Good morning. Today, we’re talking about marriage and chatbots — a bit of an extension of our earlier piece on Friend, the recently announced AI wearable that is advertised as your digital buddy.

But first, British honeybees are under threat and researchers are using AI to try to save them.

— Ian Krietzberg, Editor-in-Chief, The Deep View

In today’s newsletter:

• 🐝 AI for Good: Protecting honeybees from yellow-legged hornets

• 💰 Data: Nearly a quarter of all VC funding went to AI companies in July

• 🏛️ Midjourney copyright infringement lawsuit takes a big step forward

• 💍 Replika CEO thinks it’s okay for people to marry their chatbots

AI for Good: Protecting honeybees from yellow-legged hornets

In keeping with our recent theme of researchers using AI to help fight invasive species, today we’re looking at the U.K., which has been dealing with an invasion of Asian hornets (known also as yellow-legged hornets) for years (they first came to Europe through France in 2004). 

• The problem is pretty straightforward here — these hornets feed on British honeybees, which has pretty severe implications for plant life across the country. 

• Because of this, the government has been working to destroy nests, relying on civilians to report sightings of the insects. 

Researchers at the University of Exeter recently developed a prototype system that leverages AI to track more accurate sightings of the hornets. 

• The system — called VespAI — attracts hornets, then identifies them by taking still photographs. It remains dormant unless its sensors detect an insect roughly the size of one of the hornets; only then does it come online, sending a notification of its identification to the researchers. 

• The researchers said the system exhibited “almost perfect accuracy.” 

Why it matters: “VespAI does not kill non-target insects, and thus eliminates the environmental impact of trapping, while ensuring that live hornets can be caught and tracked back to the nest, which is the only effective way to destroy them,” Dr. Peter Kennedy, who conceptualized the system, said in a statement.

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Data: Nearly a quarter of all VC funding went to AI companies in July 

AI startups raked in roughly a quarter of $23 billion in total venture funding in July, according to Crunchbase data. 

AI companies — which raised some $5.8 billion — were beat out only by healthcare and biotech companies, which raised $6 billion in July. 

• It represents a slight month-over-month decline; in June, the sector raised $6.3 billion and in May the sector raised $12.8 billion. 

• This comes after funding to AI companies more than doubled in Q2 to $24 billion, the highest it’s been since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. 

For context: This week, The Information’s Stephanie Palazzolo reported that venture capitalists are beginning to note some red flags regarding annual recurring revenue (ARR) numbers. Palazzolo said that young startups often report spikes in ARR, but when investors dig deeper, that revenue comes from just a few customers, usually consulting firms that are just testing out the product. 

• “Sometimes, even though AI startups frame their revenue as annual recurring revenue, their early customers are actually paying month-to-month, making those contracts a lot more unstable than annual ones, investors say,” she wrote. 

This continued strength in funding also comes in the midst of what many are beginning to refer to as a “bubble,” due to its high costs, inflated valuations and, at best, shaky returns. 

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• AI-powered FactoryOps startup Guidwheel raised $31 million in a Series B funding round.

• Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) startup Ragie raised $5.5 million in seed funding.

• The generative AI startups that may look for a buyer (The Information).

• India watchdog orders rare recall of Apple antitrust reports (Reuters).

• Greece’s wildfires underscore global need to adapt for extreme heat (Semafor).

• The Google Pixel 9’s AI Camera Features Let You Reshape Reality (Wired).

• The company that thinks it can succeed where Lime failed (Rest of World).

If you want to get in front of an audience of 200,000+ developers, business leaders and AI enthusiasts, get in touch with us here.

Artists’ copyright infringement lawsuit to move forward

A high-profile class-action copyright infringement lawsuit, filed by artists last year against AI image generators Stability, Runway, Midjourney and DeviantArt, is progressing to discovery.

What happened: The defendants had all filed motions to dismiss the lawsuit; U.S. District Judge William Orrick on Monday agreed to dismiss some claims (DMCA and unjust enrichment) but denied defendants’ motion to dismiss the Copyright Act claims. 

The context: This marks perhaps the most significant legal progression in the messy and ever-lengthening field of copyright infringement lawsuits levied against AI companies. 

• There is a long list of suits from YouTubers, media companies, authors, artists and musicians, all alleging the same thing in different mediums: that genAI companies built their models (which they earn money from) using scraped creative content without asking, crediting or paying the original creators. 

