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Born out of San Francisco AI hackathons, Agency lets you see what your AI agents are doing

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After an extended week of coding, you might think that San Francisco builders would retreat to the mountains, beaches, or the Bay Area’s vibrant club scene. But in point of fact, because the week winds down, AI hackathons begin.

Over the past few years, San Francisco has exploded with AI hackathons. Every Saturday or Sunday, technologists give talks on the most recent advances in AI, networking, and—most significantly—turn ideas into working demos. Sometimes hackathons offer money or cloud credits as prizes, but the true winners walk away with a way of a startup.

“There’s no better place in the world to build the most ambitious project of your life than San Francisco,” says agency co-founder Alex Reibman. “You often see a lot of competitions—like hackathons—but they’re not competitive. They’re as collaborative as they are competitive.”

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At a hackathon in San Francisco last summer, Reibman decided to try his hand at constructing AI agents that would crawl the net. Agents are a hot topic in Silicon Valley because the AI ​​boom reaches its peak. The term just isn’t precisely defined, but it surely broadly describes AI bots that may perform tasks robotically using interfaces and services that weren’t originally designed for automation—a sort of alternative for mundane tasks that when required human intervention.

But Reibman immediately bumped into an issue. “They sucked,” Reibman said in an interview. “The agents failed 30 to 40 percent of the time, and often in unexpected ways.”

To fix this, Reibman’s team built internal debugging tools to see where their agents were going mistaken. They eventually managed to get the agents to work a little bit higher, however the debugging tools themselves ultimately stole the show and won the hackathon.

“I started showing the tools at a lot of hackathons and events in San Francisco, and people started asking for access to them,” Reibman said. “That was basically the confirmation I needed: instead of building an agent ourselves, we should build tools that make it easier to build agents.”

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So Reibman founded Agency along with his co-founders Adam Silverman and Shawn Qiu, offering tools to look at what AI agents are actually doing and catch where they’re going mistaken. A yr later, those tools eventually became Agency’s core product, the AgentOps platform that 1000’s of teams use every month, Reibman tells TechCrunch. The startup has already raised $2.6 million in pre-seed funding, led by 645 Ventures and Afore Capital.

COO Adam Silverman tells TechCrunch that AgentOps is like “multiple device management for agents,” analyzing all agent actions to make sure they don’t go down a rogue path.

“You want to understand whether your agent is going to act dishonestly and determine what limitations you can put in place,” Silverman said in an interview. “A lot of the work is being able to visually see where your guardrails are and whether agents are abiding by them before you put them into production.”

The startup is partnering with Cohere and Mistral, AI modelers who also offer agent creation services, so customers can use the AgentOps dashboard to see how agents interact with the world and the way much each costs. Agency is model-agnostic, meaning it really works with several different AI agent frameworks, but it surely integrates with popular tools like Microsoft’s AutoGen, CrewAI, and AutoGPT.

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In addition to the AgentOps dashboard, Agency also offers consulting services (Reibman previously worked at consulting firm EY) to assist firms start constructing agents. The agency wouldn’t disclose any clients by name, but said hedge funds, consultants, and marketing firms use its tools.

For example, Reibman says Agency helped create an AI agent that writes blog posts concerning the firms a client does business with. Now, that very same client uses the AgentOps dashboard to trace agent performance and costs.

Big players like OpenAI and Google are prone to ramp up their agent products in the approaching months, and AI startups like Agency need to search out a option to work with these advances, not against them.

“There are so many layers in the stack that it’s unlikely that an LLM vendor would try to cover all of them,” Reibman said. “OpenAI and Anthropic are building tools to create agents, but there are a lot of layers around them that make sure you have a production-ready code base.”

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This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com

Technology

Space Solar Startup Aetherflux collects USD 50 million for the introduction of the first version of the spatial demo in 2026

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Aetherflux, a start-up with a cosmic sunny founded by Baiju Bhatt, billionaire co-founder Robinhood, collected $ 50 million in the A series round, because it really works on the first demonstration of low land orbit in 2026.

The startup from San (*50*) in California, which got here out of Stealth in October last yr, goals to finally start the constellation of low soil orbit satellites, which might collect and transfer solar energy on to “ground stations” on Earth. This is an concept that was initially attributable to telling Isimov’s telling “reason”. Bhatt focuses on the transformation of this inspired science fiction concept into reality.

But firstly, Aetherflux must persuade the satellite to orbit to prove technology, “show that we have made transformal progress from people who do not have power from place to, for the first time, for the first time there is power from the place for people for the first time,” said Bhatt, founder and general director of the startup.

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At least that is the goal next yr, which shall be supported by Fresh Capital Aetherflux. The round brings total Aetherflux funds to $ 60 million after Bhatt has invested $ 10 million in its own funds in the company. The round A round was led by the Ventures and Interlagos indexes, with the participation of groundbreaking energy projects of Bill Gates, Andreessen Horowitz and Nea, in addition to several other interesting names equivalent to Jared Leto.

Bhatt, who joined us in the TechCrunch Equity podcast at the starting of this yr, told Techcrunch that Aetherflux would use funds to employ a bigger number of engineers and invest in technology and infrastructure needed for its first few missions.

