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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

Trump to sign a criminalizing account of porn revenge and clear deep cabinets

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President Donald Trump is predicted to sign the act on Take It Down, a bilateral law that introduces more severe punishments for distributing clear images, including deep wardrobes and pornography of revenge.

The Act criminalizes the publication of such photos, regardless of whether or not they are authentic or generated AI. Whoever publishes photos or videos can face penalty, including a advantageous, deprivation of liberty and restitution.

According to the brand new law, media firms and web platforms must remove such materials inside 48 hours of termination of the victim. Platforms must also take steps to remove the duplicate content.

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Many states have already banned clear sexual desems and pornography of revenge, but for the primary time federal regulatory authorities will enter to impose restrictions on web firms.

The first lady Melania Trump lobbyed for the law, which was sponsored by the senators Ted Cruz (R-TEXAS) and Amy Klobuchar (d-minn.). Cruz said he inspired him to act after hearing that Snapchat for nearly a 12 months refused to remove a deep displacement of a 14-year-old girl.

Proponents of freedom of speech and a group of digital rights aroused concerns, saying that the law is Too wide And it will probably lead to censorship of legal photos, similar to legal pornography, in addition to government critics.

(Tagstransate) AI

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Microsoft Nadella sata chooses chatbots on the podcasts

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Satya Nadella at Microsoft Ignite 2023

While the general director of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, says that he likes podcasts, perhaps he didn’t take heed to them anymore.

That the treat is approaching at the end longer profile Bloomberg NadellaFocusing on the strategy of artificial intelligence Microsoft and its complicated relations with Opeli. To illustrate how much she uses Copilot’s AI assistant in her day by day life, Nadella said that as a substitute of listening to podcasts, she now sends transcription to Copilot, after which talks to Copilot with the content when driving to the office.

In addition, Nadella – who jokingly described her work as a “E -Mail driver” – said that it consists of a minimum of 10 custom agents developed in Copilot Studio to sum up E -Mailes and news, preparing for meetings and performing other tasks in the office.

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It seems that AI is already transforming Microsoft in a more significant way, and programmers supposedly the most difficult hit in the company’s last dismissals, shortly after Nadella stated that the 30% of the company’s code was written by AI.

(Tagstotransate) microsoft

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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The planned Openai data center in Abu Dhabi would be greater than Monaco

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Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI

Opeli is able to help in developing a surprising campus of the 5-gigawatt data center in Abu Dhabi, positioning the corporate because the fundamental tenant of anchor in what can grow to be considered one of the biggest AI infrastructure projects in the world, in accordance with the brand new Bloomberg report.

Apparently, the thing would include a tremendous 10 square miles and consumed power balancing five nuclear reactors, overshadowing the prevailing AI infrastructure announced by OpenAI or its competitors. (Opeli has not yet asked TechCrunch’s request for comment, but in order to be larger than Monaco in retrospect.)

The ZAA project, developed in cooperation with the G42-Konglomerate with headquarters in Abu Zabi- is an element of the ambitious Stargate OpenAI project, Joint Venture announced in January, where in January could see mass data centers around the globe supplied with the event of AI.

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While the primary Stargate campus in the United States – already in Abilene in Texas – is to realize 1.2 gigawatts, this counterpart from the Middle East will be more than 4 times.

The project appears among the many wider AI between the USA and Zea, which were a few years old, and annoyed some legislators.

OpenAI reports from ZAA come from 2023 Partnership With G42, the pursuit of AI adoption in the Middle East. During the conversation earlier in Abu Dhabi, the final director of Opeli, Altman himself, praised Zea, saying: “He spoke about artificial intelligence Because it was cool before. “

As in the case of a big a part of the AI ​​world, these relationships are … complicated. Established in 2018, G42 is chaired by Szejk Tahnoon Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the national security advisor of ZAA and the younger brother of this country. His embrace by OpenAI raised concerns at the top of 2023 amongst American officials who were afraid that G42 could enable the Chinese government access advanced American technology.

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These fears focused on “G42”Active relationships“With Blalisted entities, including Huawei and Beijing Genomics Institute, in addition to those related to people related to Chinese intelligence efforts.

After pressure from American legislators, CEO G42 told Bloomberg At the start of 2024, the corporate modified its strategy, saying: “All our Chinese investments that were previously collected. For this reason, of course, we no longer need any physical presence in China.”

Shortly afterwards, Microsoft – the fundamental shareholder of Opeli together with his own wider interests in the region – announced an investment of $ 1.5 billion in G42, and its president Brad Smith joined the board of G42.

(Tagstransate) Abu dhabi

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