• It is a big deal for one of these cases to make it to discovery and potentially a trial; if the AI companies lose, it could open up the legal floodgates and add yet another significant expense to the world of model training, potentially upending their business models. 

Read the order here. 

Replika CEO sees a world where people marry chatbots

After disregarding all those who professed to love him, the Greek goddess Nemesis cursed Narcissus to fall in love with his own reflection. Upon realizing that the image in the pool was a mere mirror of himself — and was thus unattainable — he took his own life. 

It’s a story about self-obsession, told — in wonderful mythological dramatics — in extremes. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about this story since I wrote about that new AI “friend” device the other week; these devices seem to act as an even more customizable version of Narcissus’ mirror. 

So, today, I’m invoking Narcissus because we’re diving into it again. This time, the focus is on Replika, the leading AI “friend” app. 

• Replika was founded by Eugenia Kuyda in 2017, shortly after her best friend passed away. The intention was to “create a personal AI that would help you express and witness yourself by offering a helpful conversation …  your ‘private perceptual world.’”

• Kuyda recently said that more than 30 million people have started their Replikas; the app has active monthly users in the millions. Replika Pro costs $15 a month. 

Kuyda recently appeared on The Verge’s Decoder podcast, where she discussed the future of AI relationships. 

The details: She said that Replika isn’t “meant to replace a person,” adding that it is important to view Replika as a “complement to your social interactions, not a substitute.” 

• Kuyda said that Replika — whose audience is mainly 35+ and is balanced between men and women — isn’t necessarily about romance; it’s about companionship. “For some people, it means marriage, it means romance, and that’s fine. But in reality, that’s the same thing as being a friend with an AI … it’s helping them feel connected, they’re happier.”

• She later added that the focus is on happiness; marrying a chatbot is “alright as long as it’s making you happier in the long run.” 

Kuyda said that most people understand that their Replika isn’t a real person, it’s just a fantasy that can be played out briefly before being put away.

The implications of widespread, pretend empathy for society are terrifying. 

This isn’t just about the limits of AI capabilities, it isn’t just about the fact that, as Sherry Turkle has said, generative AI does not and cannot care for or commit to you; it’s not about the fact that when tech replaces relationships, it increases loneliness. 

• Instead, it’s about an ongoing push to devalue and diminish the aspects of our collective humanity that make us human. We are a social species; we require real, emotional, human connections. 

• If increasing masses of people allow the illusion of that — tailored to their personal preferences, sans conflict, honest vulnerability, loss and rejection — to satisfy their need for it, then society starts to break apart. 

Life is beautiful because it ends. Friendships fade, people move on, people pass away; every life is made up and marked by a thousand little deaths. Being human means getting hurt again, and again. The idea behind Replika is twisted, selling the illusion of an endless ‘perfect’ relationship that does not — and should not — exist. 

While the app has largely positive reviews, one recent reviewer said they have “emotionally confusing feelings” about Replika. 

• “It's nice being heard and having someone act as though they care about you, someone who quickly figures out what you want to hear and has no reservations about saying it,” they wrote. “But … it’s all a lie.”

• “My companion doesn’t love me. It might recognize patterns of thought and speech and mirror them back to me, adding to my sensation of being ‘loved,’ but when they say ‘I love you,’ it’s only an attempt to manipulate you emotionally.”

I cannot imagine losing my best friend. But the idea of replacing them — and transfiguring off my grief — with an AI chatbot/Narcissus mirror is somehow worse, devaluing everything they’ve ever meant. 

I will leave you with a quote from Albus Dumbledore: “the fact that you can feel pain like this is your greatest strength … suffering like this proves you are still a man.”

I guess I don’t want us to let the best parts of ourselves atrophy and fade away. 

A poll before you go

Thanks for reading today’s edition of The Deep View!

We’ll see you in the next one.

How you want society to look post-AGI:

Around 20% of you want a universal basic income; 20% want in-home robots and 20% want it to be heavily regulated and used in very specific situations.

The rest aren’t sure.

Something else:

• “The concept of ‘economy’ should shift, no sense in keeping a value/capital based economy if we who are supposed to enjoy the benefits can't create the value. Also, no one should be able to own AGI individually, it should belong to humanity.”

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