other news.

CEO of Perfect, Eylon Etshtein, stated that Perfect sees itself as the ‘Spotify for Talent’ and it works by learning the hiring preferences of each company to adapt recommendations accordingly. Perfect’s list of customers includes Incredibuild Ltd, RTP Global, and RocketVisor Corp.

Sonio Receives €10M Through the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator Fund for its Fetal Care AI

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Disha Chopra

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December 22, 2022

Sonio, a French AI startup that helps fetal medicine professionals in monitoring and securing pregnancy-related ultrasounds, has received funding from the EIC Fund, a leading funding organization that regularly supports startups. The funding comes in addition to the previously received €5m from Elaia, Bpi France, and OneRagTime.

Sonio, established a few years ago, benefits from five years of R&D and clinical research at the Necker Hospital in Paris, the PRAIRIE Institute, and Ecole Polytechnique. As of now, the company already offers a comprehensive set of solutions to assist over 250 practitioners, from beginners to the most experienced ones.

Within the last 2 years, Sonio has brought two significant products into the fetal medicine market: Sonio Diagnostics and Sonio Pro. Sonio DIagnostics is an ultrasound solution for professionals, and Sonio Pro is a more secure and efficient pregnancy diagnostic solution launched recently in October.

The new funding will be used to accelerate the development of newer features on the platform, like embeddable genomics and image recognition. Cecile Brosset, CEO and Co-founder of Sonio, said, “Our hard work has been fruitful. I am now more confident than ever that we can help secure pregnancy care worldwide with collective and artificial intelligence.”

Sonio is also partnering with several companies, like Samsung (France), one of the leading women’s health ultrasound service providers, Lifecell (India), Manager Systems (Brazil), and Dynamic Medicals (Nigeria).

U.S. Navy awards Amazon Web Services a contract of $700 million

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Manjiri Gaikwad

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December 21, 2022

The Department of Navy (DoN), United States, awards Amazon Web Services (AWS) a five–year enterprise software license contract of $700 million. According to the contract, AWS can produce a wide range of cloud services for the US Navy.

As per the contract, AWS will provide the US Navy access to its professional services, commercial cloud environment, and AWS training and certification courses. The US Navy specified that the agreement does not commit funds at the time of the award. However, the funds will be committed once the task orders are issued from various sources, including working capital, maintenance funds, and operations.

The agreement features the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific in San Diego, California, as the contracting entity for the deal, which states that the work will be carried out for a maximum of five years between December 2022 to December 2028.

AWS has own lots of success in landing costly cloud contracts from the US government. Recently, the US Department of Defence announced its Pentagon cloud computing contract with four leading companies: Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, and Google. According to the agreement, the Pentagon will give each company about $9 billion for developing a joint new cloud architecture named Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability.

Quris raised $9M in seed funding from SoftBank

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Manjiri Gaikwad

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December 21, 2022

Quris, an Israeli pharmaceutical AI company, announced that it had secured an additional $9M in seed funding on Tuesday. The seed funding round was led by SoftBank Vision fund 2, along with private and institutional investors like GlenRock Capital, iAngles, Richter Group, and Welltech Ventures. With the seed funding, Quris can advance its Bio-AI platform, grow its team, encourage industry collaboration, and speed up its drug research.

Yossi Cohen, Director of Israel Operations for SoftBank Investment Advisers, stated that SoftBank believes in the early forecasting capabilities that Quris is developing and showing its impact on the global pharmaceutical industry. By utilizing the power of AI, Dr. Bentwich, the founder and CEO of Quris technology and his team will save the enormous cost of drugs failing in clinical trials.

Quris is the first startup to develop an AI-enabled ‘patient-on-a-chip’ system, an alternative to human clinical trials and animal testing in drug development. As per Quris, its platform can revolutionize drug development by simulating clinical trials instead of testing new drugs on animals or humans.

Dr Bentwich mentioned that his company has much to gain from the SoftBank partnership. SoftBank’s ecosystem consists of a cluster of companies leading in the field of AI for pharma. As an investment partner, SoftBank has given companies a unique perspective on AI to produce significant unicorns.

Martin Kon, Ex-YouTube CFO, Joins AI Startup Cohere as the COO

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Disha Chopra

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December 21, 2022

Martin Kon, ex-YouTube CFO (Chief Financial Officer) since 2021, exits the company as he joins an artificial intelligence (AI) startup, Cohere, as the COO (Chief Operating Officer) and President.

Kon is an experienced business leader who has worked with globally recognized firms like the Olliver Wyman and Boston Consulting Group. He joined YouTube in 2019 and was responsible for strategy, finance, business operations, and commercial data analytics at YouTube and worked directly with Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s CEO and Google’s Corporate CFO.

As Cohere’s COO, Kon will focus on understanding enterprise consumer needs and fetching relevant commercial products and solutions to the market. Aidan Gomez, Cohere’s CEO, added that Kon would also help businesses to realize the “enormous value from harnessing the power of language models.”

Cohere is an AI startup based out of Toronto that focuses on helping businesses to adopt and take advantage of natural language processing (NLP) in the real world. The startup caters to predictive text generation, copywriting, conversational AI, summarization, or content moderation.

Gomez said, “With Martin’s network and experience, I look forward to ushering in Cohere’s next chapter, one where we establish ourselves as the commercial leader of language AI.”

Altair leads seed funding of $10M for Xscape Photonics

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Manjiri Gaikwad

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December 21, 2022

Altair, an AI company providing software and cloud solutions in high-performance computing (HPC), data analytics, and AI, has invested $10M in Xscape Photonics. Xscape is a startup that has developed patented photonic chip technology for ultra-high bandwidth connections inside computing systems and data centers.

