There Is a New Player in Town
and its Name is Juno.
Juno the month old, New York-based
ride-sharing service is seeking around $30 million in round funding, seeking a “high”
valuation. Its CEO Talmon Marco seems to be intent on taking down the all-powerful
ride-sharing company Uber. Considering that he sold his last company, Viber for
$900 million, it seems like he might just well be able to.
According to Marco he has a wait-list 6
months long full of eager drivers with 4.7-5 star rankings from Uber and Lyft
waiting to join his team. Juno also states that it will only take a 10% cut
from its driver compare to Uber which takes around 20%. It seems like Juno is
trying to be the go to company for all the mad and angry drivers who felt
abused by Uber/Lyft.
Snapchat is paying $100 million
for an emoji startup
Snapchat has apparently bought Bitstrips, a
company that makes personalized emojis. That’s right a 4 year old startup is
buying another startup that’s 5 years older than it. Bitstrips started off as a
way to make personalized comics, but slowly pivoted to making avatars/emojis
that can look eerie similar to the users that create them. There is no mention
on what Snapchat is going to do with Bitstrips, but I assume it is going to
advance its felts and texts.
Racist AI
You might have heard of Microsoft’s new AI
chat bot, hat was short lived, and taken down because of the incredibly racist
message it responded to questions over twitter. Microsoft introduced “Tay” on
Wednesday, as a bot that responds to users’ questions, and respond in a casual
pattern similar to a stereotypical millennial. The aim was to “experiment with
and conduct research on conversational understand.” But because of the internet
Tay was quickly persuaded to use racial slurs, defending white-supremacist
propaganda, and even called out for genocide. As a one highly publicized
mentioned “bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have
done a better job than the monkey we have now. donald trump is the only hope
we've got." In another, responding to a question, she said, "ricky
gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism.”
Microsoft has now taken Tay offline for some upgrades and deleted many of its
terrible tweets. Gives you a perspective doesn’t it? Microsoft wanted to create
an AI that mimics the way people speak and act, and in less than 24 hours it
becomes like this, what does that say about us as humans?
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