Does the Republican Party still believe in American leadership abroad' May 17, 2024 The United States Congress took six months to approve a supplemental spending bill that includes aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. The drama, legislative maneuvering, and threats to remove a second speaker of the House of Representatives have left reasonable people asking what, exactly, is going on with Republican legislators: Have they recognized the perilous state of the world and the importance of U.S....
Generative AI (GenAI) innovations are coming fast and furious. Progress is happening at such a rapid pace that the barriers to entry ' and adoption ' are falling away, and work that once required specialized teams or outside suppliers is now in reach. Enterprise employees are completing a variety of tasks ' writing, coding, analyzing, making predictions ' more quickly and with fewer in-house skills than ever before. But using GenAI across the business ' the elusive holy grail of this technology epoch ' is a different story. Organizations envision building solutions to make workflows across business teams and functions more productive, but the journey is proving longer and more expensive than expected. The dirty little secret of generative AI is that executives are struggling to integrate the technology piece-parts and get consistently accurate output from their solutions. They're also making hard tradeoffs between cost and scalability. Copilot-type solutions targeted at individuals do an amazing job at discrete personal tasks: bootstrapping sales emails, getting a blog started, and doing research. But they're one-off in nature, and the generated output is untethered from the business. They don't scale in a setting that relies on consistent data, knowledge, messaging, and other important business markers, so their value is limited. On the other end, there are fantastic AI solutions that streamline enterprise processes (think auditing expense reports or automating supply chains). They massively reduce tedious work and errors, but they also tap out in value because they're honed for a single process and lack broad applicability....
This is a monthly feature that runs down some of the most-active investors in U.S.-based companies, looks at some of their most interesting investments, and includes some odds and ends of who spent what. See March's most-active startup investors here. The top five firms investing in U.S.-based startups were a who's who of venture: Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Lux Capital and Founders Fund. Those five firms made a combined 46 investments in U.S. startups in April. The firm led Collaborative Robotics' $100 million Series B and took part in Ramp's $150 million round that valued the startup at $7.65 billion (actually, every firm on this list took part in that round). Also similar to General Catalyst, it took part in the rounds for Collaborative Robotics and Ramp (which it actually co-led). Khosla also participated in Varda's $90 million Series B. The San Francisco-based startup manufactures pharmaceuticals in space in microgravity that may not be cost-effective to make on the ground....
