Saudi Arabia has announced a 100 billion USD initiative aimed at establishing itself as a major player in artificial intelligence, data analytics, and advanced technology. The program, known as Project Transcendence, marks a significant push by the Kingdom to develop a robust AI ecosystem that can rival leading tech hubs, including neighbouring United Arab Emirates and other global technology centers. This unprecedented investment will focus on building state-of-the-art data centers, supporting startups, and expanding AI infrastructure to drive both domestic growth and international competitiveness. As part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 plan, this AI project underscores the country’s commitment to economic diversification away from oil, aiming to become a global tech leader within the next decade. Project Transcendence is expected to channel investments into critical areas needed to create a thriving AI industry. These include data center expansion, tech startups, workforce development, and partnerships with leading technology firms. Sources familiar with the project have indicated that Saudi Arabia intends to recruit top AI talent from around the world, invest in R&D, and incentivize foreign companies to establish a footprint in the Kingdom. source

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 will undoubtedly be the year AI agents get real. Many early entrants to the market, though, either tend to be singularly-purposed and less flexible, or more horizontal yet IT and developer-driven (and thus not always business user friendly).  Startup Sema4.ai says it has the differentiating factor that future-thinking enterprises need: The company has put a “tremendous amount of intelligence” into its platform to make it suitable for a wide variety of business use cases.  “We think it’s much better to have a horizontal platform that enterprises can build their agents for, versus coming in with a single purpose,” Rob Bearden, Sema4.ai co-founder and CEO, told VentureBeat.  Today Sema4.ai is announcing the general availability of its full-stack enterprise AI agent platform. In less than 9 months, the startup has come out of stealth, piloted its platform with six of the Fortune 2000, secured $30.5 million in funding and acquired open-source automation company Robocorp. And, it has already been featured in two Gartner hype cycles.  “Agents are going to drive the biggest transformation in business models and efficiencies that the enterprise has seen since the launch of the internet,” said Bearden.  AI agents outside DevOps and IT teams Sema4.ai’s no-code agent platform was designed to “speak industry language” and integrate with existing business processes and applications. It has seven key components:  Studio: Users can quickly build, test and deploy AI agents. Runbooks: Users can build and maintain agents with natural language runbooks and pre-built actions. Control Room: Features complete lifecycle management as well as security and scalability.  Actions: An automation framework that allows agents to integrate with apps including SharePoint, SAP and APIs using automation-as-code and Python. Work Room: Users can find, work with and supervise enterprise agents. Document Intelligence: Provides accurate document interpretation. Dynamic Data Access: Gives agents zero-copy access to past, present and future data. It is critical to shift the current operating model from “programmatically driven by DevOps and IT” to the business user, Bearden emphasized. This is because business users deeply understand specific processes and procedures and best practice outcomes, as well as potential problems and remediation methods.  In Sema4.ai, business users can define parameters and expected outcomes in runbooks that calibrate AI; agents, possessing an understanding of the data they need and best reasoning paths, then construct automations and software development kits (SDKs).  “It’s all guided by the business user in natural language,” said Bearden, the former CEO of data platform company Cloudera. “Agents will disintermediate the legacy ERP applications and even the SaaS applications. They will put the power into the hands of the business user versus the DevOps and IT teams.” Sema4.ai’s platform is architected to be interoperable with whatever large language model (LLM) is most cost-effective for the enterprise use case — currently including Claude, OpenAI, Azure and Bedrock, but that will be expanded, Bearden explained.  “Bring your own LLM, we’ll make sure that we interoperate with it at the highest standard,” he said.  Use case: Koch invoice reconciliation Customers have used Sema4.ai’s platform for a range of use cases — from simple scenarios requiring just one agent for a specific use case, to “15, 18, 20-plus” working collaboratively to manage entire business processes, Bearden explained. Agents (at least for now) are best in areas where work is procedural, high volume, human-intensive, understood, measurable and has definitive outcomes.  “It tends to be high ROI kind of work,” said Bearden. “It’s measurable. It’s auditable.” Six Fortune 2000 companies are piloting the platform in early proof-of-concept (PoC). Bearden explained that these partners are using agents to automate invoice processing, payment reconciliation, employee onboarding and regulatory compliance. In two of the PoCs, Sema4.ai’s platform is autonomously performing more than 80% of knowledge work tasks.  One early adopter is industrial giant Koch, which is using agents to automate one of its invoice reconciliation processes, Koch Labs director Tanner Gonzalez told VentureBeat. Previously, he explained, this involved manually reviewing invoices that can be 80 pages or longer. Sema4.ai allows them to use natural language processing (NLP) to create automated workflows that extract relevant data and validate invoices.  The key benefit of the platform is that it provides an easy-to-maintain, document-like interface for building and updating gen AI workflows. “Compared to previous robotic process automation tools we’ve used, Sema4.ai is much more user-friendly and doesn’t require specialized technical skills to manage over time,” said Gonzalez.  Using natural language, employees — finance analysts, accountants, operations engineers or other non-technical individuals — interact with the platform similar to how they would describe their workflow in a Word document, “explaining their logic and the tasks they complete again and again,” Gonzalez explained. In more complex use cases, the platform provides capabilities for data scientists to deploy custom AI models, and for data engineers to connect new data sources for read and write functions.  Looking ahead, Koch sees potential to expand the use of the platform to other areas such as market research analysis or external communications for commercial teams, said Gonzalez. “The flexibility and low-code nature of the platform makes it well-suited to tackle a variety of automation and conversational AI use cases across our organization,” he said.  A horizontal approach to address a variety of business needs When looking to adopt AI agents, Koch analyzed many alternatives in the market, Gonzalez noted. They found others to be too narrowly focused on specific industries, building their own foundation models or limited on integrations.  The key highlights for Sema4.ai, he said, are 1.) flexibility, “meaning we’re not tied to a specific model as new ones emerge”; 2.) ease of use for business users that can write out their steps as opposed to coding or learning a new tool; and 3.) the ability to implement closed-loop automation, driving real agent automation and monitoring progress periodically for new anomalies. Navin Chaddha, managing partner at Mayfield Fund, one of Sema4.ai’s top backers, said the startup is

