Chris Bee, a tech exec who previously worked at Lessen, Zillow, and Uber, joined AI email startup Superhuman as chief technology officer.

Bee was most recently CTO at Lessen, a property services management startup valued at more than $2 billion last year.

“I can’t be more excited to help build such a beloved product that gives people time back every day,” Bee wrote on LinkedIn.

San Francisco-based Superhuman raised $75 million in 2021 to fuel development of its email app that aims to streamline how people send, receive, and compose emails in clients including Gmail and Outlook. The company is now targeting enterprises.

Bee, who is based in Seattle, was previously a senior director at Zillow Group and a senior engineering manager at Uber.

Other key personnel changes across the Pacific Northwest tech industry:

— Tammy Perkins, a longtime HR executive based in Seattle, joined HR software provider ProService as chief people officer. Perkins previously held the same role at HAVI, and spent 13 years at Amazon. She also worked at PMI Worldwide, Fjuri, Appen, and Microsoft.

— Jonathan Klein, co-founder and former CEO of Seattle-based Getty Images, resigned from the company’s board last week. Klein, who helped launch the photo giant in 1995, stepped down as CEO in 2015, and left his chair role in 2018.

— Olly Downs, a longtime Seattle tech leader, was named chief technology and AI officer at Curinos. He joined the New York City-based fintech startup last year. Downs previously held exec roles at BARK, Zulily, and ZIllow Group. He founded and led Amplero, a Seattle marketing startup.

— Larry Hryb, who spent more than 20 years at Microsoft and became the de-facto face of Xbox, joined Unity as director of community at the game development giant.

“At Unity, I see a horizon brimming with potential,” Hryb wrote on LinkedIn. “Unity’s mission of empowering creative and business success of creators around the world across games, apps, and experiences aligns with my lifelong passion for innovation and community building.”

Hryb, also known as Major Nelson, stepped away from Microsoft last year. He was one of the main ambassadors of Xbox and also hosted the Official Xbox Podcast.

— Seattle logistics startup Pipe17 hired Ryan Powell as chief revenue officer. Powell previously worked at Ryder System, Whiplash, and Easyship.

— Chris Green joined the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Association as its first president. He was most recently assistant director for the Office of Economic Development and Competitiveness at the Washington state Department of Commerce.

— Portland, Ore.-based nonprofit Latino Founders named Juan Barraza as its new executive director. Barraza joined the organization’s board in 2019. He is currently director of innovation and entrepreneurship at VertueLab.

— Andrew Coté, vice president of strategy and growth at Seattle startup Brinc Drones, joined the Business Executives for National Security, a network of security business leaders based in Washington D.C.

— Karina Martija-Harris, previously a program manager at Washington Maritime Blue, Maritime Blue, joined the National Security Innovation Network as a program management analyst.

A new quiz from Seattle-based AI nonprofit TrueMedia tests how well people can spot deepfake images, videos and audio clips, highlighting the need for people to be aware of what’s real online content and what’s not as we head toward election season.

The quiz, released Thursday, assess a “deepfake IQ” after a user answers 10 questions with the option of choosing “real” or “fake” on a variety of politically related media.

It shows a photograph of President Biden standing with a WWII veteran, or a video of former President Donald Trump speaking at his recent trial in New York City. Other questions feature videos of Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Oren Etzioni is the founder and head of TrueMedia, which launched six months ago to develop a free, web-based, AI-powered tool that acts as a deepfake detector. A University of Washington professor and former CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, Etzioni said the main objective with such a quiz, beyond shedding light on TrueMedia, is to wake people up to what’s potentially circulating online.

“This is a major social problem, and most of us struggle with it,” Etzioni said, pointing to a November 2021 study published in the journal iScience on why people cannot reliably detect deepfakes.

New technology and advances in AI are making it increasingly easy to create convincing deepfakes. TrueMedia, which is nonpartisan, views this as a major concern ahead of a critically important election.

“Where it used to be that this was only something that state actors could do, now, unfortunately, anybody could do it,” Etzioni previously told GeekWire, adding his concern about the possibility of “a kind of disinformation terrorism.”

As a journalist who likes to consider himself fairly plugged in to current events, I leaned on that belief to see if it would help me with the quiz. I managed to score 80%, missing on one manipulated image that I thought was real and one video that I thought was fake. I also guessed on a couple, which proves that I didn’t really know if they were real or fake.

After selecting real or fake, the quiz provides the correct answer, with explainer text such as “this is a fake video … TrueMedia.org detected substantial evidence of manipulation.”

The New York Times also released a quiz in January, testing readers’ ability to identify real human faces and those generated by AI. I only guessed four correct answers out of 10 on that difficult test.

