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UK autonomous vehicle company Oxbotica plans to expand Canadian presence following $140 million USD raise (BETAKIT)
A spokesperson for Oxbotica told BetaKit that this funding raise is “vital” to Oxbotica’s current and planned hiring activity in Canada as it looks to expand the business across North America.
AI-Generated Car Buying? Impel’s New $104M Funding Drives Innovation (CRUNCHBASE)
The startup offers an AI-powered customer engagement platform for the auto industry, allowing shoppers to have a more tactical car-buying experience online. The company says it had a hand in $2 billion worth of car sales since its inception in 2011.
Smart horticultural lighting provider Sollum closes $30 million CAD to expand library of ‘light recipes’ (BETAKIT)
Backers in this round include climate impact fund Idealist Capital, which led the investment with a $25 million (all numbers CAD) contribution, as well as Fondaction, which provided $5 million. Fondaction is a limited partner in Idealist Capital’s current climate fund.
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Microsoft plans to build OpenAI, ChatGPT features into all products (THE WALL STREET JOURNAL)
Speaking Tuesday at a Wall Street Journal panel at the World Economic Forum’s annual event here in the Swiss mountains, Microsoft’s chief executive Satya Nadella said that his company will move quickly to commercialize tools from OpenAI, the research lab behind the ChatGPT chatbot as well as image generator Dall-E 2, which turns language prompts into novel images. Microsoft was an early investor in the startup.
What Xero learned after 15 years of building software for SMBs (BETAKIT)
Speaking with BetaKit, Xero’s chief product officer Anna Curzon explained the challenges of building what she calls a “purposeful platform” for small businesses.
Elon Musk’s Appetite for Destruction (THE NEW YORK TIMES)
A wave of lawsuits argue that Tesla’s self-driving software is dangerously overhyped. What can its blind spots teach us about the company’s erratic CEO?
Market intelligence startup Klue moves closer to all-in-one platform vision with DoubleCheck Research acquisition (BETAKIT)
“This is a huge step towards our vision of building an all-in-one complete platform for our customers,” Klue co-founder and CEO Jason Smith told BetaKit. He argued that with the purchase of DoubeCheck, Klue is the first platform of its kind to include qualitative win-loss analysis.
Voice AI company SoundHound lays off nearly half its staff and offers ‘pitiful’ severance (GIZMODO)
“Im actually quite shocked by the way the layoffs were handled,” one of the laid off employees told Gizmodo. “I was expecting a 17 year old company, which is now a public company, to at least provide bare minimum severance.”
Alberta Innovates’ Bryan Helfenbaum on the future of energy in Canada (BETAKIT)
“The fundamental challenge is how do we maintain the prosperity that we have enjoyed while simultaneously moving into a net-zero world, and in fact, not just surviving, but thriving,” said Executive Director at Alberta Innovates, Bryan Helfenbaum.
Getty Images is suing the creators of AI art tool Stable Diffusion for scraping its content (THE VERGE)
Getty Images claims Stability AI ‘unlawfully’ scraped millions of images from its site. It’s a significant escalation in the developing legal battles between generative AI firms and content creators.
Signal 1 launches AI platform at Grand River Hospital as startup aims to create more capacity in Canada’s healthcare system (BETAKIT)
When Layer 6 was sold to TD Bank in 2018 in a reported $100 million USD deal, Poutanen became the bank’s chief AI officer, and helped apply Layer 6’s AI engine at TD to a number of different financial services-related use-cases.
Google Calls In Help From Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. Fight (THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Mr. Page and Mr. Brin, who had not spent much time at Google since they left their daily roles with the company in 2019, reviewed Google’s artificial intelligence product strategy, according to two people with knowledge of the meetings who were not allowed to discuss them. They approved plans and pitched ideas to put more chatbot features into Google’s search engine. And they offered advice to company leaders, who have put A.I. front and center in their plans.
Volvo backs Waabi to accelerate driverless trucks commercialization (BETAKIT)
As part of its investment, Volvo announced this week that it is “currently exploring ways to cooperate” with Waabi in order for both organizations’ shared plans to accelerate the commercialization of driverless trucks.
Exclusive: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic (TIME)
OpenAI took a leaf out of the playbook of social media companies like Facebook, who had already shown it was possible to build AIs that could detect toxic language like hate speech to help remove it from their platforms. The premise was simple: feed an AI with labeled examples of violence, hate speech, and sexual abuse, and that tool could learn to detect those forms of toxicity in the wild. That detector would be built into ChatGPT to check whether it was echoing the toxicity of its training data, and filter it out before it ever reached the user. It could also help scrub toxic text from the training datasets of future AI models.
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