News influencers – People who regularly post about current events and civic issues on social media and have at least 100,000 followers on any of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) or YouTube. Political orientation – A measure of a news influencer’s partisan or ideological views. A right-leaning news influencer is one who publicly expresses that they identify as a Republican or conservative or support Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. A left-leaning news influencer is one who publicly expresses that they identify as a Democrat, liberal or progressive or support Vice President Kamala Harris (or supported President Joe Biden before he dropped out of the race) in the 2024 election. This information was found in the bio, profile picture, banner image, pinned posts or recent posts on an influencer’s social media account, any personal website or professional page, and prominent media coverage. Values and identities – Language or imagery in the bio, profile picture, banner image or pinned posts on an influencer’s social media account that expresses specific beliefs or identities. News organization affiliation – An influencer with this affiliation is one who either currently works for or previously worked for a news organization, as well as freelancers who have regularly contributed to news organizations. A news organization can be any news outlet that has a staff and multiple bylines. Researchers considered affiliated influencers to have this background regardless of their news organization’s political orientation, audience size or primary publishing method (digital, TV, print, etc.). Major social media sites – The five primary sites we studied, chosen based on audience size and the presence of discussion about news: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube. While it’s important to shed light on who these new social media news providers are, a full understanding of the modern news environment also requires getting a sense of what these news influencers are posting about. What is a news influencer? In this study, we use the term “news influencers” to refer to individuals who regularly post about current events and civic issues on social media and have at least 100,000 followers on any of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) or YouTube. News influencers can be journalists who are or were affiliated with a news organization or independent content creators, but they must be people and not organizations. Refer to the methodology for more about how we identified news influencers. Given the sheer volume of posts, this is not an easy task. The seemingly endless stream of content coming from these accounts would be exceedingly time-consuming for a group of human coders to analyze, so we used automated tools to collect these posts and turned to OpenAI’s GPT-4 model for classification. The output of this model was validated by a team of trained human coders. We collected all public posts by the 500 news influencers in our sample for three weeks over the summer of 2024: July 15-21, July 29-Aug. 4 and Aug. 19-25. Some of these weeks included major election-related events. The first week started just days after an assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a campaign rally and included the Republican National Convention, as well as President Joe Biden dropping out of the race. And the third week included the Democratic National Convention. We provided the model with the text from all posts, as well as transcriptions of videos on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, but we did not include videos on other sites or images on any site. Each post was supplied on its own, without the surrounding context, which may limit the ability to categorize the post. Replies – posts directly responding to another message – in particular have less meaning when standing on their own. The model did not recognize any mentions of current events or civic issues in 57% of the posts by the news influencers in our sample during these three weeks. This may be due to a mix of factors: the analysis limitations mentioned above, as well as news influencers posting about other topics. Still, 43% of the posts did address these kinds of issues. The remainder of this chapter looks in more detail at these posts. Among the posts that referenced current events or civic issues, a majority (55%) were about government, politics or the presidential election. This includes posts on several specific events that occurred during the weeks studied, including the first assassination attempt on Trump in July (5%), the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in August (4%), the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July (3%) and Biden’s withdrawal from the race on July 21 (2%). The presence of these topics suggests that news influencers are incorporating discussion of real-time events in their posts. About one-in-five of the posts about current events (18%) focused on social issues such as racial issues (4%), LGBTQ+ issues (2%) and abortion (2%). Other topics that fell into this category include guns, education and culture war issues. A slightly smaller share (14%) were about international issues – a sometimes small but often important component of the current events discussion in America. Many internationally focused posts were about the Israel-Hamas war (7% of all news-related posts), while 1% of all posts were about the Russia-Ukraine war. No other topic was discussed in more than 4% of all posts by news influencers about current events during the study period: 3% of posts were about technology and 3% were about crime. News influencers often respond to the news of the day The weeks we chose to collect posts for analysis – and even the year we did this study – impact the findings. The study was conducted not only in the midst of a presidential election year but also during a period of major election-related news events, perhaps contributing to the high percentage of politics-related posts. Compared with other weeks studied, posts from July 15-21 were more likely to be about government and the election: 64% of all posts focused on current events and civic issues had this focus, compared

