Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering key developments in AI research, industry, geopolitics and startups during February 2023. We wrote an op-ed for Sifted on how generative AI will change the software landscape and commented for TIME's cover story on ChatGPT. On the politics side, we reviewed and recommended spinout policy reform in Tony Blair Institute for Global Change's paper A New National Purpose and were included in Politico's 20 people who matter in UK technology. Air Street was featured in Insider's list of top AI investors See some of you at London.AI on Thurs 9 March w/DeepMind, Adept, Palantir and Basecamp Research. Register for our one-day RAAIS conference on research and applied AI 23 June 2023 in London. We'll be hosting speakers from Meta AI, Cruise, Intercom, Genentech, Northvolt and more to come! FYI, you might have to read this issue in full online vs. in your inbox. As usual, we love hearing what you're up to and what's on your mind, just hit reply or forward to your friends:-) Building large-scale AI models requires enormous computing power, which has emerged as the soft power of our time.

A look at the venture capitalists who are currently investing in AI (artificial intelligence) firms. Although the idea of robots used to be somewhat unsettling, a lot of money is currently being invested in the architecture and systems that enable machines to learn and grow on their own without the assistance of humans. According to PwC's 2018 Moneytree Report, which was just released, $9.3 billion was invested in AI firms in 2017. This enormous number demonstrates the growing interest in technology and the growing understanding of its potential among public and commercial sector donors. Artificial intelligence crosses all business areas, from self-driving vehicle AI operating systems to self-learning language processing platforms. Venture capital companies are hopping on the bandwagon to finance the minds behind the initiatives since they have the potential to disrupt so many industries, putting them ahead of the curve. The most well-known venture capital firms investing in AI technology are listed below, with an overview of their goals.

Zurich - Founded in 2021, medtech aiEndoscopic combines artificial intelligence (AI) with robotic endoscopy. Its first development, intuBot, presents an all-in-one solution for airway management. It aims to make the life-saving process of endotracheal intubation, used in emergency medicine in particular, much easier and thus save lives. It is based on a collaborative project with ETH Zurich, University Hospital Zurich, and the University of Zurich. Additionally, the startup has been selected to form part of the Switzerland Innovation Park Zürich as well as to join the group of Swiss Venture Leaders Medtech 2022.

Jaka Robotics, a Chinese startup that makes collaborative robots, has just pulled in a hefty Series D funding round of over $150 million from a lineup of heavyweight investors to help it expand globally. The round is led by Singapore's sovereign wealth fund Temasek, TrueLight Capital, Softbank Vision Fund II, and Prosperity7 Ventures, a growth fund under Aramco Ventures, which is an investment subsidiary of Saudi Arabia's state oil firm Aramco. Collaborative robots, known as "cobots", are meant to work alongside humans rather than in isolation. Based out of Shanghai and Beijing, Jaka's robotic arms can augment humans in a range of tasks, from assembling electronic parts, pouring from a coffee machine to packaging smartphones. Jaka plans to spend its fresh funding on R&D and global expansion, which makes Prosperity7's investment all the more significant.

As you may have noticed, I'm pretty obsessed with covering the best A.I. startups. Check out my posts on Prospectus. On this Newsletter I've taken special care to talk about A.I. being used in war and national security and will continue to do so. Recently, I was alarmed about a startup that wants to use Drones equipped with Tasers to help monitor for school shootings. Curiously most of his ethics board resigned in protest.

In the rush to build, test and deploy AI systems, businesses often lack the resources and time to fully validate their systems and ensure they're bug-free. In a 2018 report, Gartner predicted that 85% of AI projects will deliver erroneous outcomes due to bias in data, algorithms or the teams responsible for managing them. Even Big Tech companies aren't immune to the pitfalls -- for one client, IBM ultimately failed to deliver an AI-powered cancer diagnostics system that wound up costing $62 million over 4 years. Inspired by "bug bounty" programs, Jeong-Suh Choi and Soohyun Bae founded Bobidi, a platform aimed at helping companies validate their AI systems by exposing the systems to the global data science community. With Bobidi, Bae and Choi sought to build a product that lets customers connect AI systems with the bug-hunting community in a "secure" way, via an API.

At least, that's the crux of the argument Richard Socher, the former chief scientist at Salesforce, likes to make. In 2020, Socher co-founded You, a search engine that uses AI to understand search queries, rank the results and parse the queries into different languages (including programming languages). You summarizes information from across the web and offers built-in apps, like search tools for Twitter, that allow users to complete tasks without having to leave the results page. It seems there's some truth to his words. Socher claims that You has hundreds of thousands of users, with 70% growth in sign-ups last month and 30% growth in unique searches month over month.

Knowing how much and which kind of inventory your brand needs involves a complex web of data that companies often keep up with via spreadsheets or legacy systems that don't provide a full picture of the business. Syrup Tech, now armed with $6.3 million in new funding, is feeding all that data, like transactions, marketing and inventory, and combining it with other data, like social media trends and even the weather, to spit out predictive inventory recommendations using artificial intelligence and machine learning. This way, merchandisers and planners have better information on what they need and can reduce some of the waste. "I was at McKinsey previously, and was shocked to see merchandisers spend hours on spreadsheets," James Theuerkauf, co-founder and CEO of Syrup Tech, told TechCrunch. "My thought was to let the AI do the number-crunching and let the merchandiser make the creative decisions using the AI as support."

"We believe that any company should be able to develop reliable operational ML applications and easily adopt real-time capabilities no matter the use case at hand or the engineering resources on staff. This new funding will help us further build and strengthen both Tecton's feature platform for ML and the Feast open source feature store, enabling organizations of all sizes to build and deploy automated ML into live, customer-facing applications and business processes, quickly and at scale," said Mike Del Balso, co-founder and CEO of Tecton. Tecton was founded by the creators of Uber's Michelangelo platform to make world-class ML accessible to every company. Tecton is a fully-managed ML feature platform that orchestrates the complete lifecycle of features, from transformation to online serving, with enterprise-grade SLAs. The platform enables ML engineers and data scientists to automate the transformation of raw data, generate training data sets and serve features for online inference at scale.

It's no secret the medtech industry has embraced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Pharmaceutical companies are leaping into the AI/ML space, too. There have been about 100 partnerships that have been established between pharmaceutical companies and AI vendors, according to a report from clinicaltrialsarena.com citing GlobalData Healthcare data. Earlier today (Wednesday), Merck announced its plan to dive deeper into the space. The pharma powerhouse said it was launching the Merck Digital Sciences Studio (MDSS), which will help early-stage biomedical startups with direct investment, access to powerful Azure Cloud computing, and opportunities to pilot their technologies in collaboration with discovery and clinical scientists at Merck.