Knowledge Capital

From our Enhanced Human Curator SXQD2

Cisco announces a $1bn investment fund for AI startups

The biggest news in emerging innovation is Cisco's $1bn investment fund for AI start-ups. From their press release:

Cisco is launching a $1B global investment fund to expand and develop secure, reliable, and trustworthy AI solutions.
Cisco is making strategic investments with world-class start-ups across software and infrastructure that build upon Cisco’s strategy to connect and protect the AI era.
Cohere, Mistral AI, and Scale AI are among the initial GenAI startups joining the Cisco Investments portfolio to help build a broader AI ecosystem.

We've always admired how Cisco shows up as an example of an ethical tech company--and we hope they will continue that trend in how they choose to invest.

This was a tough call. We almost featured the top news story as "Juang Jensen learns about other silicon use cases" since a video of him signing a woman's breast has surfaced on a social media platform. It only gets an honorable mention, however. Don't worry Juang. There is always next week. Do some random act of responsibility or a senseless act of humanity-centeredness. We could use the material. It's getting hard to find.

Getting glitchy wit' it, with Luis Reira.

One of the great things about the heated debate AI has inspired is that it has forced many people to question keywords like "intelligence," "consciousness," "mind," and "thinking. SXQ HeroCorp rock star Luis Reira gathers thoughts about these things in a transcendent perspective like the one we prescribe here: history and philosophy. Luis provides some great summaries of the philosophy of mind as it pertains to this debate and is starting something mini-revolution, recommending that we all become "the glitch in the Matrix." Check out his post on the theory of mind here. Some lively debate in the comments as well. Dude even does comedy sets on AI. You will find some clips in his feed.

Get your popcorn: cage match between Gary Marcus and Yann Le Cun.

Gary is a favorite Crankasaurus Rex around SXQ and we are loving this cage match between Gary's David to Yann's Goliath. Watch Gary's takedown in real-time by following his newsletter .

Heather Roff shows what we preach here all the time. It's a cross-functional analysis. She explains how bad variables meet bad social science and create harmful biases in AI tools. We are particularly fond of the case study she deploys since she demonstrates how this is being used on vets (we are proud supporters of multiple veteran philanthropies at SXQ). If you want to see the math and the "soft science" together, look at this piece. It's The Humanities Strikes Back, folks. We think it will be better than The New AI Hope from last year. Leonard Maltin called it the darker sequel in the AI trilogy.

Stay Curious,