decentralized-finance-technologies-global-millennial-capital LinkedIn Email Facebook Twitter WhatsApp The post 行業研究報告: 去中心化金融科技全球千禧年資本 appeared first on VeriMedia. source

Zurich-based venture capital firm Founderful has raised $140mn in its second fund — $20mn more than its target and a strong sign of investor confidence in Switzerland’s flourishing tech ecosystem.   First announced back in February, the fund has already invested in 15 early-stage startups. These include Chiral Nano, which develops nanomaterials for silicon chips, and 8inks, which is rejigging the lithium-ion battery. Founderful — formerly Wingman Ventures — was launched in 2019 by Pascal Mathis, the co-founder of local travel marketplace unicorn GetYourGuide, Eat.ch co-founder Lukas Weder and Alex Stöckl, former exec at Creathor Ventures. The founder-led VC exclusively backs Swiss startups at the pre-seed or seed stage. Its vision? To transform budding Swiss ventures into global industry leaders. The 💜 of EU tech The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol’ founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now! “From day one, we have been relentless in our efforts to create a foothold for the Swiss tech ecosystem on the global stage,” said Stöckl, partner at Founderful.  “Fund II is evidence that we have walked the talk, and investors have taken note. This was no easy win, but we fought hard.”  Founderful’s new Fund II is backed by a range of institutions, family offices, and founders from unicorns such as Duolingo, Climeworks, Proton, and Scandit.  Silicon alps? Stöckl called the Swiss tech ecosystem a “powerhouse” that’s only just starting to claim its place on the global stage. The Alphine nation has the highest number of unicorn companies per capita in Europe and has ranked first in the Global Innovation Index for 13 years in a row.  But perhaps the Swiss tech ecosystem’s biggest asset is its universities and research institutions. ETH Zurich, for one, now produces more university spin-outs than any other university in Europe. We profiled one of these companies, Oxyle, earlier this year in an in-depth piece about PFAS, commonly known as “forever chemicals.” Led by Dr. Fajer Mushtaq, Oxyle has developed a reactor that mineralises these cancer-causing compounds, breaking apart their carbon-fluorine bonds. Founderful led Oxyle’s pre-seed investment in 2022 under its first $90mn fund, which has since been fully deployed across 40 startups.  The VC claims that these portfolio companies have since created over 1,100 jobs and secured more than $450 million in follow-on funding. Notable successes include Ethon AI, which helps factories like the Lindt chocolate factory save waste, and plastic recycling startup DePoly. Severin Hacker, CTO and co-founder at Duolingo and investor in Founderful’s Fund II called the up-and-coming VC “meticulous and relentless” in creating value for the founders it backs. “Their approach, combined with the unfolding potential of the Swiss tech ecosystem, probably makes them one of Europe’s most promising VC firms,” said Hacker. source

