goldrush

The U.K. government is taking too “narrow” a view of AI safety and risks falling behind in the AI gold rush, according to a report released today. The report, published by the parliamentary House of Lords’ Communications and Digital Committee, follows a months-long evidence-gathering effort involving input from a wide gamut of stakeholders, including big tech companies, academia, venture capitalists, media and government. Among the key findings from the report was that the government should refocus its efforts on…

Remember Natural Language Processing? NLP arose several years ago but it was only in 2018 that AI researchers proved it was possible to train a neural network once on a large amount of data and use it again and again for different tasks. In 2019 GPT-2 from Open AI, and T5 by Google appeared, showing that they were startlingly good (it’s now been incorporated into Google Duplex, pictured). Concerns were even raised about their possible misuse. But since then, things have gone, well, pretty exponential. 
 2021 saw a…

With the after-effect of the pandemic set to play out for years, VCs specializing in health, wellness, and general ‘joy’ would appear to have rising fortunes. Funds such as Able Partners and Joyance have appeared in recent years to invest in startups that make people’s lives healthier, or at least more fun. In Europe this sector has taken off with Nina Capital in Barcelona, Heal Capital in Berlin, InHealth Ventures London, and Apollo Health Ventures in Germany, among others. Into this space is launching a new fund…