Roads Optional: Self-Driving Startups Accelerate Beyond Pavement

In the self-driving startup race, roads are becoming optional. Venture capital and military investments are propelling companies that envision a future where roads are no longer a necessity while Microsoft prepares for the Developer Conference in this week

All this and more in today’s newsletter

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• A niche is emerging in the autonomous vehicle technology sector, fueled by a new crop of early-stage startups and recent venture capital investments. Unlike companies focused on robotaxis for city streets, these startups are taking their technology off-road. Notable examples include Seattle-based Overland AI, which is developing a self-driving system for military operations without relying on detailed maps or extensive training data, and New Brunswick-based Potential, which creates advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) for off-road environments

• AI Assistants are adopting personalities similar to ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. While these systems can sound more human by mimicking speech patterns, hopefully Apple will focus on making Siri more efficient without imitating a human personality. The goal is to strike a balance between intelligence and privacy, avoiding the pitfalls seen in other AI assistants

• Microsoft’s Build developer conference kicks off on Tuesday, giving the company the opportunity to showcase its latest artificial intelligence projects, following high-profile events this month hosted by OpenAI and Google

• The 2024 Disruptor 50 list showcases private companies that redefine disruption, with AI leading new business models beyond the traditional “better, faster, cheaper” innovation. Notably, OpenAI retains its top spot for the second year in a row.

Productivity Tools

• Notion AI : Turn ideas into actionwith Notion’s AI-powered workspace

• Deepl : A high-quality translation tool, which can give run for money to its big corporate tools cousins

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• Zapier : No more waiting for developers to bring order to your apps. Use Zapier to tame the chaos with automation and accomplish more with less work

• Faraday.dev : Generate text from a number of LLM models without installation and locally. Alpaca, LLaMA 2, Vicuna, Vigogne, Wizard

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