External funding is crucial for early-stage ventures, particularly technology startups that require significant R&D investment. Business angels offer a critical source of funding, but their decision-making is often subjective and resource-intensive for both investor and entrepreneur. Much research has investigated this investment process to find the critical factors angels consider. One such tool, the Critical Factor Assessment (CFA), deployed more than 20,000 times by the Canadian Innovation Centre, has been evaluated post-decision and found to be significantly more accurate than investors' own decisions. However, a single CFA analysis requires three trained individuals and several days, limiting its adoption. This study builds on previous work validating the CFA to investigate whether the constraints inhibiting its adoption can be overcome using a trained AI model. In this research, we prompted multiple large language models (LLMs) to assign the eight CFA factors to a dataset of 600 transcribed, unstructured startup pitches seeking business angel funding with known investment outcomes. We then trained and evaluated machine learning classification models using the LLM-generated CFA scores as input features. Our best-performing model demonstrated high predictive accuracy (85.0% for predicting BA deal/no-deal outcomes) and exhibited significant correlation (Spearman's r = 0.896, p-value < 0.001) with conventional human-graded evaluations. The integration of AI-based feature extraction with a structured and validated decision-making framework yielded a scalable, reliable, and less-biased model for evaluating startup pitches, removing the constraints that previously limited adoption.

It's great to see you on a Saturday. As you've likely seen, artificial intelligence has been the talk of the town. Nothing's been hotter than ChatGPT -- the bot's garnered 1 billion cumulative web hits since November, and users have used it to write articles, emails, and even dating-app messages. I caught up with Shark Tank star Kevin O'Leary to get his thoughts on the burgeoning tech trend and how he plans to play the market in 2023. If this was forwarded to you, sign up here. Kevin O'Leary is the chairman of O'Leary Ventures, a media personality, and veteran investor.

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban is bullish on the future of artificial intelligence and has been for years. Not only has he made it a priority to learn about and invest in AI himself, but he has consistently recommended other entrepreneurs do the same. And if the ABC's "Shark Tank" star had to start a side hustle business today, that's where Cuban would turn. "I would become an expert in scripting for Alexa and Google Home and Cortana and go to any place that sold devices they supported and show them how much more they could do with a few hours of personalization," he tells CNBC Make It. By "scripting," Cuban is referring to the process of coding voice commands to create so-called "skills," which enable devices – like Amazon's Echo or Echo Dot, which use artificial intelligence-enabled voice assistant Alexa, Google Home or Microsoft's Cortana – to complete a task.

The way to set your children up for success in this day and age is to ensure they learn about artificial intelligence, according to the billionaire tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban. "Give your kids an edge, have them sign up [and] learn the basics of Artificial Intelligence," Cuban tweeted on Monday. Cuban, who is a star on the hit ABC show "Shark Tank" and the owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball team, was promoting a free, one-hour virtual class his foundation is teaching an introduction to artificial intelligence in collaboration with A.I. For Anyone, a nonprofit organization that aims to improve literacy of artificial understanding. "Parents, want your kids to learn about artificial intelligence while you're stuck in quarantine," Cuban says on his LinkedIn account.

The popular TV show, Shark Tank, has a familiar formula. Business owners pitch their ideas to a panel of judges known as "sharks," who have the option to invest in the company or turn the offer down. Some amazing products have launched on Shark Tank, but for every success, there are multiple failures. Many ridiculous ideas have crashed and burned -- like the Ionic Ear, Bluetooth headphones that are surgically implanted into your ears. The heartbreak comes when contestants use their pitch to highlight the sacrifices they've made -- huge investments of time and money into a product that ultimately goes nowhere.