James R. Scapa, founder, and CEO of Altair stated that the investment and collaboration with some of the world’s best innovators in Photonics would enable Altair to focus on advanced technologies to help customers to solve their problems more efficiently,

Until now, computing relied on traditional electronic ways to transport vast amounts of data from chip to chip. This resulted in a lot of space and power and generated a lot of heat from the computer systems. Therefore, it caused performance issues in high-performance computing applications, especially in AI and data science applications.

Xscape has created a platform that integrates diverse computing elements in an environmentally sustainable way while providing the maximum possible performance using breakthrough photonics technology. The use of photonics cuts power consumption and heat output while increasing communication speed and power in applications.

Alexander Gaeta, CEO and co-founder of Xscape Photonics mentioned that Xscape is proud to re-invent the future of computing by developing the highest bandwidth, energy efficiency, and high-performance photonics technology to meet the needs of the future. The investment and collaboration with Altair will enable Xscape to push the boundaries of its platform and integrate with the best HPC and AI software to help customers in all sectors.

Diver X, the Startup Behind HalfDrive Headsets, Launches VR Haptic Gloves

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Disha Chopra

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December 21, 2022

Diver X, a Japanese VR startup that pitched HalfDrive VR Headsets earlier this year, has launched a new Kickstarter campaign for a pair of Diver X VR haptic gloves that contain flexing and compressing membranes to mimic touch sensations.

The HalfDrive Kickstarter fame saw the light in January as the campaign secured enough cash to be fully funded. However, the Diver X team decided against it and returned the funds as the device that clearly took inspiration from Sword Art Online failed the scalability test.

Now, the company is back with another Kickstarter campaign with ContactGlove, a pair of Diver X VR haptic gloves that tracks fingers and positions with SteamVR and offers input emulation via buttons.

It is up to the user to decide if and when to use this function because button input is an emulated process in which configuration software links certain buttons to hand motions, such as bending your right index finger to pull a trigger.

The “pro” function on higher-end versions also offers haptic feedback by contracting and expanding to mimic touch on the user’s fingertips. As per the company, the VR haptic gloves are compatible with SteamVR and come with mounting adapters for Tundra Trackers and Vive Trackers.

The Diver X VR haptic gloves are available for pre-order on Kickstarter, which already seems to have caught fire in the landscape. The project has now surpassed its original funding goal of US$200,000. The VR haptic gloves start at US$490 for models without the touch membrane and US$710 for those with Tundra Trackers. The haptic versions start at approximately US$870.

For more information, refer to the project page.

Carter secures £1.7m to use generative AI for gaming characters

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Manjiri Gaikwad

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December 21, 2022

Carter, a London-based generative AI startup, secures £1.7m in pre-seed funding round to use conversational AI for background video game characters. The funding round was led by Play Ventures, Connect Ventures, and a group of angel investors: Chris Lee, Steve Chard, GFR Fund, Jas Purewal, Affan Butt, and Rupert Loman.

Carter is working on conversational AI to help game developers realistically develop computerized gaming characters. The company is developing an AI toolkit to allow developers to integrate conversational AI to create game characters speaking in local languages.

Danial Ali, the co-founder of Carter, stated that computerized gaming characters could bring unconditional love and friendship through the human-to-machine relationship. According to him, creating realistic video game characters is a big goal and might sound like sci-fi, but there is a standard to the idea of such a computerized community.

Established in April 2022, Carter follows the vision of building meaningful relationships between humans and digital companions. It allows developers to build more meaningful conversations in their games and projects. Carter uses different techniques enabled by AI, inspired by human behavior and the industry’s leading research. The founders of Carter, Ali, and Huw Prosser have exclusive experience in the AI field. They have founded the business automation software company Bloomware previously.

Mercedes Files for Five NFT Trademarks

By

Disha Chopra

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December 21, 2022

The German automotive company Mercedes-Benz paves the path to enter the metaverse by filing for five NFT trademarks for its line. Michael Kondoudis, a licensed attorney, revealed the trademark in a tweet that showed the car manufacturer’s application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

#MercedesBenz has filed trademark applications for:
▶️ Mercedes Benz
▶️ Mercedes
▶️ S-Class
▶️ G-Class
▶️ Maybach

claiming plans for:
✅NFTs
✅Virtual clothing + goods
✅Financial services
✅Cryptocurrency trading
…and much more!#NFT #Metaverse #Crypto #Finance #Web3 pic.twitter.com/UCp8mJ7yxH
— Mike Kondoudis (@KondoudisLaw) December 19, 2022

As per the update, the Mercedes trademarks are filed for Mercedes Benz, S-Class, G-Class, Maybach, and Mercedes. The applications included goods and services like computer programs featuring textiles, beauty products, fragrances, food & drinks, trading cards, parasols, and audio/visual devices for online and virtual use. The Maybach filing additionally described plans for crypto-collectibles featuring animal furs, carpets, rugs, etc.

The trademark applications also mention plans to include financial services catering to digital currencies or tokens via a global computer network, digital currency exchange services, liquidity services for digital currencies, and blockchain assets.

The Mercedes NFT trademarks come nearly a year after Mercedes Benz unveiled its first NFT project in January, wherein Art2People collaborated with five artists to compile their digital renditions of the Mercedes-Benz G-Class.

In May, the carmaker joined the Aura Blockchain Consortium of Luxury Brands as a founding member, providing access to read-to-use NFT and blockchain technology.