AI or Not

Good on California Governor Gavin Newsom for vetoing the AI safety bill SB 1047. Though its intent was for AI safety, it missed the mark on some key points. SB 1047 summary: ? Required developers of large AI models, ie LLMs, to take “reasonable care” to ensure that their technology didn’t pose an “unreasonable risk of causing or materially enabling a critical harm.” ? Critical harm was defined as mass casualties or over $500 million in damages. ? Large AI models were defined as costing over $100 million to develop or $10 million to fine-tune. ? Each model was to include a kill switch to turn off the AI by a human immediately, if needed. Where the bill misses: ? Targeting only large AI models will force companies to either i) play accounting games to stay under that $100m amount or ii) prohibit funding, both venture and corporate R&D, thus hampering innovation for future models in order to avoid government scrutiny ? In practice, fine-tuning an existing, already in the wild, open source model costs a lot closer to $20 (no $m!) than it does $10m. And this is already happening now. ? Mass casualties and $500m in damages are quite extreme; consider the CrowdStrike outage cost Delta Airlines around that so its enough to cripple large companies and wipe out all others. Many technologists were celebrating this outcome, including Marc Andreesen and Andrew Ng. But there were supporters for the bill too, including Elon Musk and Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei. I understand why they took they showed support but still think the ambiguity and prohibiting areas did more harm than good. Back to building!

It's that time of the year again! Please join us in giving a warm welcome to the incredible startups of our Fintech Batch 20 ??????Check them below! AI or Not is an AI detection platform created to combat misinformation and elevate compliance solutions. AQ22 helps credit officers utilize AI co-workers to automate the loan assessments.? Bankuish works to improve the lives of freelancers and gig workers by providing a path to full financial inclusion. Cascading AI (YC S23) is an open-source identity and risk management infrastructure that helps businesses automate onboarding and other processes. Cashmere AI is the core intelligence layer that helps orchestrate systematic client acquisition for wealth management firms from start to finish. Concentro helps DG clean energy developers maximize the value of tax credits through a turn-key solution approach, while providing investors access to attractive sustainable investment opportunities. Coverbase is a new startup building AI-driven systems for helping companies assess the risk of working with other businesses. Decagon creates generative AI for building customer service agents that work much more like humans and its platform gives customer support team leaders more visibility into their automated customer experience operations. Eisen powers all of your account closure operations. Everything you need to monitor, manage, and mitigate risk when closing accounts. Glean is the work assistant with intuition. Search across all your company’s apps to find exactly what you need—instantly. Hebbia is an AI-powered platform that allows enterprises to build intelligent knowledge bases and interact with internal documents. HIFI is the next-generation payments and API platform for global businesses to move money at the speed of the internet. Jericho Security?is evolving defense for evolving threats. Landjourney.ai provides digital loan origination technology for modern agricultural lenders. LendAPI (Techstars '24) supports a/b testing and optimisation strategies ensuring tenants to improve by testing new rules and strategies. Narrative is a platform that automates compliance and operational workflows using AI technology. Parcha AI Agents that enables businesses to automate their scale compliance and operations. Analysis and judgment can now be fully automated with autonomous AI agents. Synthera AI?is synthetic data for financial markets to improve risk management and portfolio optimization. If you’d like to connect to these amazing startups, please let us know. Once again, Congratulations to Fintech Batch 20 Startups. ??