Dustin Kimmel

Federal US AI regulation may be stalled, but we're starting to see targeted regulation address AI issues closer to the root. Some of these interventions are smartly aimed at outcomes, rather than pre-deployment requirements, whose effectiveness remains relatively uncertain. TL;DR, it doesn't matter if a "risk" is high or low... if a single child or person suffers due to the things your model generates, you could be in trouble. Fraud, nonconsensual sexual material (aka Deepfakes), and election interference are among the many things that AI developers now need to guard against, legally, when serving residents of California.

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🇺🇲 A new crop of early-stage startups - along with some recent VC investments - illustrates a niche emerging in the autonomous vehicle technology sector. Unlike the companies bringing robotaxis to city streets, these startups are taking their tech off-road. Two recent entrants - Seattle-based Overland AI and New Brunswick-based Potential - are poised to get a first-mover advantage on this segment of autonomy. https://lnkd.in/dDiUnvVY

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Great news! Gabe Greenberg convinced Christopher Chedeau, front-end engineer at Meta, to give us a crash course on LLMs. 🎉 You might also know him as Vjeux: ⁣ ⁣ → Co-creator of React Native and Prettier⁣ → Creator of Excalidraw⁣, CSS-in-JS, Yoga, and React Conference ⁣ But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Vjeux has also: ⁣ → Improved Facebook's tagging flow with face detection⁣ → Optimized Facebook's image sizes and infrastructure⁣ → Helped open-source many Facebook front-end projects⁣ → Built infrastructure that became Docusaurus → Promoted React by organizing the first two React Conferences So when we had the chance to hear his thoughts about Large Language Models (LLMs), we knew we were in for some serious insights. Here's a glimpse of what he discussed:⁣ ⁣ ✅ LLM math demystified⁣ ✅ Model building and fine-tuning⁣ ✅ Separating AI facts from fiction ⁣ If you want to dive deep into the entire conversation, check this out: https://lnkd.in/ejaa4WZr

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Over the past two years, Integral Labs had the privilege of contributing to the creation of the Polkadot Community Foundation. Polkadot has already pioneered one of the most active and robust DAO governance systems to date, including tokenholder management of a nine-figure treasury. As the DAO continues to mature, the need to represent and serve tokenholders’ interests off-chain has become increasingly apparent. That’s where the Polkadot Community Foundation comes in. Designing the corporate structure, governance, and operating model, Integral Labs joined a working group led by our friends at Actum Node with a mission to extend the reach of Polkadot's onchain governance into the offchain world. This project was a first in the industry, with a novel design that stands apart from traditional DAO "wrapper" structures. Unlike foundations that subsume treasury assets and delegate limited powers back to the DAO, the Polkadot Community Foundation works as an optional, unopinionated side-car entity that any DAO member may utilize in their proposals. This ensures the DAO retains full autonomy and control of its treasury while enabling offchain activities such as holding real world assets, entering commercial agreements, making fiat payments, owning IP, and more—all for the benefit of, and under the explicit direction of, the tokenholders. The governing documents and bylaws are open source and available for future use by Polkadot or other DAOs. We hope is that this modular design becomes a blueprint for a future constellation of real-world businesses to permissionlessly cooperate and compete to serve DAOs by extending their existing onchain governance systems. The Polakdot community voted with over 98% support to establish the Polkadot Community Foundation. Now incorporated, community members have begun to publish treasury proposals that utilize the foundation, including the creation of what will be the first mobile app owned by an open community, and increasing accountability for vendors and service providers in the ecosystem. You can read more here: https://lnkd.in/ebCJKsjD Integral Labs is proud to have contributed to this project alongside Michael D'Alto of Actum Node, James Hutchings, ACA, CFA, Theo Louw, Michael Preston, and Kevin Foster-Archibald CA(SA) of Autonomous, Edward Noyons of Marfire, Matthew Shaw and Gregory Peacock of Webslinger Advisors, Glenn Kennedy of Leeward Management Limited, Jonathan Bain of Bridgestream, Ignatius N., Jonathan Hernandez, and David Manadom (formerly) of Fenwick & West, Melissa Lim and Justin Wretham of Walkers, Björn Wagner, Raul Ignacio Romanutti, Dieter Fishbein, and the Polkadot community.