By Adam Lidgett ( November 18, 2024, 8:05 PM EST) — A U.S. International Trade Commission judge has found that claims in a pair of Ericsson patents were invalid, handing a win to Lenovo in a case over mobile phones, laptops and other related products…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

This session weighs the benefits of AI versus the risks and explores pathways to begin your AI risk assessment. source

Mohanasevlan Jeyapalan, Senior VP, PMO at Expo City Dubai, commented on the evolution of cybersecurity from being a technical concern to a priority for board members, emphasizing that data quality is a risk that now demands executive-level attention. “Cybersecurity took a lot of time to come to board members, and data quality is a risk that needs to be discussed,” Jeyapalan stated. This shift marks a crucial step in aligning cybersecurity with broader business goals, ensuring that executive leaders are actively engaged in securing data quality and managing risks. AI-Driven Insights for Predictive Risk Management Another theme that resonated with panellists was the use of AI and analytics for predictive risk management. The ability to analyze large datasets to predict and prioritize threats empowers companies to take preemptive action, enhancing resilience against cyber incidents and other disruptions. In particular, AI can help security teams make more accurate predictions about where and when a threat may arise, enabling companies to allocate resources more effectively. Anoop Kumar, Head of Information Security Governance, Rish and Compliance at GulfNews, Al Nisr Publishing also reflected this sentiment: “We need to make sure the risk is managed properly.” This proactive approach to managing risk with AI-driven insights is essential for companies seeking to not only respond to threats but anticipate and mitigate them before they materialize. source

By Tom Zanki ( November 18, 2024, 7:11 PM EST) — Venture-backed software startup ServiceTitan Inc. filed plans on Monday for an initial public offering, represented by Latham & Watkins LLP and underwriters’ counsel Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati PC, joining a growing list of IPO prospects…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More As companies begin experimenting with multimodal retrieval augmented generation (RAG), companies providing multimodal embeddings — a way to transform data to RAG-readable files — advise enterprises to start small when starting with embedding images and videos.  Multimodal RAG, RAG that can also surface a variety of file types from text, images or videos, relies on embedding models that transform data into numerical representations that AI models can read. Embeddings that can process all kinds of files let enterprises find information from financial graphs, product catalogs or just any informational video they have and get a more holistic view of their company.  Cohere, which updated its embeddings model, Embed 3, to process images and videos last month, said enterprises need to prepare their data differently, ensure suitable performance from the embeddings, and better use multimodal RAG. “Before committing extensive resources to multimodal embeddings, it’s a good idea to test it on a more limited scale. This enables you to assess the model’s performance and suitability for specific use cases and should provide insights into any adjustments needed before full deployment,” a blog post from Cohere staff solutions architect Yann Stoneman said.  The company said many of the processes discussed in the post are present in many other multimodal embedding models. Stoneman said, depending on some industries, models may also need “additional training to pick up fine-grain details and variations in images.” He used medical applications as an example, where radiology scans or photos of microscopic cells require a specialized embedding system that understands the nuances in those kinds of images. Data preparation is key Before feeding images to a multimodal RAG system, these must be pre-processed so the embedding model can read them well.  Images may need to be resized so they’re all a consistent size, while organizations need to figure out if they want to improve low-resolution photos so important details don’t get lost or make too high-resolution pictures a lower quality so it doesn’t strain processing time.  “The system should be able to process image pointers (e.g. URLs or file paths) alongside text data, which may not be possible with text-based embeddings. To create a smooth user experience, organizations may need to implement custom code to integrate image retrieval with existing text retrieval,” the blog said.  Multimodal embeddings become more useful  Many RAG systems mainly deal with text data because using text-based information as embeddings is easier than images or videos. However, since most enterprises hold all kinds of data, RAG which can search pictures and texts has become more popular. Organizations often had to implement separate RAG systems and databases, preventing mixed-modality searches.  Multimodal search is nothing new, as OpenAI and Google offer the same on their respective chatbots. OpenAI launched its latest generation of embeddings models in January. Other companies also provide a way for businesses to harness their different data for multimodal RAG. For example, Uniphore released a way to help enterprises prepare multimodal datasets for RAG. source