Monta Vista Capital closes its largest fund to date

November 14, 2023

Setting Monta Vista apart is that the firm doesn’t raise capital from institutional investors, but rather leverages a large network of 65 individual investors.

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How Facebook went all in on AI

November 14, 2023
The following is excerpted from BROKEN CODE: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets by Jeff Horwitz. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Jeff Horwitz. In 2006, the U.S. patent office received a filing…

AI is at an inflection point, Fei-Fei Li says

November 14, 2023
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. “This moment in AI is an inflection moment,” Fei-Fei Li told me recently. Li is co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute and one of the most prominent computer science researchers of…

Copart (CPRT) Earnings Preview: An Auto Stock to Consider?

November 14, 2023
Copart (CPRT) posted better-than-expected revenue and earnings for the fourth quarter of 2023. Further, this auto auction company’s outlook appears promising, propelled by solid demand for its services and strategic…

The Biggest Questions: How did life begin?

November 14, 2023
How life begins is one of the biggest and hardest questions in science. All we know is that something happened on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, and it may well have occurred on many other worlds in the universe as well.  But we don’t know what does the trick. Somehow a soup of…

Giskard’s open-source framework evaluates AI models before they’re pushed into production

November 14, 2023

Giskard is a French startup working on an open-source testing framework for large language models. It can alert developers of risks of biases, security holes and a model’s ability to generate harmful or toxic content. While there’s a lot of hype around AI models, ML testing systems will also quickly become a hot topic as […]

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Nepal joins a growing list of countries banning TikTok

November 14, 2023

Another country is banning TikTok, the ByteDance-owned short video behemoth with over one billion active users around the world. The decision, first reported by the New York Times, came shortly after the Himalayan country introduced a rule requiring social platforms to register with the local government. TikTok’s refusal to curb hate content was affecting “social harmony,” […]

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Etaily is a “one stop solution” for consumer brands that want to enter Southeast Asia

November 14, 2023

E-commerce in Southeast Asia grew rapidly during the pandemic, and that momentum is continuing. A McKinsey report found that between now and 2026, the market is expected to triple at compound growth rate of 22%, hitting $230 billion in gross merchandise volume. Not surprisingly, global brands are eager to enter Southeast Asia. E-commerce enablement platform […]

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Pebble, a startup that tried and failed to take on Twitter, finds new life on Mastodon

November 13, 2023

Pebble, a startup that took on Twitter and failed, has returned from the dead — as a Mastodon instance, it seems. The company announced last month that it was shutting down its Twitter/X alternative citing the increasingly competitive landscape, X’s ability to retain users, and its own failure to gain traction with a wider audience. […]

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