Sam Altman wants to scan your eyeball | Newsletter

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Quick Hits

AI watermarks: Big Tech firms agree to watermark AI-generated content.

Taxis fly south: São Paulo company builds electric flying taxi factory.

Bye, bye birdie: Twitter bids adieu to bird logo, replaces with X.

TikTok tests texts: Platform aims to expand ‘boundaries of content creation.’

ML in the cloud: Dropbox hires machine learning expert.

Not just iOS: ChatGPT comes to Android soon(ish).

Better Maps: Apple promises you’ll now love its map app.

Kill the Catpcha: Plenty of tech companies are trying.

Sam Altman unleashes ‘the Orb’

Millions of people across the globe already have gotten their eyeballs scanned in exchange for a digital ID (”proof of personhood”) and promise of a new type of digital currency called WorldCoin. OpenAI founder Sam Altman calls his new company an “identity and financial network” and says he hopes it will help make universal basic income (UBI) a reality one day. WorldCoin claims 2M users after launches in India, Japan, Germany, England, and Spain. People signed up this week for a “genesis grant” of 25 tokens after getting their iris scanned by one of the bowling ball-sized devices.

ChatGPT outperforms docs

Researchers found that AI outperformed most doctors on weekly diagnostic challenges, according to a study published in the medical journal JAMA. Medical teams at a Harvard-affiliated hospital report success using ChatGPT and similar tools to help them with diagnosis. “It is fundamentally different than a search engine,” one doctor said.

Amazon employees relocate to office

Amazon is ratcheting up efforts to bring employees back to the office and asking some to relocate. Managers at different Amazon businesses are telling staff they may have to move to a “main hub” location in Seattle, New York, or San Francisco. Some have started jokingly referring to the policy as “disagree and commute,” a riff on the “disagree and commit” leadership principle favored by Amazon execs.

Fact-checkers cure AI ‘hallucinations’

Deploying AI to streamline medical records still requires a lot of human power. To find and fix errors produced by bots that transcribe and summarize patient-doctor conversations, healthtech startup DeepScribe deploys an army of 200 human fact-checkers. They often clean up so-called “hallucinations” from AI making stuff up.

The Weekly Pulse

Source: World Economic Forum

AI energizes startup talent hunt

The ongoing AI boom is creating many new opportunities with startups and larger endemic organizations across the planet. Over 85% of organizations surveyed by The World Economic Forum identified increased adoption of new and frontier technologies and broadening digital access as the trends most likely to drive transformation in their organization. According to the survey, 50% of organizations expect AI to create job growth, and AI is expected to be adopted by nearly 75% of surveyed companies.

Tweet of the Week

Companies in the News

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Figure, maker of general-purpose humanoid robots, secured $9M Series A led by Intel Capital.

Optiversal, a generative AI content provider for retailers with offices in Austin, Texas, New York, and Saint Petersburg, secured a $4.2M seed fund led by Bling Capital with participation from Alpaca Ventures and Red Sea Ventures.

U.K.-based Magic secured $2.5M from Fasanara Capital and Sir Richard Branson to revolutionize personalized health and wellness experiences.

Cambridge, England-based Carbon13 raised a $2.2M seed fund led by from True Ventures to help founders invest in decarbonization and carbon capture solutions.

Ontario-based Metafold, a cloud- and API-based 3D engineering platform, raised a $1.78M seed fund to advance sustainable industrial 3D printing.

Spain-based Ucademy raised over $1.5M in Series A funding led by Brighteye Ventures and Eoniq Fund to revolutionize exam preparation.

Poll of the Week

What We’re Reading

ChatGPT can now remember who you are and what you want (The Verge)

Small Devices Could Soon Handle Large Language Models (The Information)

Webb telescope detects water vapor for first time in faraway Earth-like planet-forming disk (Interesting Engineering)

New Biden rule would make government websites and apps more accessible to people with disabilities (AP)

In tech, everything is labeled "AI" now (Axios)

Podcasts of the week

The Evolution of Social Recruiting (Back to Work podcast)

Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI (The Lex Fridman Podcast)

✓ Startups hiring now

Nedge Computing: Cloud computing everywhere on any device | 2 open roles

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Wells Groups of New York: Outsourced CFO and Controller services for Seed - Series C startups | 7 open roles

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