 |
|
|
|||||
Daniel George, the founder and CEO of AI company TwinMind, has quite the resume. He was a part of a Nobel Prize-winning team that worked on using artificial intelligence (AI) to detect gravitational waves and black holes. He also worked on AI projects at companies like Wolfram and Google X. Perhaps most notably, he created an AI tool that automated his own job as a VP at JPMorgan, allowing him to spend a few years traveling the globe. And now, George counts himself as a startup founder, and he’s bringing his latest project to the masses: TwinMind, an AI platform that listens to everything you do, say, and browse, and its all stored locally and encrypted, he says. TwinMind can be downloaded as an app on an iPhone and functions like Jarvis in your pocket.” ‘Proactive’ AI that runs your life? Effectively, users turn it on and can leave it running all day (if they choose to). The app listens to and digests the users surroundings, and produces end-of-day reports or wrap-ups, capturing things that you may have forgotten or missed. Everything is processed as its ingested and transcribed on the fly. George claims that this helps with security issues, as audio isnt actually stored or saved anywhere. All that is saved are the final outputs of the model, for privacy considerations, he says. For iPhone users, the mic icon will always display when the app is listening and transcripts don’t actually identify “who said what words exactly.” Given how the app functions, however, it does seem possible that people could be caught in the background as the app is running without knowing it. TwinMind says it encourages users to ask for consent according to local laws. TwinMind runs as an app on existing hardware and stores information locally, then uses what it learns to be proactive and surface relevant information for users when and as needed. Attracting users and Silicon Valley investors The app launched in late March and has already attracted thousands of users through word-of-mouth, George says. It has also attracted the attention of Silicon Valley investors, including Anand Rajaraman, Dan Roth, and Michael Liou, who collectively were some of the earliest investors in companies like Facebook, Robinhood, and others. Data from PitchBook clocked TwinMind’s valuation at $30 million last year, while George says its latest valuation is $50 million. George and his two cofounders, CTO Sunny Tang and chief scientist Mahi Karim, all met working at Google X. He says they’re now living together in a Bay Area house while they build and scale TwinMind, working 100-hour weeks for the past year-and-a-half. The app works in more than 100 languages and, according to George, can run for more than 12 hours without sapping a smartphones battery, as it uses an LLM to process speech directly and produce a daily memory, or rundown, that resembles a bulleted memo comprising each session. It really understands everything youve gone through, everyone you know, and your values, George says. TwinMinds app is available for download and is free to use. As for whats next, George says TwinMind is now planning a Series A funding round and for the first time is speaking with VC firms while the company grows. He says it’s amassed roughly 10,000 users so far. Once people use it, they wont stop, George predicts. I cant live without it.
Category:
E-Commerce
A book festival took place over the weekend in Baltimore, but even if you’re local, you likely didn’t hear about it until after the fact. The event, called A Millions Lives Book Festival, is now trending on social media, but for all the wrong reasonsit’s being called “the Fyre Festival of book festivals,” if that’s any indication of just how disappointing it seems to have been.A Million Lives, organized by author Grace Willows and Archer Management company, came to Baltimore’s Convention Center on May 2 and 3. While the event was allegedly described to authors as an extravagant fantasy-themed ball where they could promote their books to hundreds to thousands of attendees, videos on TikTok and Threads suggest that barely a handful of attendees showed up, and there hardly appeared to have been any setup done in terms of decor. Videos show what looks like a mostly empty room with some tables. The only real setup appears to have come from the book vendors themselves and whatever books, signage, and display items they brought.In one of many recap videos posted to TikTok, one author explains that prior to heading to Baltimore, she was convinced the event was going to be absolutely massive. Author Perci Jay says she counted at least 120 vendors, authors, narrators, and speakers prior to attending. The numbers were so big, she cleared her schedule, and even planned huge life events around the book festival. “I’m currently pregnant with twins,” Jay says in her recap video. “I planned my pregnancy around this event, like a clown.” Jay now says that doing so was a huge mistake. Not only did she not earn back the money she spent on the event from book sales, she lost a bundle. In addition to the $150 table fee she paid, she also shelled out $250 to sponsor the event in order to get extra author promotions, such as social media posts, her logo on the organizer’s web page, and more. She also traveled from Texas to Baltimore. However, according to Jay, none of what she signed up for ever came to fruition. She didn’t get her logo on the site, no social media posts about her were made, and the event itself was a huge flop with almost no readers in sight. Beyond that, Jay claims there were issues with hotel bookings. According to her, “featured authors” like herself were promised a free stay at the Hilton, which is connected to the Convention Center, but at the last minute were bumped to the Days Inn across the street. “Does this look like I’m at the Hilton?” Jay jokes, panning the camera around her hotel room. Other authors reported not being able to check in to their hotel at all, or having to pay hotel fees they were promised were already covered. Author Luna Laurier, who also posted on TikTok, said that not only is she out thousands of dollars from the event, but the hotel actually called her in the middle of the night saying that she had to take over payment for her room, which she had been told would be covered by the organizers. “I’m still kind of in shock,” she tells her audience in the post. “I really cannot believe that it got as bad as it did.”Mikayla Hornedo, an author who saw red flags prior to the event but decided to attend anyway because she used to live in Baltimore, was utterly disappointed as well. Hornedo shared her experience at the festival on TikTok, saying that her very “generous” estimate was that 40 attendees in total showed up on Friday. Archer Fantasy Events did not respond to Fast Company‘s request for comment, but did post an apology online, which directed vendors seeking refunds to reach out to them directly. “I do understand that the ball tonight was not set up to standards,” organizer Grace Willows said. “There were a lot of issues getting set up, and it was not set up well . . . if you would like a refund, please contact me and I will issue a refund immediately.”Still, for many, the apology fell short. In the comments section on Instagram and TikTok, many flat out called the event a “scam.” Multiple comments mentioned that Willows explicitly told them in emails that hundreds, if not thousands, of tickets had been sold. “In our correspondence, you told me you expected 1,200 attendees; otherwise I wouldn’t have paid the table fee, which I hope you refund,” one commenter vented. Other comments pointed to the thousands that some vendors spent to get there, with one suggesting that giving refunds may not be enough to make up the financial cost for some authors. “Honestly, you need to be worried about litigation at this point, given how many people are saying they were told a lie about how many tickets you sold,” it read.
