Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Tech companies. Consumer demand remains strong despite economic headwinds in some parts of the world. Amazon’s quarterly sales jumped 11%, Airbnb revenue was up 18%, and shoppers in China and India helped offset a U.S. revenue slowdown for Apple.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Tech workers. Layoffs are paying off for executives and shareholders. After letting go of thousands of employees, Amazon’s operating income more than doubled. Meanwhile, unionizing workers at Google and eBay filed unfair labor practice charges against them.

Amount the U.S. Federal Trade Commission fined a group of robocall scammers, which it alleges made more than five billion fraudulent calls during a three-month span in 2021.

History suggests it’s unlikely the FTC will ever collect the record-breaking sum. From 2015 to 2019, it ordered violators of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act to pay over $200 million in fines and other charges, but it was able to collect just $6,790 of that amount. No wonder robocalls remain such a nuisance.

Sachin Subramanian and Philip Kung are the co-founders of generative AI startup Sweetspot, a search engine that uses large language models to look for specific U.S. government contracts — a $650 billion business.

Reed: Tech companies are increasingly looking for government contracts and there are geopolitical reasons for that. What’s a real world example?

Subramanian: The government is trying to install a lot of facial recognition software of late. The contracts on Sam.gov are titled with very obscure names. Sometimes people just say, ‘software needed to detect x and y.’ But with our software, if you just type in ‘facial recognition,’ it matches businesses with all those relevant contracts.

Sometimes the government has some data that they need analyzed. Businesses have a tough time finding these contracts because there are so many things they could type in and it takes a while to find all these relevant contracts.

Q: How does it work? Do you do a bunch of training on the language used in government contracts or can you plug in existing models like GPT?

Subramanian: We pre-process the publicly available government data in our unique way, such that it allows search terms to get easily filtered out by our AI. So the AI is able to understand this data better.

Q: What does pre-process mean?

Kung: Our secret sauce is being able to determine what’s relevant, what’s not relevant in a contract. Roughly 80% of it is things like general amendments or best practices, but it has nothing to do with what the government wants. We’re able to extract that relevant 20% and that reduces a lot of noise.

Q: What made you want to do this?

Subramanian: We had a friend who worked at a real estate firm in LA and his job was to bid on commercial real estate contracts that were put out by the government. He explained how much of a hassle this was. You couldn’t just go on Sam.gov and magically type in commercial real estate in Los Angeles and expect to get any relevant results.

Q: So is that the target customer?

Kung: I think it really helps with small to medium-sized businesses. There’s so many contracts being uploaded to Sam.gov, from real estate to medical care to different parts for automobiles. And those are the kinds of things that are hard to find.

This is a great example. We typed in Orange Is the New Black into our search engine. It came back with federal prison contracts, specifically for women’s prisons. It shows that the AI is not looking for specific keywords because it understands that Orange Is the New Black is a show about women’s prisons.

For the rest of the conversation, read here.

Corporate executives working on artificial intelligence are anxious about the technology, but the majority still plan to incorporate generative AI into their businesses over the next year, according to a survey of senior AI professionals at large companies conducted by Dataiku and Databricks. Professionals from the Asia-Pacific region are the most enthusiastic about tools like ChatGPT and the least concerned about their potential downsides.

“They were trying to tell me that AI could make a voice that sounds just like me. But it’s not me, because I’m amazing. I’m like, is this AI thing going to be amazing too? Because I am naturally, organically amazing. I’m one of a kind. So actually, I would love to see that thing try to duplicate this motherf–ker.”

— Rapper Lil Wayne in a Billboard interview on Wednesday.

We’re all scientists now: Earlier this week, we highlighted the buzz around LK-99, and now the race to recreate the substance has become a global frenzy on social media. It’s roped in researchers from advanced laboratories, tech entrepreneurs, livestreamers, and even a Twitter user nicknamed “Russian anime catgirl.”

The saga started late last month, when a group of Korean researchers uploaded a study claiming they had created a superconductor that can run at room temperature and ambient pressure, a potentially huge physics breakthrough that could revolutionize computer science and many other industries. They said they achieved the feat using a lead and copper material called LK-99.

Since it’s made from relatively mundane substances, scientists and DIY hobbyists around the world started trying to make their own versions of LK-99. They filmed and documented every step of the process on sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, and TikTok. A video of a purported attempt by researchers at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China received over 10 million views on the video site Bilibili since it was uploaded on Tuesday.

It’s not yet clear if LK-99 is the real deal, and some people trying to replicate the Korean scientists’ work have gotten mixed results. But the effort demonstrates how scientific research now happens in the age of the internet. People are no longer willing to wait for experts to publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals; they demand to see experiments unfolding in real time. That means there’s more misleading information floating around, but it also suggests that human progress will be more open, transparent, and collaborative in the future.

— Louise

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