David Ting

Digital Age Assurance Act Claims its First Victim. MidnightBSD Modifies License to Exclude California Residents Effective 2027 Over Age Verification Mandates. Full details here: https://lnkd.in/ghTJziPa #MidnightBSD #DigitalAgeAssuranceAct #AB1043 #California #BSD #Unix #Announcement #Policy

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Podonos just raised $2.4 million in pre-seed funding, and the signal is loud and clear: the voice AI industry finally has someone measuring the sound, not just making the noise. Based in Los Gatos, Podonos is building the infrastructure layer that decides whether voice AI feels real, human, and ready for primetime. The industry is racing toward a projected $47.5 billion by 2034, but growth without standards is chaos. Podonos is making sure the hype actually holds up when you press play. At the center is ✦Soohyun Bae, PhD in Computer Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and Y Combinator W22 alumnus. His track record stretches from engineering roles at Google Maps to leading AR mapping at Niantic, plus co-founding Bobidi and TickTock AI. He has seen what happens when technology scales without proper #guardrails. With Podonos, he's betting the future of AI isn't just about how smart the models get, but how believable and trustworthy they sound. Podonos evaluates models across naturalness, similarity, emotion, recognition accuracy, pronunciation, tone, and resilience. Add in #personaconsistency, and suddenly you're not just testing machines, you're testing their ability to pass as human. The twist? They deliver results in under twelve hours, when the legacy approach drags on for two months. In AI time, that's the difference between relevance and irrelevance. Investors caught the beat. Serac Ventures, led by Kevin Moore, took the lead, backed by NAVER D2SF, the venture arm of South Korea's NAVER, and KAIST Venture Investment Holdings. Together, they've now backed Podonos twice, with this $2.4 million round stacking on top of a $750,000 raise in March 2025. Total funding sits at $3.15 million, and every dollar is pointed toward scaling #engineering, refining #analysistools, and launching into the U.S., Europe, and Southeast Asia. This isn't theory. Podonos already serves Resemble AI, Play AI, and Sanas AI, hitting six-digit ARR by November 2024 with just four employees. Their secret weapon is reach: 150,000 evaluators spread across nine languages and thirteen locales, forming a human-in-the-loop platform that blends speed, rigor, and global coverage. That reach lets Podonos deliver evaluations at a scale and pace that no competitor has matched. The strategy is ambitious: expand into high-demand sectors like #healthcare, #finance, #gaming, and #advertising, then move beyond voice into #multimodal model evaluation, spanning video AI and large language models. The mission isn't just to check if AI works, it's to decide if AI works for people. #Startups #StartupFunding #EarlyStage #VentureCapital #PreSeed #AI #AIInfrastructure #Voice #VoiceAI #VoiceTech #Infrastructure #Technology #Innovation #TechEcosystem #StartupEcosystem #Hiring #TechHiring If software engineering peace of mind is what you crave, Vention is your zen.

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Santa Clara-based Upscale AI has launched with over $100 million in seed funding to build an open-standard AI networking platform. Upscale AI is a networking company creating hardware and software solutions to make AI more accessible. The company challenges today's closed, proprietary systems by pioneering open-standard networking technology, providing high-performance connectivity for AI training, inference, and cloud deployments. The round was co-led by Mayfield and Maverick Silicon, with participation from StepStone Group, Celesta Capital, Xora, Qualcomm Ventures, and others. The funding will support the launch of its new suite of open AI-native infrastructure solutions this fall. Congratulations to founders Barun Kar and Rajiv K., and the Upscale AI team. Tech Funding News: https://lnkd.in/dxmJNicd Deals like this are reshaping the AI landscape. For weekly analysis on the funding, valuations, and strategic moves that matter, subscribe to the Charted Growth newsletter: chartedgrowth.beehiiv.com #AI #Networking #Infrastructure #OpenSource #SeedFunding #DeepTech #VentureCapital

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Looking forward to speaking at AI4 2026 (Aug 4–6, Las Vegas). AI discussions often focus on models. In production systems, the harder problem is decisions — multiple services and agents acting on slightly different state, leading to conflicting outcomes. I’ll talk about the operational context layer needed so automated decisions can actually be trusted in workflows like payments, trading, and security. Hope to see you there.