Asked what things people should key in on to help detect deepfakes, Etzioni said you can’t rely on the “naked eye,” and that a tool like TrueMedia will help when it’s broadly available to the public.

“In addition, I would encourage everyone to check their sources,” he said. “What is the origin of this social media post? This image? Is it bona fide?”

TrueMedia plans more quizzes and interactive features in the months ahead to raise awareness of the deepfake issue and, Etzioni said, to broaden the availability of tools to prevent the impact of that content in time for the upcoming elections.

Related:

• These startups are tackling deepfake and digital likeness issues spurred by generative AI
• After personal experience with cyberstalking, tech founder launches startup battling deepfake content

Amazon on Thursday announced that it has eliminated 95% of the inflated plastic pillows that it uses to cushion goods being shipped to its customers. It’s now largely using recycled paper as a filler.

The e-commerce giant said the move marks its “largest plastic packaging reduction effort in North America and will avoid nearly 15 billion plastic air pillows annually.”

“We are working towards full removal in North America by end of year and will continue to innovate, test, and scale in order to prioritize curbside recyclable materials,” said Pat Lindner, Amazon’s vice president of mechatronics and sustainable packaging, in a release announcing the news.

Environmental nonprofit Oceana cheered the news, and called on the company to go further.

“While this is a significant step forward for the company, Amazon needs to build on this momentum and fulfill its multiyear commitment to transition its North America fulfillment centers away from plastic,” said Matt Littlejohn, Oceana’s senior vice president of strategic initiatives, in a statement.

In an April report, Oceana estimated that Amazon had produced 208 million pounds of plastic packaging in 2022 in the U.S. If that total volume was turned into air pillows it would circle the Earth more than 200 times, according to the nonprofit.

The plastic pillows as well as the bubblewrap plastic mailers still in use by the company are typically not allowed in curbside recycling.

The company is planning to also replace those blue-and-white mailers with a paper product, Lindner told Bloomberg.

An unsuccessful shareholder proposal at Amazon’s annual meeting last month requested that the company explore how it could reduce its plastic footprint.

Amazon reported that in 2022 it had decreased by 11.6% its single-use plastic delivery packaging.

Much of its previous decline in plastic use came from changes in its operations overseas. In December, Amazon reported that it in Europe it had replaced its single-use plastic packaging for deliveries with 100% recyclable paper and cardboard packaging. The European Union has taken steps to ban disposable plastics in packaging and other uses over the next few years.

Amazon recently brought those efforts to the U.S., announcing in October 2023 that a fulfillment center in Ohio was its first facility to replace plastic packaging with recyclable paper options.

In a webinar Tuesday on the future of climate tech, Alan Neuhauser of Axios kicked off the questions by asking what it means to succeed in a burgeoning market where simply surviving is challenging enough. 

Mark Cupta, managing director at Prelude Ventures, said an essential win for a climate tech startup is having sufficient funds to buy enough time to get traction. Capital is flowing into mature sectors, Cupta said, but budding ventures need investments to stay afloat while they grow.

The online event focused on a recent report by Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) that explores the state of venture capital investing in the climate tech sector. The news was mixed. While deal activity in the climate tech industry was down 14% last year from a peak in 2021, it’s doing much better than the broader tech market, which fell by 24%.

Within climate tech, trajectories vary between sectors. Cupta noted that food and agriculture is “taking an absolute beating” after years of instability, whereas carbon capture and removal companies, and climate data startups have surged ahead in recent years.

The dip in funding for climate tech can create growth and longevity issues for companies with big dreams and high costs. But the report’s authors said the situation isn’t a cause for panic. They noted many hopeful trends in the data, and said that government incentives, particularly the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, continue to bolster growth in the sector. 

Panelists at the event, hosted by SVB, said companies that know how to get creative with funding sources and incentives stand out.

“They are using all the resources they have access to,” said Milo Werner, an investor and industrial strategist at NextGen Industry Group. 

All three panelists said that early stage companies should work with a target market in mind. 

“If you can guarantee that someone’s going to buy your product at a price, it’s a little easier to justify a factory to make it,” said Joshua Posamentier, managing partner and co-founder of Congruent Ventures. 

They also highlighted how important it is for companies to partner with financial backers who understand their vision and timeline, which can be a challenge for some hardware-intensive climate tech startups. Investors need to be more patient than they would be with faster-moving software companies. 

In the Pacific Northwest, climate innovators are finding a foothold. A report out last month put the Seattle area among the top U.S. cities for climate tech startup hubs. Companies in this region received $240 million in funding last year, according to PitchBook data analyzed by the venture firm Revolution.