If, by some chance, you find yourself in Mark Cuban's bathroom, make sure to check out the reading materials. "If you go in my bathroom, there's a book, Machine Learning for Idiots," Cuban said on the latest episode of Recode Media. "Whenever I get a break, I'm reading it." That means everyone, including and especially business owners, are at risk if they don't educate themselves now. "There'll be a time when people take AI and its impact for granted, but if you don't know how to use it and you don't understand it and you can't at least at have a basic understanding of the different approaches and how the algorithms work, you can be blindsided in ways you couldn't even possibly imagine," Cuban said. "Algorithms are a function, literally, of the people who write them. Whoever they are, whatever they are, that's what you're going to get," he added. "If you don't know any better, it's like if you just had somebody who wrote software and didn't know anything about your business. There's going to be all kinds of risks involved. You have to understand it." You can listen to Recode Media wherever you get your podcasts -- including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and Overcast. Below, we've shared a lightly edited full transcript of Peter's conversation with Mark, recorded live at Vox Media's The Deep End at South by Southwest 2019. I do a lot of these interviews now, either on a stage like this or at our own conferences or podcasts, and the thing I've learned over years is the best guest you can ever have is a billionaire who owns his or her own company because they can say whatever they want. So that's what we set up for you today. You answer your own emails. You know, I'm talented like that. Thank you for doing that. I'm not going to ask you if you are running for president. Because that's a boring ... I'm gonna get a boring answer. If you did run for president, like everyone else at South By Southwest, what would you campaign on? You put me on the spot. Let's just start by what I think is important, right, and I'm not a candidate so I don't give a shit if you like it or don't like it. First is common sense, right? Second is trying to bring people together.

Heather Potters is trying to get to the point. On a stage at Denver's Air & Space museum, a 182,000 square-foot space filled with decommissioned aircraft, she stands in front of a PowerPoint and describes her company's no-needle syringes, which can deliver vaccines by accelerating the liquid into a superfast stream that punctures the skin. Two Air Force jets point their noses at each other to her left, facing off, just like Potters and the other participants in tonight's NASA iTech competition. Here at NASA's iTech competition, the co-founder of PharmaJet is vying for access to expert advice from the space agency. She and 14 other researchers are pitching diverse terrestrial technologies that they hope to level up to space.

Bill Gates is the richest man in the world right now, with more than $85 billion to his name, and, according to one estimate, if he makes it to his mid-80's, he will likely be the world's first trillionaire . But self-made billionaire Mark Cuban predicts that the world's first trillionaires will actually be entrepreneurs working with artificial intelligence. "I am telling you, the world's first trillionaires are going to come from somebody who masters AI and all its derivatives and applies it in ways we never thought of," says the star investor of ABC's "Shark Tank," speaking to a packed house in Austin at the SXSW Conference and Festivals Sunday night. Ever faster computer processors and exponentially larger data sets are creating opportunity to apply artificial intelligence to new industries like insurance, says Cuban . We will "see more technological advances over the next ten years than we have over the last thirty. It's just going to blow everything away," says Cuban, who himself started out as the child of a blue-collar family from Pittsburgh.

Mark Cuban opened the Upfront Summit in an epic interview by Jason Hirschhorn, founder of Media REDEF. They discussed many topics ranging from protection of the press to what Mark looks for in an entrepreneur to investing outside of Silicon Valley and of course Trump and sports. But perhaps to most insightful was their discussion about Machine Learning / AI. Mark made a fortune by being early in Local Area Networking, streaming and then High Definition video so perhaps it's worth listening. He said that he believes AI will have a bigger impact than any technology in the last 30 years.

When Mark Cuban returns for the eighth season of "Shark Tank" on Friday night, he will be looking for new businesses and products in which to invest his billions of dollars. But he doesn't go after every deal he's pitched -- even if he thinks it's a good idea. He says he knows what he's good at, and he sticks to that. "The idea is the easy part," says Cuban, who joined ABC's "Shark Tank" in its second season as a guest "Shark" and became a series regular in Season 3. "We've all had ideas; everybody you know has had an idea. They get all excited about it. They think that nobody's ever done it because it's not on Google. Then rather than saying, 'Okay, let me see if I can sell any,' they think, 'Okay, can I raise money?'"