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THE "GODZILLA EL NIÑO" IS COMING: WHY CALIFORNIA’S RESILIENCE GAP MUST CLOSE NOW Scientists are forecasting a "Godzilla El Niño" hitting California by winter 2026-2027. There is already a 62% chance of a super El Niño by this summer. We are looking at record-breaking heat waves this spring, followed by torrential rain, flooding, and coastal erosion when winter arrives. Here is what concerns me: California's wildfire-scarred hillsides become massive mudslide zones when heavy rain hits burned terrain. In Berkeley alone, half of the 8,000 fire-zone properties currently have code violations. Under the status quo, these are only checked once per year. We cannot inspect our way out of a "Godzilla" event with annual visits. I've spent the last year building PROJECT TRINETRA to help communities prepare BEFORE the disaster, not just respond after. HOW IT WORKS: Residents lead their own safety. Using a browser-based AI model running entirely on their phone, they can check for fire and flood hazards—vegetation clearance, combustible materials, and drainage issues. INTEGRITY BY DESIGN: • PRIVACY-FIRST: Photos never leave the device. No cloud. No third-party surveillance. • SCALED CAPACITY: Routine data is verified by residents; expert eyes are routed only to the 15-20% of properties that truly need them. • 12X FREQUENCY: Same inspectors. Same budget. Constant vigilance. With a Godzilla El Niño on the horizon, the question isn't whether communities should prepare. It's whether we'll give them the tools to do it in time. Building this as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (UNRAVEL THE LOVE) because the communities that need this most shouldn't be locked behind a SaaS "paywall." If you work in disaster resilience, civic tech, or municipal government—I'd love to connect. #DisasterPreparedness #CivicTech #BuildingInPublic #CommunityResilience #AIforGood #ProjectTrinetra 🔹 SEE THE GAP: Below, on the left, a single inspector visits one home. On the right, thousands of residents use the app to verify their own safety, creating a resilient mesh of data for the city.

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According to: https://lnkd.in/gusS_9Cs (from phys dot org) A new record of 50 Qubits has been set for a Universal Quantum Simulator. The highlights of the requirements needed to achieve this feat include 16,384 Nvidia GH200 superchips, 16+ petabytes of RAM, and new innovative data bus connectivity architectures. The resulting system can perform calculations at FP64 precision, definitely not a corner cut. Lots of performance data is included but it would be interesting to understand what the physical and energy footprint is. Full paper: https://lnkd.in/gtBbK5yM #quantumsimulator #quantumcomputing #exascalesupercomputer #Julichsupercomputingcenter

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Today marks the final day of NVIDIA GTC in Silicon Valley, an event that has experienced significant growth. Downtown San Jose is bustling with participants, highlighting the pervasive influence of AI as it disrupts various industries. EdgeNectar is at the forefront, pioneering AI for private 5G zero-touch operation. This plug-and-play solution enables enterprise AI applications with low latency, providing reliable and secure connectivity.

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RFdiffusion2 now available! Atomic-level scaffolding for complex active sites Try it out on Tamarind Bio now: https://lnkd.in/ghapF6ak RFdiffusion2 shows state-of-the-art atomic-level scaffolding that generalizes to complex, multi-island active sites, and it reliably yields active enzymes with modest screening, though activities are still below the best native enzymes and should improve with richer theozymes and sequence/pocket co-design. In a curated benchmark of 41 Atomic Motif Enzyme benchmark spanning EC 1–5 with ligands and atomic constraints. RFdiffusion2 produced at least one success for 41/41 cases vs 16/41 for prior RFdiffusion. Where success is defined as catalytic-atom heavy-atom RMSD <1.5 Å in prediction and no ligand clashes. RFdiffusion2 is a generative model that directly scaffolds atomic active-site descriptions (theozymes) without pre-specifying residue indices or side-chain rotamers. It can infer indices and rotamers jointly, control ligand burial via per-atom RASA labels, steer pocket orientation with an ORI pseudo-atom, and complete partial ligands during generation. Disclaimer: The code released by the authors is still early, we will be updating as changes are made. Movie credit: Institute for Protein Design, University of Washington —————— Tamarind Bio is the leading library of the best molecular design tools, including RFdiffusion2, AlphaFold, Boltz, and hundreds more!