Here are a few Seattle companies with recent investments to keep an eye on:

• Banyu Carbon, which aims to reduce the cost of carbon capture using light-based technology, has raised $8.5 million from investors so far this year.
• Recurrent raised $16 million earlier this year to fund its shopping platform that provides buyers and dealers information about batteries in used electric vehicles.
• In 2023, Omnidian announced that it landed $25 million for solar power development projects; LevelTen Energy, a platform for renewable energy transactions, raised $10 million; and Electric Era raised $13 million from Chevron Technology Ventures for their quick EV charging stations.

A new startup founded by longtime e-commerce leaders is using artificial intelligence in a bid to shake up the way people find and buy clothing online.

Daydream announced a massive $50 million seed round from top venture capital firms to develop technology that aims to supercharge the shopping search experience.

The company, which has offices in New York City and Seattle, isn’t revealing many details about its platform, which will launch in beta later this year. But its website hints at the vision with a series of hypothetical search queries, such as:

• Bright-colored sneakers that feel old school and classic
• Street style tops inspired by Bella Hadid
• I’m shopping for cozy and effortless vibes for fall in NYC
• I love this tote, but I want it without stripes
• I need a dress for a summer wedding in Costa Rica

Daydream said it has nearly 2,000 brands in its catalog through partnerships.

The startup is led by CEO Julie Bornstein, former chief operating officer at clothing rental giant Stitch Fix. Bornstein also held executive roles at Sephora, Nordstrom, and Urban Outfitters. Her previous startup, an AI-powered shopping platform called THE YES, was acquired by Pinterest in 2022.

Bornstein pointed to “massive gains in AI over the past year.”

“We can finally build an intelligent online shopping platform that will make it easy and fun for consumers to find products they love among the best selection of brands and retailers in the world,” she said in a statement.

The rise of generative AI and other advanced technologies could shift the way people find information on the internet — and have big implications for e-commerce.

Online retailers are testing different AI-related ideas in their search experiences. Amazon recently introduced its new AI shopping assistant Rufus. Alaska Airlines rolled out a new trip itinerary search tool earlier this year that leverages generative AI technology from OpenAI.

A recent survey from Adobe on generative AI trends found that two-thirds of respondents want brands to use purchase history and other data to make shopping experiences more relevant to what they want.

“Online shopping is in need of an overhaul, particularly in the realm of memory and context, to provide seamless and intuitive experiences that truly understand and anticipate customer needs,” Daydream CTO and co-founder Matt Fisher told GeekWire.

Fisher is one of several Seattle-area employees working out of Daydream’s office in Kirkland, Wash.

Dan Cary, co-founder and chief product officer who is also based in Seattle, previously spent 12 years at Google, most recently as a product manager for generative AI for YouTube.

Fisher said the company plans to grow headcount in the Seattle region.

Other co-founders include former Pinterest execs Lisa Green and Richard Kim.

Forerunner Ventures and Index Ventures led the round, which included participation from GV (Google’s VC arm) and True Ventures.

“We believe that search will transition to service, with the search giants dominating the space losing market share to new entrants providing personalized, AI-driven services that work in collaboration with consumers to meet their end goals and delight with a fundamentally new level of value,” Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner at Forerunner, said in a statement.

How is artificial intelligence making marketers more productive? How are journalists approaching the ethical dilemmas inherent to AI content creation? And how can scrappy startups hope to compete with well-funded tech giants in the fast-moving world of AI?

Those are some of the questions addressed by tech entrepreneur and marketer Adam Tratt and GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop on this episode of Shift AI, a show that explores what it takes to adapt to the changing workplace in the digital age of remote work and AI.

Listen below, and continue reading for highlights, edited for context and clarity. Subscribe to the Shift AI Podcast and hear more episodes at ShiftAIPodcast.com.

AI and productivity

Todd: We’ve seen the awakening over the past year. People are trying to figure out what exactly to do with these tools. The capabilities and the weaknesses are becoming more and more apparent. And we’re at the stage where a lot of startups and big tech companies are looking for specific, vertical applications to provide more value.

I was talking with an entrepreneur who said he thinks that each of his engineers has gotten about 20% more productive over the past year to 18 months. And that feels about right to me. That’s about what my experience is

Right now we’re seeing a variety of companies in many different ways look for incremental productivity beyond that, trying to get up to maybe 30%, 40%, 50%. That’s my sense of things right now.

Adam: A lot of the work that I do is by myself. There’s so many different sub-disciplines within the category of marketing, and it’s hard to be great at all of them.

In fact, there’s almost nobody that’s great at all of them, because half of marketing is this analytical, spreadsheet exercise, where you’re trying to make every dollar that you spend work as hard as possible for your brand. It’s usually in driving demand. 

