Founders are raising too much money 💸, the auctioned AI art controversy, and another look at the trolley problem

November 18, 2018 Issue

The AI and Robotics Newsletter from Comet Labs. Subscribe here. Past issues here.

👋 Hi,

With the team back from the week-long Assessing China program with six excellent chipset startups, we’ve learned a lot about China’s current semiconductor landscape and what the technology companies there are demanding. There are many more startups in China already than we originally expected, and companies there eagerly searching for the right applications of AI for their companies.

We’re consolidating our learnings, and are excited to share them with you soon. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, we want to wish you a very happy Thanksgiving holiday and hope you have a wonderful time spending it with loved ones.

Enjoy these links from the Comet team, and enjoy the holiday break!

Follow Comet Labs for more stories and thoughts about the impact of AI and robotics.

💬 THIS WEEK AT OUR LUNCH TABLE:

VC checks to startups have been getting larger and earlier in recent years, with a few huge funds as standouts leading the way. It makes us wonder what impact this is having on founders, and whether it’s smart to raise so much money so early in development.

You’re an early-stage founder raising for your first big round. A major fund offers you an enormous amount of money at a high valuation. Would you take it? Why, or why not? Let us know with a reply.

Yes, take it and grow.
No, it’s too much.
It depends on something else.

Last week’s poll about the auctioned AI art was close, but the verdict is in: the code was open sourced, so the creators don’t bear a responsibility to credit the author. Do you disagree?

📚 FEATURED ARTICLE:

How To Teach Artificial Intelligence Some Common Sense — WIRED
AI heavyweights Gary Marcus, Yann LeCun, and Oren Etzioni point out the persistent problem that today’s AI systems are still only great at performing the task they were trained to do. Unlike humans, they can’t reliably identify and react quickly to changing environments which remain a barrier to the next level of intelligence. But even these experts are conflicted about whether common sense is a good idea at all.

📹 WATCH THIS:

Chinese hot pot restaurant Haidilao has introduced robots to their workforce in both the back kitchen operation and the wait staff. Take a look at them in action.

📖 WORTH READING:

In The Age of A.I., Is Seeing Still Believing? — The New Yorker
As the technology for creating and manipulating media (particularly video) becomes easier to use and more accurate, we’ll need new strategies to combat bad actors lest we become a society with the expectation of complete mistrust.

Waymo to Start First Driverless Car Service Next Month — Bloomberg
It’s been clear that Waymo’s making great progress toward their AV fleet, but we didn’t realize they were just this close. It’s amazing that they’ll have a fleet (while small) ready to deploy in Phoenix in just a matter of months.

China’s Xinhua agency unveils AI news presenter — BBC
On the one hand, watching this AI news anchor is fairly eerie, even while the flaws are clear. On the other, it does open up the possibilities for use cases like multi-language translation of news programs that could be quite beneficial.

Baidu hits the gas on autonomous vehicles with Volvo and Ford deals — TechCrunch
Baidu has been quickly collecting automaker partnerships (now at over a hundred total) to help make its Apollo autonomous car program happen. What’s unclear is what purpose each of the partnerships will have, and how they will all come together to form a strategy, though the company predicts that it will begin shipping level 4 autonomous cars in 2021.

Walmart is building an AI lab inside one of its stores — TechCrunch
Walmart has already made a few investments in AI and robotics technology integrations for their retail operations in the past few years, most notably their partnership with Bossa Nova. Now, it sounds like their spinning up a more dedicated internal effort.

How Google Photos Became a Perfect Jukebox for Our Memories — NYTimes
There’s a lesson to be learned from Farhad Manjoo when he states, “Google Photos has become one of the most emotionally resonant pieces of technology I regularly use.” Perhaps one of the most sophisticated and widespread uses of AI today, Google Photos is a case study of excellent design with AI.

👏 PORTFOLIO NEWS:

Burgerbot startup Creator hires inventor of Boston Dynamics’ Big Dog — Creator
Creator has brought on Martin Buehler as VP of Engineering to help the team scale and optimize the company’s iconic hamburger robot. Congratulations to the team on this amazing hire!

IAM Robotics Raises $20 Million to Accelerate the Introduction of Robot Workers — IAM Robotics
Congratulations to the IAM team on this new fundraise announcement! IAM Robotics is doing amazing work around autonomous picking.

A New Kind of Clinical Trial — Doc.ai
We’re so excited that you can now download the doc.ai app and start using their platform to own your healthcare data and participate in clinical trials. Check it out!

📝 READ THIS PAPER:

A generic framework for privacy preserving deep learning — OpenMined
As many instances in the past year have proved, data privacy is a crucial concern for the near future, especially as it relates to technology that requires data to operate well, like AI systems. Andrew Trask and many other researchers from the OpenMined open-source community have released a new paper that details their framework for deep learning to specifically preserve data privacy during training.

🛠 STUFF YOU CAN USE:

Spinning Up in Deep RL — OpenAI
Check out this excellent collection of resources from OpenAI to help engineers quickly get started with deep reinforcement learning applications.

Andrew Ng Offers “AI For Everyone” — Synced
This new class offered on Coursera by Andrew Ng is positioned as a beginner-level course targeted at business professionals to help develop an understanding of how to apply AI effectively in their domain areas.

📣 HIRING:

Bioinformatics Engineer — doc.ai
The doc.ai team is hiring an experienced engineer who understands healthcare data. Join doc.ai to work on a multi-omics approach to building predictive models to accelerate medical research for patients and researchers.

Several Positions Available — Creator
From engineering to design, on both hardware and software teams, Creator is looking for talented folks for many different roles.

Several Available Positions — Grabango
Grabango, our portfolio company providing technology for checkout-free shopping, is looking for new members to join its stellar team.

And that’s it for this week! Find us on Twitter to stay updated with the latest news in AI and robotics.

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