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DeepSeek-V3.2 is also available on Atlas Cloud now. We worked with SGLang to fix tool-use in non-streaming mode. The model now supports tool_call, tool_choice, response_format and reasoning. Price: $0.28/M Input & $0.4/M Output. Try it on Atlas Cloud: https://lnkd.in/gUb9i_B8

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Thank Dani Cherkassky Great piece on the architecture shift voice AI needs. The core thesis: cloud-centric voice systems fail in real-world conditions because they are too slow, too expensive to keep always-on, and deaf to spatial context. The solution is a hybrid architecture—fast, always-on edge processing (Spatial Hearing AI and Cognition AI) handling 80% of interactions locally, with cloud LLMs reserved for complex reasoning. But the Kahneman thesis runs deeper than the article suggests. System 1 and System 2 are not just useful metaphors—they reflect an actual biological sequence. Fast, intuitive processing (System 1) evolved first; slow, deliberate reasoning (System 2) was layered on top. The brain's architecture reflects this: spatial-acoustic processing happens in milliseconds at the brainstem and primary auditory cortex, long before language centers engage. Kardome is not just borrowing Kahneman as marketing. Their architecture is neurologically correct—it replicates the hierarchical, parallel, spatially-aware processing that makes human auditory cognition so robust. Here is the deeper point: hearing preceded language in human evolution, and spatial hearing preceded both. The mammalian auditory system evolved to detect predators and locate prey—survival functions that required sub-second latency and continuous environmental awareness. Language processing was layered on top of this infrastructure. Current voice AI inverts this evolutionary logic: it starts with language models and treats spatial audio as an afterthought. Kardome restores the natural hierarchy. 🙌 Danny Shapiro, Rory Sutherland

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Happy Friday! 🖼️ A picture is worth a thousand words! ☺️ This is the latest data from our Central Plant AI optimization solution running at California State University-Dominguez Hills Kenny Seeton. Pretty exciting that we've confirmed that it takes our AI/ML/RL platform a total of TEN (10) days, from “scratch, to completely RE-discover the data points needed, classify them, "map" them, build its OWN model, train itself, and INCREASE the Central Plant efficiency by FORTY-EIGHT PERECNT! From 0.81 kW/ton down to 0.39 kW/ton! 🚷 NO human intervention! Below is a snapshot of the CP. Restart 5/5/25. We deleted ALL of the learnings from the last 2 1/2 years. About 2GB. 1 week baseline. 10 days RL. Notable observations: 1. Even though the Plant Efficiency increased by 48%, the Chiller is STILL "holding" the CHW-S temp set-point of 47 DEG F (46.5 DEG F Actual). 2. The one-thousand TON (rated) JCI/York YMC2 Chiller is "putting out" 668 TONS of cooling (67% of its RATED capacity), YET the Chiller itself is only "loaded up" 39.4%! This means the Chillers CAPACITY (output) INCREASED significantly. 3. The original BMS algorithm was programmed to set the CW Temp to Outside Air Wet-Bulb (OA-WB) PLUS five (5) degrees. Which is standard practice, and has been, for decades. However, our AI trained itself and controlled the CW Temp everywhere from +4 degrees above OA-WB to TWENTY-FOUR (+24) degrees above OA-WB. And everywhere in between. Every five (5) minutes. 288 cycles (solutions) per day. The new set-point is computed and sent from the cloud. Takes 4-5 secs. Let's talk about "guardrails". 😉 YES! 😁 They're there. Low: 60.0 DEG F to a High: 90.0 DEG F. In fact, these same "guardrails" are typically already IN PLACE, with your existing BMS logic. AND there's mechanical safeties, ON the Chiller(s) and equipment. We take the safety and security of your organization VERY seriously. But here's the thing about facil.ai: How can you TRUST our AI? Because you can TRUST the people who built it! And install it. Our partners are the same BMS service providers, consultants, mechanical contractors, ESCOs, Property Managers, Peers and friends: Who are serving you right now! Ready to learn more? Contact us: https://lnkd.in/gVutYEiX Want to explore being a partner? https://lnkd.in/gigtx2vx Want to invest in the future of AI Digital Technology? We're putting together a crowdfunding growth round with StartEngine https://lnkd.in/gwcSRR3b Please sign up on the list if interested: https://lnkd.in/gJ_2yCr3 Let's start a conversation! I'm always ready to "talk shop" 🤗 Shoot me a note on LinkedIn or e-mail: keith@facil-ai.com 🦄 We’re thrilled to be in conversations with several large infrastructure companies as partners or acquirers. Inquiries to our interim CTO John Majeski BUILD🛠️GROW📈FUND💰EXIT🦄 ❤️ Our customers love us! 🚀 facil.ai is proud to be a Portola Valley Partners portfolio company. #innovation #technology #management #creativity #future

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