Then there’s another part that’s a creative exercise. That has a lot to do with, how do you present your brand? What are the words you choose? What are the visuals you choose?

There’s all these ways to use AI to help you compensate for whatever your weaknesses are. So whether it’s running an efficient LinkedIn advertising campaign, or creating tweets from a blog post, there’s ways you can deploy LLMs and other tools to do a great job.

AI startups vs. tech giants

Boaz: I’m seeing the big companies move so much faster. You wake up in the morning, like we did with Sora and OpenAI, and all of a sudden, all these small companies that were building text-to-video, they are now in a really, really awkward position to have to prove their value.

Todd: The scarcity of computing power is the huge hurdle. So you see this reshuffling of priorities and resources. I think you need some really savvy startups and some really smart founders to navigate this whole world, when you’ve got these giants who are moving so quickly.

Adam: Everybody I know is surprised that Microsoft has come out so strong, so fast. And Google is still apparently flat-footed. It’s very early days. And I would not be surprised if both Google and Amazon come out with very competitive offerings, as the smoke starts to clear. We all know Google has been working on AI for a long time. And they were intentionally pumping the brakes, until they realized OpenAI was eating their lunch.

[Editor’s Note: This podcast was recorded before Apple’s recent AI announcements.]

Todd: My impression walking away from Google I/O was that Google CEO Sundar Pichai is far more conservative, in terms of pushing the envelope on AI, than certainly either OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman, or Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. My question walking away from that was, what has he seen?Adam: It might just be that he’s seen the Terminator trilogy.

The ethics of AI content creation

Adam: I do have some ethical concerns, but the way I’m using AI is, at the moment, somewhat benign: “Read this blog post, tell me what it says, help me create provocative, interesting social media posts, take this story, create an image for the story.” … I have no ethical qualms with generating a fake image for a story, as long as it doesn’t misrepresent the thing that I’m trying to say, and you need to credit appropriately.

Todd: That brings up an interesting ethical dilemma that we ran into at GeekWire. Recently, we decided, when we’re generating images to go with stories, we will not use photorealistic images. We’ll use things that are clearly illustrations, created by the AI generator, because otherwise there could be this confusion in the minds of readers. So we’re just coming up with these things on the fly — things that feel right based on our underlying principles.

Two words about the future of work and AI

Adam: Guarded optimism. In general, what I’ve seen in my career in tech has been steady progress, mostly for good. I think the people I’ve worked with have had good intentions. Occasionally, in the course of being competitive, things get out of hand. And then usually the government steps in, too late. I’m hoping that, just as we’ve seen in the first year-and-a-half of general availability of LLMs, that the promise will be elusive compared to the reality, and we’ll have time as an industry to course-correct as we get closer to this idea of more sophisticated models.

Todd: Hyper drive. I think that things are going to just accelerate and continue accelerating. I’ve been covering tech since 2002, more than two decades. I’ve never seen a year like this, ever. I missed the dot-com bubble. I didn’t get to see that. And I feel like this has made up for it in some respects. I just feel like it’s going to accelerate so fast that the only thing that’s going to slow us down is a backlash.

Listen to the full episode of Shift AI with Todd Bishop and Adam Tratt here.

Seattle’s Aurion Biotech announced Wednesday that it received special designations from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that should speed up the development of its treatment for a common disease that damages the cornea and can result in vision loss.

The FDA granted Breakthrough Therapy Designation and Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy Designation for Aurion’s cell therapy treatment.

The designations accelerate the FDA’s review process, and are given to efforts that target serious diseases and offer significant improvements over currently available options.

Degeneration of the cornea with age or disease can result in a condition called corneal edema secondary to endothelial dysfunction. Associated with impaired, hazy vision and ultimately blindness, the condition affects millions of people globally, and about 4% of people over age 40 in the U.S.

Aurion recently completed the enrollment of 97 patients in a Phase 1 / 2 clinical trial being conducted in the U.S. and Canada. Its cell therapy has been approved for use in Japan.

Existing treatment for the condition includes corneal transplants, which are effective. But there is an insufficient supply of available tissue and the post-operative recovery requires a patient to lie flat on their back for up to three days to ensure the cornea adheres correctly.

Aurion, a spinoff of Seattle eye care company CorneaGen, has offices in Seattle, Tokyo and Cambridge, Mass. The company’s corneal therapy is based on technology Aurion licensed in 2020 from the Kyoto Prefecture University of Medicine.

In 2022, Aurion announced a $120 million Series C round of funding.

Ernst & Young on Monday named Aurion CEO Greg Kunst as its Entrepreneur of the Year for the Mountain West Region.