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🎉 Gavel won Best Technology of the year from the California Lawyers Association ! We are thankful for this recognition of our team's relentless work and innovation in 2024, taking strides towards making the law universally accessible. What a year so far: 🚀 Gavel expanded its reach to PDF automation, making it simple and powerful for law professionals to turn any legacy PDF forms into modern web applications 🚀 Our new AI agent was released to automatically turn PDF forms into legal apps. 🚀 Our AI stack became capable of benchmarking and optimizing agents for new large language models from major players OpenAI, Anthropic, #Llama, Mistral AI in hours -- bringing the best of AI innovation to our customers. 🚀 Our new add-in for Microsoft Word came out, making powerful automation directly available while drafting Word documents. 🚀 Our no setup required, pre-built workflows are becoming available in many legal areas and jurisdictions at a record pace, thanks to our powerful platform that makes it easy to create legal apps. 🚀 A flurry of testimonials of happy customers, ranging from family and estate law, to corporate or mortgage law. And importantly a growing number of low income families helped via Gavel's automation for legal aid. 🚀 Absolutely outstanding customer support and fast response time to any of our customers (paying or not), rethought with AI at the center of our customer success workflows. 💜 All of this would not be possible without our outstandingly talented, creative passionate team, committed to making a difference in making the law universally accessible to all. We couldn't be prouder of all the legal innovation we are witnessing from our customers and our team, and can't wait to see what next will be #BuiltOnGavel cc: Dorna Moini #LegalTech #Startup #Gavel #ArtificialIntelligence #GenAI #Awards #Innovation

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Every day I get more excited about Reality Defender! Deep Fake detection is THE emerging battleground in cyber. Check out this great interview with cofounder/CEO Ben Colman.

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Start-up scene. SF, NYC? U.S? How about Canada? Here are some thoughts. I hear a lot of comparisons all the time about U.S having a better start-up ecosystem than Canada. With no doubt, SF shows an advanced, amazing, well-oiled system for founders to operate in like Andrew Yeung talks about below. That’s why so many successful companies come out of SF. BUT. Not everyone has the means or desire to go the U.S at the beginning of their journey especially considering financial burdens, wanting to be close to friends, family, and community. I think the key is to make sure your mindset keeps up. As a founder, there will always be 4/5 people around you that think like you, help you grow, and have an obsession for solving the problem they are passionate about. You only need that many. Find those people. Hangout with them. Build cool things with them. That’s how growth oriented community starts. I found my community at NEXT Canada and University of Toronto Entrepreneurship. The more we do that, the more we build the start-up eco-system in Canada. How you live in your own mind matters. First explore what your mind wants, desires, and needs. Surround yourself with people who help you grow. Not those who keep you stagnant (unless that is what truly aligns with you). Yes it absolutely HELPS to live in SF and network, sleep, and breath start-up. The culture there is great for building a company. BUT since not everyone has the resources to go to another country, I’d start creating the SF mindset in your own head, and build the next Amazon. Because you can.

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My deepest gratitude to Sarah Kaufman, Paul Cherukuri, and Chethan Sarabu, MD for sharing their time and expertise at Luminary Labs' Climate week Lab Session. All too often, the climate conversation falls prey to oversimplification, labeling some industries, technologies, or interventions as "good" for the planet and others "bad." While there are certainly examples of actors causing extreme harm, more often this assertion conceals a more complex duality: Essential sectors of our society and economy — from education to transportation — contribute to climate change while also facing the impacts of rising temperatures and extreme weather. As a society, we must align on the acceptable tradeoffs of the technologies we have today AND continue to innovate to improve upon what is possible today. For example: 🏥 Healthcare's reliance on single-use materials and high consumption of gasses and power contribute to the sector’s significant environmental footprint. But it’s not as simple as reusing and recycling; disposable syringes are wasteful, but have saved millions of lives — and few patients and providers are willing to return to times when life expectancies were shorter and patient outcomes were more precarious. 🚘 Transportation is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions –– and at the same time, our aging transportation infrastructure is ill-equipped to handle current and worsening climatic extremes.  High temperatures and flooding frequently disrupt multiple modes of transportation, and urban sprawl makes implementing more sustainable interventions difficult. Looking to the future, the experts on the panel also recognized that these sectors will play a key role in driving climate solutions – from mobility wallets to rethinking hospital supply chains. As each panelist explored this duality, a central question emerged: How can leaders advance sustainable innovations while also ensuring that essential aspects of our society and economy are resilient and thriving? https://lnkd.in/evn3qJ2p Image courtesy of April Renae.

