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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

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PO clarous Director General Zoom also uses AI avatar during a quarterly connection

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Zoom CEO Eric Yuan

General directors at the moment are so immersed in artificial intelligence that they send their avatars to cope with quarterly connections from earnings as a substitute, a minimum of partly.

After AI Avatar CEO CEO appeared on the investor’s conversation firstly of this week, the final director of Zoom Eric Yuan also followed them, also Using his avatar for preliminary comments. Yuan implemented his non -standard avatar via Zoom Clips, an asynchronous company video tool.

“I am proud that I am one of the first general directors who used the avatar in a call for earnings,” he said – or fairly his avatar. “This is just one example of how Zoom shifts the limits of communication and cooperation. At the same time, we know that trust and security are necessary. We take seriously the content generated AI and build strong security to prevent improper use, protect the user’s identity and ensure that avatars are used responsibly.”

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Yuan has long been in favor of using avatars at meetings and previously said that the corporate goals to create Digital user twins. He just isn’t alone on this vision; The CEO of transcript -powered AI, apparently, trains its own avatar Share the load.

Meanwhile, Zoom said he was doing it Avatar non -standard function available To all users this week.

(Tagstranslat) meetings AI

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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The next large Openai plant will not be worn: Report

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Sam Altman speaks onstage during The New York Times Dealbook Summit 2024.

Opeli pushed generative artificial intelligence into public consciousness. Now it might probably develop a very different variety of AI device.

According to WSJ reportThe general director of Opeli, Altman himself, told employees on Wednesday that one other large product of the corporate would not be worn. Instead, it will be compact, without the screen of the device, fully aware of the user’s environment. Small enough to sit down on the desk or slot in your pocket, Altman described it each as a “third device” next to MacBook Pro and iPhone, in addition to “Comrade AI” integrated with on a regular basis life.

The preview took place after the OpenAI announced that he was purchased by IO, a startup founded last 12 months by the previous Apple Joni Ive designer, in a capital agreement value $ 6.5 billion. I will take a key creative and design role at Openai.

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Altman reportedly told employees that the acquisition can ultimately add 1 trillion USD to the corporate conveyorsWearing devices or glasses that got other outfits.

Altman reportedly also emphasized to the staff that the key would be crucial to stop the copying of competitors before starting. As it seems, the recording of his comments leaked to the journal, asking questions on how much he can trust his team and the way rather more he will be able to reveal.

(Tagstotransate) devices

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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The latest model AI Google Gemma can work on phones

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It grows “open” AI Google, Gemma, grows.

While Google I/O 2025 On Tuesday, Google removed Gemma 3N compresses, a model designed for “liquid” on phones, laptops and tablets. According to Google, available in a preview starting on Tuesday, Gemma 3N can support sound, text, paintings and flicks.

Models efficient enough to operate in offline mode and without the necessity to calculate within the cloud have gained popularity within the AI ​​community lately. They will not be only cheaper to make use of than large models, but they keep privacy, eliminating the necessity to send data to a distant data center.

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During the speech to I/O product manager, Gemma Gus Martins said that GEMMA 3N can work on devices with lower than 2 GB of RAM. “Gemma 3N shares the same architecture as Gemini Nano, and is also designed for incredible performance,” he added.

In addition to Gemma 3N, Google releases Medgemma through the AI ​​developer foundation program. According to Medgemma, it’s essentially the most talented model to research text and health -related images.

“Medgemma (IS) OUR (…) A collection of open models to understand the text and multimodal image (health),” said Martins. “Medgemma works great in various imaging and text applications, thanks to which developers (…) could adapt the models to their own health applications.”

Also on the horizon there may be SignGEMMA, an open model for signaling sign language right into a spoken language. Google claims that Signgemma will allow programmers to create recent applications and integration for users of deaf and hard.

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“SIGNGEMMA is a new family of models trained to translate sign language into a spoken text, but preferably in the American sign and English,” said Martins. “This is the most talented model of understanding sign language in history and we are looking forward to you-programmers, deaf and hard communities-to take this base and build with it.”

It is value noting that Gemma has been criticized for non -standard, non -standard license conditions, which in accordance with some developers adopted models with a dangerous proposal. However, this didn’t discourage programmers from downloading Gemma models tens of tens of millions of times.

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(Tagstransate) gemma

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This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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