The Washington State Department of Commerce and the City of Seattle this week allocated close to $75 million in funding for community-led clean energy projects and climate-related job training programs.

The Commerce grants, which totaled $72.6 million, will go to counties to support solar development, hydrogen fueling, electric microgrids and more. The City of Seattle is investing more than $2.2 million to recruit and train people from marginalized communities for construction and clean energy jobs.

The government agencies backing these programs said they are intended to equip people disproportionately affected by climate change with tools to respond as the world continues warming.

Leaders in Washington state and Seattle have demonstrated their commitment to addressing climate change with ambitious carbon reduction goals. Seattle aims to reach zero emissions by 2050 and decarbonize all city-owned buildings by 2035. In May, Commerce awarded Seattle $3.2 million to support appliance upgrades for small businesses.

The City of Seattle awarded funds to six programs within five organizations: 

• Emerald Cities Collaborative, with funding for its heating, ventilation, and air conditioning work and for its electrical pathways program
• Pacific Northwest Ironworkers Local 86
• Apprenticeship and Non-Traditional Employment for Women
• YouthCare’s YouthBuild 
• Seattle Central College’s Pre-Apprenticeship Construction Training 

The investments will provide training for at least 260 Priority Hire employees, which is a city program supporting the employment of workers from economically disadvantaged communities. The effort also includes partnerships with local companies such as Puget Sound Energy to place workers in construction and clean energy jobs. 

Funding for the grants came from the city’s controversial payroll expense tax, which has faced repeated opposition from Seattle’s business community. The tax supports affordable housing and other efforts to support lower-income residents.

Commerce dispersed 71 grants across 24 counties for clean energy installations. All projects have an environmental justice component. 

The funding for these awards comes from Washington’s Climate Commitment Act, a progressive measure backed by Gov. Jay Inslee that caps carbon emissions and requires businesses to pay for the right to pollute. Initiative 2117, which will be on the November ballot, would eliminate the act and the climate funding it generates. 

Some of the Commerce grant awardees include: 

• Toppenish School District in Yakima received $1.7 million for renewable energy projects for community resilience and student engagement at Valley View Elementary School.
• Port Angeles Food Bank received $321,516 for sustainable power upgrades.
• United Indians of All Tribes Foundation in King County received $2.2 million to decarbonize the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center in Seattle’s Discovery Park. 
• The City of Walla Walla received $2.5 million for a project to power the city’s water treatment operations with solar.

“These awards get money into the hands of people who can immediately put it to use fighting climate change,” Mike Fong, director of the Department of Commerce, said in a press release.

The emergence of the modern deepfake is closely tied to the rise of generative artificial intelligence, but when it comes to videos and images of questionable origin and authenticity, the real pioneer is Bigfoot.

Fifty-seven years after the infamous Patterson–Gimlin film purported to capture a furry beast traipsing through the Northern California wilderness, the Bumbershoot Arts + Music Festival in Seattle is challenging artists, animators, and technologists to take the tradition to the next level in its “Big Fake Deep Foot” contest.

Bumbershoot organizers are inviting people from around the world to create short (no more than 5 minutes) deepfake videos featuring the legendary figure of the forest. The winner will receive a $5,000 prize.

This show has been a longtime goal for Greg Lundgren, the Bumbershoot producer and creative director, known for projects including the Out of Sight art fair and Museum of Museums, who signed on with the iconic Seattle festival last year.

Lundgren has been closely following deepfake technology for several years, watching the tools mature. He had originally hoped to do a Bigfoot deepfake show three or four years ago, but the technology hadn’t reached the point where it was feasible.

“I’m hoping that that moment has arrived, where there’s enough people out in the world that feel capable of it, and rise to the challenge,” he said recently.

It’s a lighthearted twist on an emerging area of technology that is more often a source of concern, due to the potential for deepfake content to contribute to the spread of disinformation and other malicious behavior in politics and society.

“I chose Bigfoot partly because I love Bigfoot, and partly because Bigfoot is part of the Pacific Northwest DNA,” Lundgren explained, noting that Bigfoot also has the benefit of being politically ambiguous and gender-neutral.

“It’s meant to be light, it’s meant to be creative and comedic, and give people a wide berth about how they approach it, and what that narrative is,” he added. “It could be really funny, it could be very serious. But I think Bigfoot as an idea was a good foundation that didn’t create political divide, that wasn’t about hate, that wasn’t about some of the problems that deepfakes represent.”

The winner, as chosen by an expert panel, will receive $5,000, plus the satisfaction of being the best Bigfoot deep-faker on the planet, or at least the best one who took the time to come up with a submission.

