 Autonomous driving startup Argo AI will shutter its Washington, D.C., operations after laying off 150 employees, or about 5% of its workforce. The company is based in Pittsburgh but has been testing its self-driving vehicles without backups drivers in Miami and Austin since May. More: - Argo had planned to launch a robotaxi service in the District of Columbia last year but delayed the plans due to the pandemic.
- The layoffs are companywide and impact workers in recruiting, operations, digital media, and communications.
- The company grew its global workforce from about 1,000 employees in 2020 to more than 2,000 during the pandemic, suggesting it may have grown too fast.
- Argo, a spinoff from Carnegie Mellon University, was founded in 2016. Since then, it has secured investments of $1B from Ford and $2.6B from Volkswagen.
- Argo said it still plans to commercialize its AV technology for the automakers.
THE ROBOT REPORT 
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The Wikimedia Foundation is using a Meta-created AI model to help verify the accuracy of citations on Wikipedia. The software, called Sphere, automatically scans citations in large amounts and suggests alternatives when a citation is wrong or inaccurately sourced. More: - Sphere relies on a natural language understanding transformation model to understand the links between words and phrases.
- Built using CCNet, Sphere's "knowledge index" is a database comprised of over 134 million public web pages, which it sources to verify claims.
- Meta trained Sphere on a new data set of 4 million Wikipedia citations, which it said is "significantly more intricate than ever used for this sort of research."
- Wikipedia said the tool is useful since around 17,000 news articles are added to the website every month.
- Meta hasn't specified if it's using Sphere on its own platforms. The company said Wikipedia does not pay to use Sphere.
SILICON ANGLE
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 A message from PIESTRO Final Month To Make Pizza History With This Startup 997 AD was the first mention of the word pizza. A thousand years later, it’s still evolving. Now, you can join a new era of pizza and invest in Piestro. They’re building an army of robotic pizzerias that can dish an artisanal pie in 3 minutes. These fully automated kiosks have every advantage over the traditional restaurant: - Boosting profit margins by up to 3X
- Slicing labor to nearly zero
- Expanding to malls, offices, airports, etc.
No wonder Piestro has $580 million in pre-orders from global pizza brands like 800 Degrees Pizza and Carbone Restaurant Group already. The last day to invest in Piestro is July 28th. Become a shareholder in the next evolution of pizza before they’re serving pies in your neighborhood. Invest Now
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Amazon selected seven Black-founded AI and voice startups for its first Black Founders Build with Alexa accelerator. The four-month program will provide the startups with up to $100,000 in investment from the Alexa Fund, as well as incubation and mentorship opportunities. Amazon said it chose the startups based on their abilities to innovate using its Alexa AI across different industries. Cohort winners: - Moment AI: AI monitoring system for cars to improve driver safety.
- Myavana: AI-powered personalized hair care guidance.
- PayTalk: Conversational AI to simplify transactions using smart devices.
- One Stop Wellness: Health literacy platform for companies.
- Seam Social Labs: Natural language processing platform for data and survey collection.
- Kiddie Kredit: A mobile app designed to teach children about credit by completing chores.
- DOSS Group: Voice-activated intelligent assistant for real estate.
VOICEBOT.AI
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AI software and a radiologist were 3.6% better at detecting breast cancer together than a doctor or AI screening for the cancer alone, according to a study published in The Lancet Digital Health. The researchers suggest that the software could help detect more cancer cases and cut down on radiologists' workloads. More: - The software was developed by German startup Vara, which is used at more than a quarter of Germany's breast cancer screening centers.
- It trained the AI system on 367,000 mammograms, radiologists' notes, and other data to categorize each image as "confident normal," "not confident" (no prediction), and "confident cancer."
- To study its effectiveness, researchers compared the AI system's performance when it analyzes mammograms alone and when it acts as a screening agent for human radiologists.
- The doctors reviewed each mammogram prior to seeing the AI's assessment. The AI issued warnings when it detected cancer and the radiologist did not.
