European Parliament takes a major step toward AI regulation
⚡ Today’s Highlights
📰 News: Europe takes a huge step toward AI regulation
💰 Funding: Paro, AptEdge, Precedent, and Wherobots
🦾 Tools: AI makes creating websites a breeze
📅 Events: The Open Data Science Conference 2023 ends today!
📰 Today's Top Stories
Europeans Take a Major Step Toward Regulating A.I.
(7 min read) (Source: The New York Times)
TLDR: The European Parliament has passed a draft law known as the A.I. Act, which aims to regulate artificial intelligence and impose restrictions on its riskiest uses, including facial recognition software and generative AI systems like ChatGPT.
The European Union is ahead of other major Western governments in AI regulation, with the bloc having debated the topic for over two years. The release of ChatGPT last year intensified concerns about the societal impact of AI and prompted policymakers to take action.
The European bill, which will be finalized later this year, adopts a risk-based approach, focusing on applications of AI that have the potential for significant harm. It requires risk assessments for AI systems before their deployment and introduces transparency requirements and safeguards for generative AI systems.
Google intros new AI-powered travel and product search features
(3 min read) (Source: TechCrunch)
TLDR: Google is introducing two new AI-powered features for advertisers that automatically identify the optimal ad placements across its platforms.
The first feature, called Demand Gen, utilizes AI to place photo and video ads across multiple products, such as Gmail, YouTube, and Shorts.
The second feature employs AI to maximize views for video ads, resulting in an average increase of 40% in video views during early testing. These AI tools aim to free up advertisers' time and allow them to focus on strategy and storytelling.
Canva announces developers platform and a $50M fund for app development
(7 min read) (Source: VentureBeat)
TLDR: Canva's newly launched Developers Platform includes Canva Apps APIs, which enable the development of AI-powered applications for tasks such as photo, video, audio, and text generation.
The platform aims to bring AI-powered solutions to Canva's community faster, with features like generative AI products that generate unique images and the ability for apps to read and update design elements based on AI analysis.
By providing access to Canva's design engine and integrating AI capabilities, the platform empowers developers to create innovative AI-driven experiences for Canva's large user base and address common design problems with intuitive solutions.
💰 Funding Alerts
1. Paro, an AI-powered marketplace for finance and accounting solutions, raised $25 million in Series C funding, bringing its total funding to $67 million. The round was led by Top Tier Capital Partners (Garth Timoll, Sr., Managing Director), with participation from existing investors Madrona Venture Group, Revolution Ventures, and Sierra Ventures.
Paro provides to businesses through a combination of expert fractional talent, data-driven tools, and guiding insights.
Paro plans to use the funds to further develop its platform, expand its services with enterprise clients, and enhance its suite of AI-powered tools that help experts optimize their earnings and business outcomes.
2. AptEdge, a gen AI startup that specializes in building an answer engine for customer service, raised $11 million in Seed funding, led by Stage 2 Capital, with participation from investors such as Unusual Ventures, National Grid Partners, Carya Venture Partners, and Counterpart Ventures.
AptEdge plans to use the funds to further develop its product, incorporating new language models as they launch, and expanding its connectors to industry and in-house knowledge sources. The company aims to enhance its contextual answer engine, which combines AI search technology and generative AI, to provide quick and accurate customer service solutions.
3. Precedent, an insurance tech company, raised $9 million in Seed funding provided by Adir Ventures.
Precedent offers Digitized Demand Handling technology for the insurance industry, using AI + ML.
With the funds, Precedent plans to expand its suite of products to more insurers, accelerate new product development, and strengthen partnerships with claims management, injury evaluation, and core systems platforms. The goal is to streamline communication processes between attorneys and insurance carriers, improve claims handling efficiency, and reduce errors by leveraging AI, ML, and Large Language Models.
4. Wherobots, a data platform for geospatial analytics using AI + ML, raised $5.5 million in a seed funding round co-led by Wing Venture Capital (Peter Wagner, Partner) and Clear Ventures.
With the funding, Wherobots plans to build products that enable organizations to extract business value from spatial location and time data. They aim to bring geospatial compute and AI technology to every decision-making process, providing comprehensive geospatial data management for the enterprise and offering tools for geospatial data science acceleration, cloud-integrated geospatial pipeline deployment, and fully managed spatial data pipelines.
🦾 Trending Tools
Framer AI helps you design your dream website with ease using their AI-powered features. Create websites, designing everything from portfolios to startup landing pages with AI-generated layouts, color palettes, and copy.
Superpowered is an AI copilot for meetings. With AI-generated notes that adapt to your format and style, experience enhanced efficiency and focus on the conversation while the AI handles the rest.
Playbook AI is a storage solution for creative artists, helping organize AI art, prompts, and iterations. With visual cloud storage and integrated generative tools like Dall-E and Stable Diffusion easily store, curate, and generate art.
Scalenut’s AI-powered SEO platform automates workflows. Save time, increase organic traffic, and stay ahead of competitors with Scalenut's powerful SEO strategy, content creation, and search guideline decoding capabilities
Trickle is an AI-driven workspace that combines notes, tasks, and a knowledge base. Boost your productivity and facilitate collaboration, powered by GPT-4, easily organizing, creating, and sharing content in one place.
👀 More Reading:
Artificial intelligence early adopters in the workplace are profiting (CNBC)
Mechanical Turk workers are using AI to automate being human (TechCrunch)
AI Promises Humanity One Last Job. Helping AI Help Humanity (Scientific American)
Rewiring The World With AI (Forbes)
Four different ways of understanding AI — and its risks (Vox)
🌎 Fresh Content
1. sentdex broke down OpenAI’s new function calling feature, which allows developers to describe programming functions and have the models generate the code to execute those functions, as well as some of the other API updates. (YouTube)
2. Solar Sands made an excellent video covering the recent innovations in generative AI, the implications they’ve had for artists in nearly every niche, and what AI might mean for human creativity and art in general. Similarly to how photography was received by artists more than 200 years ago, generative AI may represent a new art form and a new creative tool for people that already exercise their creativity for a living, as long as the appropriate regulation is put in place to protect an artist’s intellectual property. (YouTube)
📅 Upcoming Events
The Open Data Science Conference 2023 (June 14-15, 2023 / Tobacco Dock, London, England + Virtual) helps you build job-ready skills and stay up-to-date with the latest advances in machine learning, NLP, LLMs, data analytics, responsible AI, and more with ODSC East’s expert-led, immersive, training sessions. With 300 hours of content, the conference features a wide range of sessions for data scientists at every level, from beginner to expert.
🧠 Prompts
Utilize ChatGPT’s expertise to craft a cutting-edge 360-degree customer profile strategy through this insightful prompt. It guides you in assembling and interpreting data for a well-rounded view of your customers' behaviors, needs, and preferences. Tailor the prompt to your specific requirements to garner deep insights and facilitate data-driven decision-making that caters to your customers more effectively.
Crafting a Comprehensive Customer Profile Strategy
Prompt: "Assist me in devising a 360-degree customer profile strategy. What methods can my business employ to accumulate and scrutinize data, in order to acquire a profound understanding of our customers' behaviors, needs, and predilections? Please confirm that you're ready to start by saying 'Ready to build customer profiles'. Then ask me for further details you might need."