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Riding the Monday tide! So, here is the game, aggressive goals need aggressive steps! Its been a learning advising growth accelerated start-ups. This is a groovy read, although can lawyers convince their clients the importance of this, I would rate at moderately difficult on the difficulty scale! A stable business can any day outweigh accelerated growth business. Speaking of which, stability may not be an issue with India, at least for sometime now. A stable government goes a long way, people have aligned to the ideologies and operate therein - run the familiar terrain! #tech #product #design #designthinking

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Want a front-row seat to the frontier of tech? We’ve got the role (or two) for you! We’re expanding our frontier-tech team at Blackbird by hiring a Frontier Tech Investments Associate and Foundry Fellows! Got questions? We've got answers... 1️⃣ What are the roles? 🧪 Associate = a full-time VC investment gig in our Blackbird Investments team, working directly with me. We’re looking for someone with a science and/or engineering background and more curiosity than they can handle. You’ll grow your own investment brand and practice, support our portfolio founders, and will help build Foundry, our early-stage frontier-tech accelerator. ✨ Foundry Fellow = a casual/contract gig in our Blackbird Investments team, ~15h per week for 3 months. The Fellowship is ideal for PhD students and ECRs who want to learn more about startups and VC. You’ll go deep on emerging areas relevant to your expertise (or curiosity!), get a front-row seat to groundbreaking companies in those areas, build out your non-academic network, and develop a solid writing practice. 2️⃣ Why are you hiring? We love frontier tech, and we’re ready to grow our team. 3️⃣ Wow, it’s so great that you’re starting to look at deep tech! Look, we get it: we don’t make a lot of noise about our frontier tech investing. Buuuut we’ve been deep-tech investors since we backed Tim Kentley-Klay to found Zoox back in 2014—we’ve been on incredible journeys with PsiQuantum (building the world's first utility-scale quantum computer right here in Australia!), Inventia Life Science (transforming drug discovery with high-fidelity cell models), Remedy Robotics (surgical robots for remote endovascular procedures), Opto Biosystems (minimally-invasive neural implants to treat cancer), and more. We believe that frontier technologies, and great frontier-tech investing, will be part of the solutions to the greatest problems humanity faces today. 4️⃣ When do applications close? May 31st at 11:59pm AEST. 5️⃣ I have more questions! I’m sure you do! Clare Birch and I are hosting an AMA to answer any and all questions about these roles. Want to know what a week in the life of our team looks like? What’s keeping us up at night? What our ideal candidate looks like? Come along and find out - registration link in the comments 👇 Apply for these roles: Associate - https://lnkd.in/gCfj4EUJ Foundry Fellowships - https://lnkd.in/gj6ATZVZ If you know anyone that we should meet, send me their details! Cameron Elise Ben Andrew Robin Joseph Adelaide James Olivia Lucinda Raghav Jesse Christie Mohamed Tom Amee Pablo Haya Loong Hon Joshua Benjamin Megan Harry Denzil Matthew Diana Daniel Tom Deanna Justin Amar Lilly Stone Thomas

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As brokers, we've seen a lot of nonsense by the Big Tech companies trying to devalue and undermine the patent system. They use their weight and money to push around small inventors and startups, all while violating their patents. But the Plaid team has stooped a new low. They threatened a law suit (against Vitek IP) for even contacting them about the availability of a patent portfolio. Not an aggressive approach. Not a threatening approach. Just a customary notice to their legal team that a portfolio of NFC Payment patents is available for acquisition. They not only threatened Vitek IP, but a fully drafted complaint ready to be filed was sent to us. They demanded payment be made or the law suit would be filed. 😳😳 🙄🙄 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️ I usually say I "cease to be amazed" by Big Tech anymore, but well done Plaid, your sleazy behavior is a novel way to undermine IP. 👏 🙄

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When you’re in the trenches building, amazing things reveal themselves that you could never have foreseen at the outset.✨☺️ Life imitates art and all that. I have been hard at work creating a product/market fit course for climate software startups and along the way I found an incredible launch partner in Koray Parmaks from Carbon Zero Capital. 🚀 Koray, a Founder/CEO turned investor, and his partner Eric Tong, are putting $ from their exits into climate startups.💚 Together, we are offering an invite-only bootcamp to help selected founders gain conviction on the path to Strong PMF.🧗‍♀️🦾 💰At the end of the bootcamp, Carbon Zero Capital will make investments in bootcamp grads that meet their PMF criteria.💰 Yes, for real. Our PMF bootcamp helps early stage stage climate founders hit their next milestones📈: -> Progress $0-500k, $500k-3M ARR -> Increase % customers that truly love your product -> Patch your leaky bucket (funnel) -> Right-size your unit economics -> Raise your next round If you want to join the bootcamp or learn more, request access at https://lnkd.in/g3yrQQvi !!🤘

