Black-owned startup Robin AI has raised $26 million in new funding for its next growth and global expansion phase. RobinAI The AI-driven contract editor is the brainchild of former Clifford Chance lawyer Richard Robinson and former machine learning research scientist James Clough. Founded in 2019, Robin AI uses generative AI to automate and speed up the process of drafting and negotiating contracts and extracting information from across entire contract repositories through simple search. The startup trained its machine learning model on data from 4.5 million legal documents with input from in-house lawyers to create
The StoryGraph, a Black woman-owned cataloging web platform for books, took to X, formerly Twitter, announcing they have had to take their platform offline to upgrade its servers. The StoryGraph The StoryGraph, founded by Nadia Odunayo, is a competitor of Amazon-owned social cataloging platform Goodreads as it uses a freemium model, with some features only available in a subscription plan. Founded in 2019, StoryGraph was initially a side project for tracking books. After studying at Oxford University, Odunayo went into the world of software engineering but, in 2019, decided to work
To commemorate the 30th anniversary of The Notorious B.I.G.’s debut single “Juicy”, Warner Music Group (WMG) has collaborated with The Sandbox, a leading decentralized gaming virtual world. Together, they are bringing the iconic hip-hop artist to life in today’s virtual world through the Metaverse experience “Breakin’ B.I.G.” as a nod to the beloved side-scrolling games of the 1990s. Breakin’ B.I.G. Notorious B.I.G. released his debut album “Ready to Die” 30 years ago, which featured the song Juicy, selling 6 million copies and is widely regarded as one of the greatest
This year’s top stories reflect the challenges, opportunities, and dynamic changes in the tech industry and broader society. Unsurprisingly, many of these years’ top stories concern the boom in generative AI, from developing the “BlackGPT” to concerns around the historical and present-day harms and philosophies underpinning AI developments. We’ve also shared stories of Black innovation, Latine entrepreneurship, workplace wins and challenges, collective triumph, and personal tragedy. Here are the ten stories that resonated with you, our POCIT readers, the most this year. 10. Cash App’s Appeal in the Black Community
Orka, a Chicago-based health tech firm, is redefining the hearing aid industry with its innovative Orka hearing aid. Founded in 2018 by Ben Sun, Chauncey Lu, Linkai Li, and Xinke Liu, Orka aims not only to enhance hearing but also to make hearing aids as user-friendly and desirable as AirPods. Birthed from personal experience During a family visit to China in 2017, Ben Sun, CEO, observed his grandmother struggling with her hearing. He told Forbes that after spending $1000 on hearing aids for her, she stopped using them after a
Implementing artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace could widen the racial wealth gap between Black and white households in the US by $43 billion, research has suggested. McKinsey & Co. stated that generative AI (gen AI) has initiated a seismic shift in work and value creation. When this happens, and a new technology appears, it can create or exacerbate divides, including the racial wealth gap. They explored how many gen AI may affect Black communities and Black workers. A Divide In Black And White Households The research found that new
The University of Washington’s recent study on Stable Diffusion, a popular AI image generator, reveals concerning biases in its algorithm. The research, led by doctoral student Sourojit Ghosh and assistant professor Aylin Caliskan, was presented at the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and published on the pre-print server arXiv. The Three Key Issues The report picked up on three key issues and concerns surrounding Stable Diffusion, including gender and racial stereotypes, geographic stereotyping, and the sexualization of women of color. Gender and Racial Stereotypes The AI
Anguilla, an internally self-governing overseas territory of the UK, is making £3 million ($3.8M) per month from its .ai domain. Anguilla, the British territory in the Caribbean, has fewer than 20,000 people on the island. However, its code top-level domain (ccTLD) is wanted by many for AI startups. “I knew way back that .ai could end up being used for AI, that it could be valuable someday. But it was a question of when right?” Vincent Cate, president at DataHaven.Net Ltd, which handles sales of the .ai domain for the
Rite Aid will be banned from using AI-powered facial recognition technology for five years as it disproportionately impacts people of color. The US pharmacy chain deployed AI-based facial recognition technology from 2012 to 2020 to identify shoplifters. However, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a complaint against the company. Rite Aid’s Facial Recognition Tech According to the FTC, Rite Aid has used facial recognition technology in hundreds of its retail pharmacy locations to identify patrons previously deemed likely to engage in shoplifting or other criminal behavior. The technology captured images of all
Latimer, the innovative AI platform named after the African-American inventor Lewis Latimer, has taken a significant step towards making generative AI more inclusive and historically accurate. The platform announced an exclusive content license agreement with the New York Amsterdam News, one of the nation’s most influential and oldest continuously published Black newspapers. Historically Accurate Training Data Amsterdam News has been a pioneering force in Black journalism since 1909. The newspaper is also known for its innovative approaches and significant milestones, such as being the first Black newspaper unionized in all departments.