Category:
E-Commerce
Anthropic is turning to a Biden administration alum to run its new Beneficial Deployments team, which is tasked with helping extend the benefits of its AI to organizations focused on social goodparticularly in areas such as health research and educationthat may lack market-driven incentives. The new team will be led by Elizabeth Kelly, who in 2024 was tapped by the Biden administration to lead the U.S. AI Safety Institute within the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Kelly helped form agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic that let NIST safety-test the companies new models prior to their deployment. She left the government in early February, and in mid-March joined Anthropic. “Our mission is to support the development and deployment of AI in ways that are good for the world but might not be incentivized by the market,” Kelly tells Fast Company. Anthropic views the new group as a reflection of its mission as a public benefit corporation, which commits it to distribute the advantages of its AI equitably, not just to deep-pocketed corporations. In an essay he published last year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei emphasized AIs potential to drive progress in areas like life sciences, physical health, education, and poverty alleviation. The Beneficial Deployments team sits within Anthropic’s go-to-market organization, which it says ensures that the companys AI software and services are designed and deployed with customer needs in mind. Kelly says her team will collaborate across departmentsincluding with Anthropics Applied AI group and science and social impact specialiststo help mission-aligned customers build successful products and services powered by Anthropic models. We need to treat nonprofits, ed techs, health techs, those organizations that are developing really transformative solutions the same way that we treat our biggest enterprise customers, Kelly says. In fact, the smaller organizations, which often lack budget and in-house AI expertise, may get a level of support thats not considered standard for Anthropics larger customers. “Our primary focus here is making sure that . . . the work that we’re doing has the biggest impact in terms of lives that we’re improving, diseases that we’re curing, educational outcomes we’re improving,” Kelly says. When considering new beneficiaries, Kelly says she’ll take input from members of Anthropics long-term benefit trust, an independent governance body whose five trustees have experience in global development. The Beneficial Deployments team will also grant partner organizations free access to Anthropics models. One of the teams first initiatives is an AI for Science program, which will provide up to $20,000 in API credits over a six-month period to qualifying scientific research organizations, with the possibility of renewal. Anthropic wants to work with at least 25 science organizations that use its large language model (LLM) Claude for starters, then expand the program to additional industry verticals. As publicly funded support for scientific endeavors faces increasing challenges, this program aims to democratize access to cutting-edge AI tools for researchers working on topics with meaningful scientific impact, particularly in biology and life sciences applications, Anthropic said in a statement. From special cases to a new program Anthropic began piloting the Beneficial Deployments concept earlier this year, providing API credits and consulting to several ed-tech organizations. Amira Learning, for example, leverages Anthropic AI to teach millions of students reading comprehension. With the advent of sophisticated new LLMs like Claude, Amira recognized the possibility of an AI tool that can have deeper, humanlike conversations with students about the context and meaning of words. Amira uses Claude to generate dialogues that are personalized to students and designed to measure and enhance reading comprehension skills. The AI can create custom instructional content for students, like questions and hints. Amira says that more than 90% of its users approve of their interactions with AI. Anthropic then began engaging with other types of organizations using the same model. FutureHouse, for example, is an Eric Schmidt-backed nonprofit dedicated to automating scientific research, particularly in biology, with the help of AI systems. Modern biological research is often stalled by information overload, with researchers spending countless hours combing through papers in order to avoid duplicating existing work. Fortunately, this information comes mainly in the form of text and graphsboth of which are right in Claudes wheelhouse. FutureHouse has used Anthropics Claude models (alongside models from OpenAI and Google) to underpin a suite of agents that can help with science and drug discovery research. We’ve recently been working with the Beneficial Deployments team at Anthropic to share how we’ve been using their models to build our scientific agents on our platform, says Michael Skarlinski, head of platform at FutureHouse. Their team has been interested in learning which use cases Anthropic models are uniquely capable of, and how they can help improve our development process. Another partner, Benchling, operates a cloud-based data management platform to help life sciences researchers manage and share (often fragmented and complex) scientific data and collaborate efficiently. Benchling is using Anthropics AI within Amazons Bedrock cloud application environment to embed AI agents directly into scientific workflows. Scientists spend up to 25% of their time on tedious data tasks. “AI will transform the biotech industry: automating toil, improving experiment design, and even generating novel hypotheses, says Ashu Singhal, Benchlings cofounder and president. But today, only a handful of R&D teamswith the budget, tooling, and technical expertiseare at the frontier. With the Beneficial Deployments team now in place, the terms of those earlier engagements will be formalized, expanded, and offered to more qualifying organizationsmost of them academic and nonprofit groups. The size of the new team hasnt been disclosed, but Anthropic has already posted several open roles within the group, including specialists in public health and economic mobility. “I’m incredibly excited about the potential of these efforts to support organizations, companies, and causes that are sometimes left behind and need to really be part of the AI transformation,” Kelly says.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||