(GeekWire is a supporting sponsor of the contest, and I’ll be a member of the jury assessing the submissions, drawing in part on my own heritage. I’m no Bigfoot hunter, or deepfake creator, but my dad was a souvenir wholesaler who specialized for many years in Bigfoot merchandise.)

People around the world are invited to compete. As many as 20 entries will be chosen to be screened in the Animation District at Bumbershoot, Aug. 31 and Sept. 1, Labor Day Weekend at Seattle Center.

One contestant (below) is documenting the process of generating a submission.

Full rules and requirements are available here. Contest submissions, no more than 5 minutes long, must be posted to YouTube by midnight July 31.

Butterflies, a Bellevue, Wash.-based social media platform that combines human and AI-generated content, launched Tuesday after raising $4.8 million in seed funding.

After five months in beta, Butterflies is billed as an app where “humans and AI coexist.” The Verge editor Alex Heath called the app, whose interface looks like Instagram, “one of the most provocative — and, at times, unsettling — takes on social media that I’ve seen in quite a while.”

The technology relies on public AI models as well as the startup’s own image rendering and LLM models to help users create an AI friend, called a Butterfly, in just minutes. These personas come complete with a profile, backstory, opinions and emotions, and they automatically create posts and interact with both real people and bots.

Butterflies was founded by Vu Tran, a former engineer at Snap.

“To date, humans have been able to chat with AIs in one-dimensional conversations, but there has yet to be an experience where people can create and interact more dynamically with AIs,” Tran said in a news release.

He said tens of thousands of butterflies were created in beta and thousands of users have been spending an average of one to three hours a day interacting with them. 

The company’s long-term goal is to enhance the realism of AI, crafting digital beings that interact with people in a relatable and life-like manner, enriching personal experiences.

Tran said AIs today are primarily being used as helpers, admins or copilots, but in a year, conversations with AI friends will feel as natural and real as those with any human.

“Butterflies AI is demonstrating that AIs can also be your friend and guide,” Tran said. “Humans have always been drawn to entertaining stories and compelling characters. Artificial intelligence is allowing us to create and build relationships with them in an entirely new way.”

The seed round was led by Coatue with participation from SV Angel and several strategic angels.

Butterflies is available on iOS and Android.

T-Mobile is helping boost the fan experience this week at the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship, a major women’s golf tournament hosted by Sahalee Country Club in Sammamish, Wash.

The Bellevue, Wash.-based wireless carrier is providing infrastructure to power a new “KPMG Champcast” mobile app and online experience that features real-time shot tracking for every golfer. High-resolution drone imagery was used to create a digital twin of each hole at Sahalee, and shot-tracking is powered by a system called ShotLink.

Champcast can be accessed via the championship’s mobile app (iOS; Android) or online.

Tracking technology in golf has come a long way since the PGA Tour began using ShotLink more than two decades ago. It’s led to an explosion of data and the creation of new statistics such as strokes gained, a method of comparing a player against the the rest of the field.

KPMG in 2021 launched its KPMG Performance Insights dashboard that shows strokes gained and other advanced analytics for LPGA golfers.

Tracking tech in golf has made an impact off the course, fueling adoption of entertainment experiences at businesses such as Topgolf and Five Iron Golf in Seattle.

The PGA Tour also works with Amazon Web Services to power ShotLink technology.

T-Mobile’s technology is also being used this week to add more camera angles for NBC’s television coverage and connectivity enhancements for event operations at Sahalee including ticketed entry, payment processing, and photojournalism.

The company is hosting a lounge at the tournament for fans that includes an augmented reality experience.

T-Mobile, which inked a four-year sponsorship deal with the PGA of America in November, was also involved in the PGA Championship last month. The wireless giant has a number of other sports-related partnerships to help promote its products and services.

Nelly Korda, the top-ranked women’s golfer, is sponsored by T-Mobile, as is Brooke Henderson, who won the Women’s PGA Championship when it was last held at Sahalee in 2016.

Microsoft and its PC partners Tuesday pressed ahead with the release of the first Copilot+ PCs despite delaying the AI-powered “Recall” feature to address security and privacy concerns.

Rather than offering Recall at launch, as originally planned, Microsoft said last week that the feature would first be released and tested through its Windows Insider program in the coming weeks.

The move comes amid broader scrutiny of Microsoft’s security challenges, as reflected in a Congressional hearing last week, and the company’s pledge to prioritize security over new features.

Combined with growing competition from Apple and others in the field, the developments have sapped some of Microsoft’s momentum as it tries to reinvigorate its flagship PC operating system.

In addition to the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop from Microsoft, new Copilot+ PCs are also available as of today from HP, Lenovo, and other computer makers.