- The AI and doctor working together had the highest rate of accurate cancer detection. On its own, the AI underperformed a doctor working solo.
MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
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| A message from ARGYLE Nearly half (49%) of 1099 workers reported being rejected for financial products they could afford. Why? More people are self-employed today than they have been in 20 years, with the trend expected to continue. What’s more, independent workers are pulling income from multiple, often diverse, gigs, largely due to rapid technological advancements and lightning bolt global events. Yet, our legacy financial infrastructures cater to traditional W2 workers with single, full-time jobs. The industry inadvertently marginalizes self-employed, 1099 workers, who struggle to access financial products like credit cards and loans. Our whitepaper breaks down what the lending space needs to know: - The loss at hand, and the loss to come, from overlooking the 1099 worker
- The needs and wants of the modern gig worker
- Opportunities and solutions presented by data democratization
- How financial services can brace for the growing gig economy with the help of employment data
Download the whitepaper
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Citi's strategic investment arm has invested an undisclosed amount in Claira, a startup using AI to quickly analyze financial contracts. Claira's technology uses computational linguistics to break down documents into sentences and translate their relationships into a workable map for machines. More: - Claira was incubated and spun off from an arm of Exos Financial, a B2B institutional finance platform.
- Exos initially used its technology to remediate its LIBOR or London Interbank Offered Rate, a benchmark interest rate, in late 2020.
- Now Citibank has signed on to use Claira's technology in its capital markets group. It invested an undisclosed funding amount in the upstart through its strategic investment arm, Citi Spread Products Investment Technologies (SPRINT).
- Claira says it will use the new capital to develop its products and go-to-market strategy.
BUSINESS INSIDER
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AI Events and Conferences: - International Conference on Machine Learning and Data Mining: July 16-21, New York City.
- ICML 2022, International Conference on Machine Learning: July 17-23, Baltimore, in-person conference with virtual elements.
- Ai4 2022: Aug. 16-18, Las Vegas.
- Deep Learning Summit: Sept. 14-15, London.
- AI & Big Data Expo — North America: Oct. 5-6, Santa Clara, Calif., and online.
- IROS 2022: International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems: Oct. 23-27, Kyoto, Japan.
- European Conference on Computer Vision: Oct. 23-27, Tel Aviv and online.
- The AI Summit Silicon Valley: Nov. 3-4, Santa Clara, Calif.
- NeurIPS, Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems: Nov. 24-Dec. 4, New Orleans and virtual.
- AI & Big Data Expo Global: Dec. 1-2, London and online.
- The AI Summit New York: Dec. 7-8, New York City.
- World Artificial Intelligence Cannes Festival: Feb. 9-11, 2023, Cannes, France, and online.
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QUICK HITS: - Elon Musk gave a shout-out to Boxabl, calling it a "cool product." Invest in Boxabl today with over 15,000+ investors!*
- A Gothenburg University researcher directed OpenAI's GPT-3 language model to write an academic thesis about itself.
- Chinese robotics meal-delivery startup Pudu Technology plans to reduce its workforce to 500 employees this year, from a peak of 3,000 in 2021.
- Wonder Robotics raised $4M for its solution enabling highly precise autonomous drone landings.
- Nearly 80% of customer experience professionals said their company plans to raise investments in contact center AI and automation over the next year, according to Talkdesk Research.
- Ondas Holdings, the parent company of American Robotics, will acquire autonomous drone solution company Airobotics.
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 |  | Beth is a writer and analyst at Inside.com covering artificial intelligence and daily tech news. Since starting work at Inside, she has covered various topics including virtual reality, drones, and e-commerce. Prior to that she was a public policy and investigative reporter for The Arizona Republic, where she won a Pulitzer Prize nomination and First Amendment Award for reporting on the rising costs of pensions. Reach her at Beth.Duckett@inside.com. |   | | Editor | Aaron Crutchfield is based in the high desert of California. Over the last two decades, he has spent time writing and editing at various local newspapers and defense contractors in California. When he's not working, he can often be found looking at the latest memes with his kids or working on his 1962 Ford. | |
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