AI

Safety first funding

It’s been several months since Dario Amodei, former VP of research at OpenAI, the leading research-lab-turned-for-profit, announced he was leaving the company. 

Now, he’s announced a brand-new AI safety startup fueled by $124 million in funding. That’s 6.5x bigger than the average Series A. 

Large and in charge

While OpenAI is bullish on its status as an AI “research and deployment” company, Anthropic bills itself as AI “safety and research.” 

Amodei and his sister Daniela, who is cofounder and president of Anthropic, both worked on GPT-3—a breakthrough large language model—during their time at OpenAI. Around 12 other OpenAI research alumni have reportedly joined Anthropic’s ranks. 

Rewind: GPT-3 can be used for just about anything English language-related: auto-writing email responses, making up adventure stories, and more. But since GPT-3 and similar language models learn from large bodies of text (i.e., the internet as we know it), they absorb a lot of harmful biases, too. 

• When researchers asked GPT-3 to complete a sentence containing the word “Muslims,” over 60% of results involved violent language, e.g., words like terrorism, murder, and bomb. 

OpenAI is working on safety, too, by adding humans into review processes and building out a new use-case monitoring pipeline. 

A milli x 124

Large language models are such complex, advanced tools that it’s difficult to identify the biases they contain—let alone figure out how and why they adopted them. 

That’s likely why the Amodei siblings’ goal with Anthropic is to create “reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems,” as well as to build in more human feedback in the development and deployment process. Some big names are trusting them to do it... 

Follow the $$: Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn led the startup’s Series A round, and he was joined by Dustin Moskovitz, cofounder of Facebook and Asana, and Eric Schmidt, former longtime leader at Google and Alphabet. 

Dreams reality

Despite the fanfare surrounding Anthropic, we don’t have a lot of details yet on how, exactly, it plans to do what it's...planning to do. Anthropic's goal is a traditionally difficult one—AI explainability has been a challenge from the field’s inception. 

Bottom line: For now, according to Daniela Amodei, the Anthropic team will be “focused on pushing forward our research for the next few months and are hoping to have more to share later this year.”—HF 

WEARABLES

Follow the leader

Apple's hold on the smartwatch market is as secure as ever, but a new Google-Samsung partnership wants to change that.

Market update: Global smartwatch shipments overall climbed 35% year over year in Q1 2021, per a new report from Counterpoint Research. Over the same period, Apple grew its market share three percentage points to 33.5%. 

• Huawei was runner up with 8.4% market share, and Samsung was next with 8%. 

The Apple Watch stands tall mostly due to its compatibility with Apple’s billions of devices; a host of useful apps, including fitness goal tracking and heart rate monitoring; and the variety of style choices available (e.g., straps, watch faces). 

Better together?

Google has tried and failed with smartwatches before due to poor chipsets, batteries, and a lack of features, while Samsung’s market share has stagnated at 10% or less for years. 

The two are uniting to build a new Wear operating system, which borrows software (Tizen OS) and hardware (Galaxy Watches) from Samsung. The new watches will boast better battery life, 30% faster app load times, and simpler developer tools.

Google’s also taking advantage of its Fitbit acquisition by using the team to overhaul Wear OS’s health capabilities. Wear OS can now track your heart rate watching the NBA playoffs and your restless sleeping patterns after your team loses, and still have battery to spare in the morning.

Bottom line: The Google-Samsung alliance aims to be a first step in chipping away at Apple’s smartwatch dominance.—JM

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In other words, you could attend while sipping piña coladas on a beach...or ziplining in Costa Rica...or like...relaxing on the couch. Point is: you can get access to the content that will help you level up in your career—no matter where you are. 

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The content was created with remote work in mind, so they’ve got podcasts, 15 min sessions, and more to make sure you can still walk your dog 4x times a day and run that 1PM errand. Connect with peers, exchange ideas, and grow your network without those “this is kinda awkward” networking vibes. 

Learn more and register today for FREE.

CONNECTIVITY

Where the Sidewalk begins

If Amazon has its way, you’ll never stray too far from the sidewalk again. Its mesh network, called Sidewalk, rolls out next week. It’s meant to boost Amazon's hardware ecosystem by making device setup easier and improving range and wi-fi reliability.

Amazon device owners will be automatically enrolled in Sidewalk as of June 8. They can opt out, but privacy advocates still worry the setup will push many users into an untested network.

How it works: Sidewalk siphons small portions of user’s bandwidth to create a low-bandwidth shared network. It takes about 80 kbps, or 1/40th the bandwidth needed to stream an HD video.

• The network is too slow to stream movies or send email, and only Amazon-approved devices can connect.

Amazon’s Alexa, Echo, Ring security cams, outdoor lights, and motion sensors are all Sidewalk-compatible, as are Tile tracking devices via partnership. For context, Amazon had sold more than 100 million Alexa-powered devices alone as of 2019. 

Won't you be my neighbor?

Privacy advocates worry about connecting highly personal devices like cameras and speakers to such a big, unproven network. Even widely used wireless standards like wi-fi and Bluetooth have had serious security vulnerabilities. 

Amazon says Sidewalk is encrypted, with users unable to directly see or triangulate who is connected to their devices.

Big picture: Amazon is not the first Big Tech company to establish a mesh network. Apple’s AirTags system is similar in nature and scale, while Google’s Nest home wi-fi network operates on a more personal level.—JM 

BITS & BYTES

Stat: Zoom sales grew 191% year over year in Q1 2021, from $328 million to $956 million. It’s an eye-popping but somehow slower growth rate than Q4 2020 (369%).  

Quote: “How do we define enforcement in the age of the algorithm? How do we codify enforcement in the age of algorithms? This is like a playtime when we're going to be figuring that out.”—AI expert Cathy O'Neil, on AI regulatory sandboxes 

Read: Everything you’ve ever needed to know about the cloud. 

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WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• JBS, the world’s largest meat supplier, was hit by a cyberattack on North American and Australian systems that has disrupted operations. 
• TSMC has started building its $12 billion Arizona chip factory, which will mass-produce 5-nanometer chips starting in 2024. 
• Amazon announced the dates for Prime Day: June 21–22.
• Tesla filed a brand trademark under...restaurant services.

TRIVIA

“The cloud” is an ever-present, yet evasive, concept. This week’s trivia centers on how well you know the tech that underlies…everything. 

Take the quiz here. 

TECH THROWBACK

Thirty years ago, the first website went live. British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, the one who hit “publish” on August 6, 1991, was working at CERN, a European research organization and the world’s largest lab. 

The site was a primer on the World Wide Web, accessed via http://info.cern.ch. It had a list of people involved, a history of the project, and a definition of the internet: “The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.” 

ICYMI

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions: 

• Why Snap bought WaveOptics for $500 million
• To regulate AI, try playing in a sandbox
• Mayo Clinic AI could help diagnose early-stage heart failure