In the absence of the Recall feature, the company is touting capabilities of the Copilot PCs including all-day battery life, a powerful Neural Processing Unit (NPU) and new AI experiences including Cocreator in Microsoft Paint.

Recall captures screenshots at short intervals, making it possible for users to quickly query their history and find information later. Among other changes since the May 20 announcement, Microsoft detailed plans for new levels of encryption and said Recall would be turned off by default unless activated by users during setup.

Apple last week unveiled a series of AI features for Mac, under the name Apple Intelligence, in a preview of macOS Sequoia at the company’s WorldWide Developer Conference. Apple also announced an AI partnership with OpenAI, the longtime Microsoft partner in which the Redmond company has invested billions of dollars.

Rene Bystron spent hundreds of hours at his last startup building an app that helps teach people how to use generative AI tools. And it was through that experience that the Seattle entrepreneur came to a realization.

“There’s this massive need in the market for a tool that allows people to leverage AI for workflow-specific tasks without prompting,” Bystron told GeekWire.

Bystron is the co-founder and CEO of DeltaGen, a new startup developing software that aims to help companies use AI tools that don’t require “prompting,” or the process of queuing AI systems for a specific answer.

Bystron previously launched and led AI LaMo, which built games, quizzes, and other interactive content to teach people how to improve their prompt engineering skills and interact with chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.

“I’m cannibalizing years of work — I built my career in prompting,” Bystron said. “But I’ve just seen hundreds of companies and done dozens of generative AI workshops to know that this doesn’t come to people naturally.”

DeltaGen is building a platform targeted at enterprise workflows, starting with financial professionals. Its tool identifies workflows associated with a particular job by scanning LinkedIn profiles of users, and then provides solutions designed for specific tasks.

“You don’t really need to write anything,” Bystron said. “You select and choose.”

Bystron said the software leverages around 30 APIs from different AI models and picks the best one for a particular job.

“There are models that work better for some workflows, and others that work better for others,” he said.

DeltaGen is still in beta mode. It plans to generate revenue using a traditional software-as-a-service model, charging users for premium features.

The 5-person company recently joined the latest cohort of the Techstars Workforce Development Accelerator, a Denver, Colo.-based program designed for tech startups addressing labor market challenges. Another Seattle startup, Incskill, is also participating in the three-month program.

Techstars earlier this year shut down its Seattle accelerator.

Bystron previously was a project leader at Boston Consulting Group, and founded and led Meltingpot Forum, a large multidisciplinary speaker event in the Czech Republic.

DeltaGen co-founder and CTO Avinash Uddaraju previously co-founded Gritly, which also participated in Techstars’ workforce accelerator and was acquired by IIA Healthcare. Other co-founders at DeltaGen include CMO Abdullah Raja and COO Casey McCullar.

• The Amazon Labor Union prevailed in a landmark union vote at the company’s Staten Island, N.Y., warehouse in 2022, the first time a group of Amazon warehouse workers voted to form a union.
• But since then, Amazon has appealed the vote and bargaining efforts by the Amazon Labor Union haven’t moved forward. The union also lost two subsequent elections at different warehouses in New York.
• “Workers at Amazon — in the warehouses or behind the wheel — have proven they have the strength, unity, and determination to take on the greediest employer on the planet, and win,” Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien said in a statement. “Together, with hard work, courage, and conviction, the Teamsters and ALU will fight fearlessly to ensure Amazon workers secure the good jobs and safe working conditions they deserve in a union contract.”

Another startup studio with roots in Seattle is incubating ideas and spinning out fledgling tech companies.

Mudita Venture Partners, a venture capital firm based in Detroit, launched its Mudita Studios arm about a year ago. Stephen Konig, a longtime Google product management leader based in Seattle, runs the program.

“It was important for me to stay here,” Konig told GeekWire. “It’s such an active and vibrant community from a startup and talent perspective.”

Four startups have spun out of Mudita Studios, including three based in Seattle: Official AI, which helps people monetize their digital likeness; Stellis AI, which offers AI advisory services; and legal tech startup Predict.law.

Mudita’s studio follows a similar thesis to its venture fund, focusing on early stage B2B enterprise software startups. It uses the typical startup studio model, testing different ideas and finding entrepreneurs to lead spinouts. Those companies are funded in part by Mudita Venture Partners.

The startup studio model has gained popularity over the past decade. Some criticize such programs for taking too much equity from entrepreneurs.

Konig said Mudita’s ownership stakes depend on the particular idea and circumstances. But he said startup studios can appeal to someone who can’t afford to spend months or years testing out their business idea.

“We’re taking a tremendous amount of the risk out of the equation,” Konig said.