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To all my fellow Arizonans in particular… Here’s the Cliff Notes version of why our Silicon State focus on “atoms” in addition to bits is SO on point for our times. The world of atoms shall be underserved no longer. And Avanced Manufacturing (of all kinds of things in all kinds of industries) is right on the $! 🙏🏼🌵🚀 https://lnkd.in/gNbGmPsC

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If you're reading this, that means you have almost certainly already seen the clip below. For those who have not yet seen it, at Ray Summit, OpenAI's Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil said the company's o1 model can write legal memoranda that previously were the domain of $1000/hour associates, leading Mr. Weil to ask: "what does it mean when you can suddenly do $8,000 of work in 5 minutes for $3 of API credits?" I have an answer to that question. And, from what I've seen thus far on social media, mine is apparently a bit of a contrarian take: 1) Your memo is no longer worth $8,000: Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this bit is fairly obvious, no? Two things are happening here. One, law firms no longer have the sort of information moats they once did - for example, I do not need to go to my local law library to search the municipal code; rather, it is one click away. And two, for a majority of junior associate level tasks (e.g., legislative summarization and analysis), the LLMs produce comparable output exponentially faster. 2) So you better adapt your skill set and practice to the times: Not familiar with these AI tools yet? It's time to familiarize yourself, or you're giving your competitors a huge advantage. Have a practice that is highly reliant on junior associate billing for quasi-administrative legal work? Likely time to rethink that business model. Lawyers that adapt to the changes that AI presents will continue to thrive. If I were the associate in Mr. Weil's hypothetical, I would focus on technological literacy as well as all of those "soft skills" that continue to be value add and not yet easily displaced by technology: ability to synthesize information, interpersonal communications, excellent judgment, etc. Curious to hear others' takes in the comments...

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It's simple. More functionality = more power. The Ray-Ban Meta upgrades with enhanced AI functionality mean that power management and seamless charging experiences become increasingly important for all smart glasses and wearables. Learn more in the #ProofPoints video below.

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AI memory is fundamental for conversational AI and AI agents. It is critical for building personalized experiences and improving reasoning. Check out Letta’s course to understand how to use AI memory to enhance the customization and quality of your AI app.

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👀 Looking at our recent investments at Draper Associates, here’s what standout founders nailed, making our decision to invest much easier (and faster): 💥 Visionary Tech with a Bold Vision – These founders are not here for incremental wins; they’re reimagining what’s possible in across tech - biotech, robotics, aerospace, and beyond. Their vision is big and audacious, tackling complex problems that demand breakthrough solutions, others have not been willing to try. 👊 Clear Passion & Purpose – The drive in these founders is undeniable. They’re committed to their mission with a depth of purpose that shapes every choice. One founder, for example, took two years completely off to learn and meet everyone in longevity biotech. This level of grit and dedication is rare but essential for the most impactful founders. 🌟 Assembling All-Star Teams – They bring together top-tier talent from diverse disciplines: experienced business leaders with successful exits or industry experience at top companies, technical co-founders with deep expertise, often PhDs or industry pioneers, and even published authors. It’s a complementary team, unified by a shared vision. They make the: "Why this team?" obvious - at a glance. 💻 Data-Driven to the Core – These founders present data insights that show why their approach is unique, especially against a competitive field of companies. This data is delivered with clarity and they make the complex simple. Many are published in top journals, adding depth and credibility to their approach, and reinforcing that they know their tech inside out. ⚡️ Memorable, Clear Vision – They don’t just pitch; they make the future feel tangible, with a vision that’s both compelling and concise. If I can relay their pitch in under 30 seconds to my team, they’ve killed it. 📣 Transparent & Proactive Communication – The best founders don’t wait for questions. They come prepared, often with a comprehensive FAQ doc, give timely updates to our questions, and are candid about challenges. This level of openness builds trust and strengthens our partnership. 💸 Milestone-Driven Funding Strategy – Each funding stage aligns clearly with already achieved or upcoming achievable milestones. They’ve mapped out a roadmap that minimizes risk at every step, giving us confidence in their journey. 💰 Revenue Milestones Along the Way – Even if it'll take a decade to hit revenue on their big vision, these founders find revenue generation stops along the way to profitability. They share a trajectory that connects early wins to revenue, showing how every step is a building block toward their bigger vision. Overall, the best founders are incredibly thoughtful, prepared, and fantastic verbal / written communicators. #founders #startups #fundraising #VC

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