Tech:NYC Digest: October 12

Tech:NYC Digest: October 12

October 12, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

Thursday, October 12, 2023

In today’s digest, protecting youth data privacy in New York, reviewing your 2023 ballot proposals, and we ask New York tech leaders to sound off on the AI not getting enough hype.

Was this digest forwarded to you? Subscribe here.

  • New York Attorney General Letitia James, Gov. Kathy Hochul, and other policymakers are expected to introduce two new proposals on social media and youth data privacy regulations. (New York Times)

    • As the Times explains: “Tech:NYC, which represents more than 800 tech companies, raised objections to the proposed legislation, suggesting it could infringe on free speech. It also raised logistical and privacy concerns with verifying the identities and age of users, which it said could require sharing government documents.”

    • See more about the proposals in City & State.

  • The city is getting 40 miles of new greenways, thanks to a federal grant, adding to the 150 miles already in place. Most of them are expected to be separated from traffic or near parks where cars are banned. (Gothamist)

  • When it comes to growth in bike use, NYC tops the list in a new analysis of dozens of US cities, with 43 more trips per 1,000 people in 2022 compared to 2019. (Axios)

In other reading:

  • Sen. Gillibrand, city and state lawmakers respond to questions about regulation of tech and AI in New York summit (Crain’s New York Business)

  • Schools and sewers: what to know about New York’s 2023 ballot proposals (Gothamist)

  • When 42nd Street Was the ‘Dead Line’ No One Would Cross (Curbed)

New York wants to be AI’s world capital, writes Axios today. And we think it has a good shot:

  • Our president Julie Samuels told Axios that founders continue flocking to the city because “it's the best place to apply, monetize and scale the transformational AI tech they've built” alongside other key industries concentrated here.

The conversation around AI is moving as fast as the technology itself is, so we reached out to a group of AI leaders in our network to ask them: what about AI still isn’t getting enough hype?

Jack Kokko, Founder & CEO, AlphaSense:

  • “AI’s ability to create new avenues for meaningful work deserves more recognition. It can also empower employees to elevate their role in the workplace as they leverage AI like a personal assistant.”

Paris Heymann, Partner, Index Ventures:

  • ”Many of the most prominent use cases for AI today are function-specific; for example, AI for marketing, AI for copywriting, AI for programming. In the future, I think there will be greater focus on Vertical AI products built for specific industries rather than specific functions: AI for restaurants, AI for teachers, AI for law firms, AI for veterinarians. The opportunity for AI trained on industry-specific data is endless.”

Sarah Nagy, Founder & CEO, Seek AI:

  • ”I think that there needs to be more attention on how to ask follow-up questions to AI and take advantage of its flexibility with respect to being corrected. Sometimes I will see people get an unsatisfactory answer back from, say, ChatGPT and have no idea how to respond. Correcting ChatGPT can be very similar to correcting a human, but this is counterintuitive to many people and I'd like to see more visibility around this.”

Anju Kambadur, Head of AI Engineering, Bloomberg:

  • "The recent focus on developing large general-purpose language models has drawn academic attention away from where they can make important contributions, particularly in the area of domain- and task-specific models, which often yield superior results.We must renew our focus on developing and evaluating domain-specific models and enable academics to focus their attention where industry underinvests, such as low-resource languages, dialects and variations in language, among other things."

Brian Schechter, Partner, Primary:

  • ”An unbelievably hype-worthy but overlooked phenomenon is the degree to which brilliant young people, for whom coding is a first language and computer interactions are as natural as breathing, have gone all in on AI. I've encountered more college dropouts turned founders in the last year than in the last decade. They view AGI as inevitable, and believe that contributing to that inevitability is the most worthwhile thing imaginable.”

John Dickerson, Co-founder & Chief Scientist, Arthur:

  • ”We need to focus on the data. LLMs trained from scratch on bad data will be bad. Popular LLMs fine-tuned on bad data will be bad. And, LLMs implanted in retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems, the dominant industry paradigm, with bad private data will be bad. The data matters through the full LLMops pipeline.”

.

  • AOA Dx, a NYC, Boston, and Boulder-based company developing tests for the early detection of ovarian cancer, raised $17 million in new funding. Good Growth Capital led the round and was joined by RH Capital, Y Combinator, Astia, Adaptive Capital Partners, Gore Range Capital, and others.

  • Carefull, a NYC-based startup that helps banks protect older customers from fraud, raised $16.5 million in Series A funding. Fin Capital led the round and was joined by TTV Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Commerce Ventures, Montage Ventures, and Alloy Labs.

  • Neutral, a NYC-based carbon credits blockchain startup, raised $3.2 million in new funding. North Island Ventures led, and was joined by Redalpine, Digital Currency Group, Cerulean Ventures, Factor Capital and Rarestone Capital.

  • Pickle, a NYC-based peer-to-peer fashion marketplace, raised $8 million in seed funding. FirstMark Capital and Craft Ventures co-led the round and were joined by Burst Capital.

  • Parsec, a NYC-based provider of insights into on-chain markets, raised $4 million in new funding. Galaxy Digital led the round and was joined by Uniswap, Robot Ventures, CMT Digital, and others.

  • October 18: In-person: NY Enterprise Tech Meetup, with Grafana Labs COO Doug Hanna, Vercel VP of Product Jared Palmer, and Apollo senior director of develop experience Peggy Rayzis. Hosted by Work-Bench. Register here.

  • October 19: State of Compensation: Major Shifts in 2023, with Carta head of insights Peter Walker, Assembly co-CEO Lisa Wallace, and others. Hosted by Carta. Register here.

Any feedback or suggestions of things to add? Get in touch here. Was this digest forwarded to you? Sign up to receive it directly here.