“Our team is now focused primarily on building a load, which is located at the top of the bus … which has all the power generated by a satellite bus and turns it into laser energy,” said Bhatt.

Aetherflux uses Apex Space satellite bus. The satellite bus is the basic structure and satellite system that gives basic functions for its operation, equivalent to power, drive and communication. Most buses generate energy through solar panels, and Bhatt says that power – as much as a kilo of energy – shall be sent back to the ground.

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After the receipt shall be “ground stations” Aetherflux, consisting of photovoltaic boards, which convert sunlight into energy stored in batteries for later use. Bhatt said that his team, which consists of engineers and researchers from NASA, Spacex, Lockheed Martin, Anduril and the American Navy, can be working on constructing the first Aetherflux ground station. The startup has no place for the station yet, but evaluates military sites where there may be more controlled airspace.

In the future, Bhatt claims that the goal is to construct small, portable ground stations – with a diameter of 5 to 10 meters – to introduce electricity to the most distant locations.

“We would like to demonstrate (with the first mission), it is to join the end,” said Bhatt. “We want to be able to show that we actually have electricity on Earth and use it to illuminate light installations or perform electronic items on Earth.”

Few achieved the feat of sending solar energy from space to earth. One of the only successful missions was in 2023, when scientists Caltech’s Space Solar Power Project The displayed wireless power transfer from low Earth’s orbit using microwave radiation. This has proved this idea, but it surely will not be in the state of Aetherflux for the scalable, industrial system.

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Eetherflux increases falls at the back Prize From the Energy Health improvement fund of the Defense Department to develop cosmic solar energy for the US army.

(Tagstotransate) aetherflux

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Spelman organizes the game Dżem to build a hbc gaming pipeline

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The event took place from March 28 to 30 with Hackaton, workshops and network events.


Spelman College wants the game industry to be “E” for everybody. HBCU hosted the third annual game from games to encourage more black people to take part in creating video games.

When the world becomes much more digital, with an adult video game industry, Spelman wants black professionals to take places at the table. HBCU Jam hopes to encourage students with this lucrative profession path by constructing calls and supporting opportunities.

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This yr the game It began completely by the team led by students by the senior computer science Major Major Denee Denee. Co -chairing older “Comp Sci”, Nia Brunson, an eight -person team used the Spelman innovation laborator as the seat of the conference.

“Innovation laboratory began so small and then it was an amazing space,” Brunson explained, “Now, with this new dedicated space, students have even more learning and creating opportunities. School and team deserve it, and I think they will do amazing things for Spelman and the entire HBCU community.”

Trope added: “I am a great supporter of jams and hackatons because they give you the opportunity to assess their skills and work on something you are really proud of.”

Event began From March 28 to 30, allowing many without experience as well as to the interest in games to proceed passion on this field. Game Jam began with the inaugural conference before the start of the 24-hour hackaton, wherein students met in teams to create their very own video games.

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Brunson believes that this support could make everyone feel welcome in the gaming industry, no matter initial knowledge on this subject. The co -chairman also formatted the game to be sure that that the participants had enough time to work in Hackathon before workshops and network events.

“I love that playing jam welcomes people without the previous development of the game. Over 50% of our applicants are new in games,” said Brunson. “That is why we organize workshops on the creation of assets, the use of unity and ensuring mentoring – that everyone feels supported.”

Students from nine HBCu took part in evolution, and technological sponsors reminiscent of Zynga, Microsoft, Unity, Boeing and Codehouse are also joining the fun with prizes for participants. Although black professionals constitute only 5% of the workforce, which is confirmed by the International Association of Dewelopers, this initiative goals to solve this method gap without delay.

For Jaycee Holmes, a professor of interactive media and co -director Spelman Innovation Lab, Jam encourages enthusiasts of black games to know that these works are already waiting for them.

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“We want them to realize what they are capable of and understand that there is a friendly game industry willing to their votes.”


This article was originally published on : www.blackenterprise.com
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Altman Foling Drama itself listed in the new book Fragment

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Open AI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman speaks during the Kakao media day in Seoul.

Fragment of the upcoming book “Optimist: Sam Altman, Opeli and Race to Invent the Future” offers new details About why the Opeli board briefly slowed down the general director of Altman in 2023.

The book written by the Wall Street Journal reporter, Keach Hagey, claims that members of the Management Board of the Non -Profit organization were increasingly concerned after learning about problems akin to OpenAI Startup Fund, which was actually personally owned by Altman.

At the same time, the co -founder of Ilya Sutskever and Cto Mira Murati reportedly collected evidence of what they perceived as toxic and dishonest behavior of Altman, together with the screenshots of the Slack Channel screen. For example, Altman allegedly claimed that the company’s legal department said that the Turbo GPT-4 didn’t must be checked by a joint security committee, but the best lawyer of the company refused this.

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After Sutskever provided this evidence to the board members, they moved to Altman and the appointment of Murati as a brief director. But this failed quickly, and Opeli employees (including Sutskever and Murati) signed a letter demanding the return of Altman – which he soon did, and Sutskever and Murati leave, after which go to their very own startups.

(Tagstotransate) ILYA SUTSKEVER (T) MIRA MURATI (T) OPENAI (T) Altman

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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