Anthem Inc. has agreed to acquire rival Cigna Corp. for $54 billion, creating the health insurance industry’s biggest company by enrollment. The agreement announced Friday caps weeks of frenzied deal making in the healthcare sector. Aetna Inc. reached a $37-billion deal for Humana Inc. this month. And Woodland Hills insurer Health Net Inc. agreed to […]
Jukedeck, a pioneering AI startup out of the UK which could interpret video and automatically set music to it, has reportedly been acquired by hot social media startup TikTok. Jukedeck was previously a TechCrunch London 2015 Battlefield winner. Jukedeck had raised £2.5M, largely from Cambridge Innovation Capital, but also included investors Parkwalk Advisors, Backed VC and Playfair Capital who were the most recent investors. Founder and CEO Ed Newton-Rex changed his LinkedIn profile recently to say he was now working for TikTok’s parent company Bytedance as director of its AI Lab since April this year, according to industry news outlet Musically. Newton-Rex famously rapped his pitch: We have reached out to Newton-Rex for confirmation, however, several of his colleagues have also now updated their LinkedIn profiles to reveal that they also all now work for Bytedance. This includes David Trevelyan and Pierre Chanquion (previously senior software engineers, music production R&D at Jukedeck; now senior software engineers at Bytedance’s AI Lab); Katerina Kosta and Gabriele Medeot (formerly machine learning researchers at Jukedeck; now senior machine learning researchers at Bytedance); and Marco Selvi (formerly senior software engineer and machine learning researcher at Jukedeck; now senior machine learning researcher at Bytedance). Jukedeck’s site is now offline and its homepage replaced by a message saying “We can’t tell you more just yet, but we’re looking forward to continuing to fuel creativity using musical AI!” – indicating that Jukedeck’s technology for adding music to videos is likely to be used by Bytedance inside TikTok. Newton-Rex has often talked about putting the power of music composition into the hands of the masses, and TikTok clearly has scale. The social music app has been downloaded about 80 million times in the United States, and 800 million times worldwide, according to data from mobile research firm Sensor Tower. ... Read More
Genie AI, a legal tech startup and Entrepreneur First alumni, has raised £2 million in funding. The round is a combination of equity and a U.K. government grant, and will be used to continue development of the company’s “intelligent” contract editor for law firms and an upcoming product targeting GDPR compliance. Leading the £1.2 million equity investment is Connect Ventures, with participation from a number of angel investors, including former President of the Supreme Court Lord Neuberger and Professor Jun Wang at UCL. The £800,000 grant was awarded by UK Research and Innovation. “Lawyers always tell us ‘I know I’ve done something like that before,’ but in large firms it’s a real pain to dig past drafting out of emails, document management systems and the minds of senior lawyers,” says Genie AI co-founder and CEO Rafie Faruq. “SuperDrafter solves this by automatically curating relevant knowledge from around the firm, and recommending clauses to lawyers as they draft, in real time”. The broader idea is that SuperDrafter can enable lawyers to benefit from the “collective intelligence” — both past and present — of an entire law firm. It does this by machine reading thousands of documents confidentially and then analyses variations of the same clause to deuce market standards and allow lawyers to negotiate the best deal for their clients. In addition, Genie AI claims that SuperDrafter does not require a human to tag or train the required data. Instead, the algorithm “learns by itself”. “When drafting documents, lawyers typically start from a template, a document from a negotiating party, or an “automated” first draft using a questionnaire. Next, in order to tailor or negotiate the contract as it goes back and forth, lawyers typically have to search for past wording or tweak certain clauses and there are always thousands of variations of the same clause,” explains Faruq. “[Using SuperDrafter], lawyers can now do this in one click, by simply loading in a document and viewing recommended clauses for each part of the contract. This gives lawyers the collective intelligence of the firm at their fingertips”. The upshot, says Faruq, is that Genie AI’s solution makes contract drafting not just significantly faster but also much more robust. “More interestingly, our clients are increasingly using SuperDrafter not just for efficiency, but to win the best deal in every matter,” he adds. “Contracts specify commercial relationships, and we can get you the best terms, predicted from hundreds of thousands of past examples”. The intelligent contract editor is being piloted with law firms Clifford Chance, Pinsent Masons and Withers, where it is being used to draw up lengthy contracts within banking and finance. “We believe the complexity lends itself to AI-assisted drafting, where machines can augment lawyers with the collective intelligence of millions of past examples,” says Faruq. Meanwhile, Genie AI is already working on a second product. Dubbed “Anonymiser”, the software can be used SuperDrafter or standalone and with will automatically redact confidential information from contracts so than companies can comply with GDPR regulation and preserve client confidentiality. ... Read More
Pinterest isn’t your typical social network — for starts, its 250 million users spend their time creating collections of things that make them happy, rather than, say, competing to spread news that might end up making someone sad. But when Pinterest users search the platform for something dreary anyhow, the company doesn’t have qualms about stepping in. Today, Pinterest has revealed a new set of “emotional well-being activities” that it will automatically suggest to user who search for phrases that signal that they’re undergoing some anxiety or stress or otherwise feeling bad. And yes — one of those exercises, developed in partnership with the Stanford School of Medicine’s Brainstorm lab, literally asks Pinterest users to take some deep... Continue reading… ... Read More
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook’s Messenger Kids app is built around a simple premise: children shouldn’t be able to talk to users who haven’t been approved by their parents. But a design flaw allowed users to sidestep that protection through the group chat system, allowing children to enter group chats with unapproved strangers. For the past week, Facebook has been quietly closing down those group chats and alerting users, but has not made any public statements disclosing the issue. The alert, which was obtained by The Verge, reads as follows: Hi [PARENT], We found a technical error that allowed [CHILD]’s friend [FRIEND] to create a group chat with [CHILD] and one or more of [FRIEND]’s parent-approved friends. We want you to know that we’ve turned off this... Continue reading… ... Read More
Group commits to using Azure as exclusive cloud provider in its pursuit of artificial general intelligence... Read More
142 other mobile games removed by government agency in legal crackdown... Read More
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