Konig said Mudita axes 95% of ideas that come through the studio.

Mudita joins other startup studios in Seattle including Pioneer Square Labs, Madrona Venture Labs, Conduit Venture Labs, and TF Labs.

Others such as Kernel Labs and Pienza launched in the past several years but have since pivoted or are not active.

Mudita teamed up with Pioneer Square Labs to help incubate Official AI. Konig has a desk at PSL’s office in Seattle.

David Zager, partner at Pioneer Square Labs, said he’s happy to have another startup studio in town that can boost entrepreneurial energy and investment dollars in the Seattle region.

“The joint studio efforts have produced much serendipity,” he said. “We look forward to more Mudita collaborations.”

The other spinout from Mudita is Momentum Collective, a Denver, Colo.-based go-to-market consultancy for VC-backed startups.

Despite launching the studio during a broader slowdown in the venture capital market, Konig said the timing has actually been good, in part due to the rise of generative AI.

“Thinking through all the applications for generative AI, and all the things that it could do, has given us a huge pipeline of opportunities to explore,” he said.

Konig, who spent more than a decade at Google, said he’s learned to temper expectations amid the hype around AI.

“The due diligence that you have to do to build a successful business, I think is still very much true,” he said. “And I think it’s more important than ever.”

In her commencement speech at Stanford University on Sunday morning, Melinda French Gates got personal and philosophical.

French Gates acknowledged the big step the Standford grads were taking — which included her daughter, Phoebe Gates, who earned her undergraduate degree.

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about transitions,” French Gates told the 20,000-person crowd.

That includes her divorce three years ago from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and last month leaving her role at the Gates Foundation, which she helped launch 25 years ago, to pursue her own philanthropic efforts with a focus on family issues and women’s reproductive rights.

Referencing the spiritual leader Ram Dass, French Gates recounted a story about a big wave who feared being destroyed upon crashing into the shore, but was reassured by a wiser, smaller wave that it had nothing to fear because they were not waves, but water.

“It captures what it’s like to experience an enormous transition without losing the core of who you are. I turned 60 this year, and you don’t get to be my age without navigating all kinds of transitions,” she said.

She advised the students that they would survive tough changes, and what mattered most is not enduring them, but what you do after as a result.

“I’ve learned that the next day is when the real work begins,” she said. “Because what we do the next day is what makes us who we are.”

French Gates offered three lessons for the graduates to take with them.

Sit with the transition rather than race to the next challenge. French Gates said that while the Gates Foundation’s initial focus was on vaccines, she realized through conversations with the people and women they were aiding that contraceptives were hugely transformative, and she shifted course to emphasize that work.

“I learned how much society benefits when women are able to make their own decisions, control their own resources, and direct their own futures,” French Gates said, earning her a round of applause.

She advised the students to keep an open mind about where their careers and lives take them, to remember that they’re “water” and not defined by one path and one identity.

Find “small waves” to help you on your journey, and be a small wave for others. French Gates shared a story of her experience working at Microsoft where she was only woman in her hiring class of MBAs. While she initially loved the job, the brash, aggressive culture was wearing her down and she thought of quitting.

A friend and colleague named Charlotte helped her find her way.

“She’d already figured out how to navigate the culture there without losing her own identity,” French Gates said. “Having Charlotte in my life made it possible for me to imagine a future at Microsoft, also.”

Build a web of deserved trust. Referencing a concept from the late Charlie Munger, a vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, French Gates advised the graduates to work towards creating a society in which people can rely on each other for support and in working towards a greater good.

That includes personal relationships as well, and French Gates shared a story about a close friend whom she comforted when her young husband died of cancer. That friend in turn helped French Gates bear her grief when she ended her marriage after 27 years.

“Yes, you are graduating into a broken world, but it is community that rebuilds things,” French Gates said. “You’ve already started building that community here, and together is how you’ll make the broken things whole again.”

“There’s a great future in thermoplastics.”

If anyone ever does a remake of “The Graduate,” that’s how the famous advice given to Dustin Hoffman’s character about the promise of the plastics industry might be updated. And the movie’s locale just might be shifted to Spokane.

At least that’s what a private-public consortium centered in Eastern Washington and North Idaho is banking on. The Advanced Aerospace Materials Manufacturing Center Tech Hub, or AAMMC, sees a great future in the development of thermoplastic composites for aircraft and spacecraft.

Last October, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration designated the AAMMC as one of 31 Tech Hubs based at sites across the country. That status made the Spokane-based group eligible to apply for a $72 million Phase 2 grant.

The first five to 10 recipients of federal funding are due to be announced in late June or early July — and the leaders of the Spokane Tech Hub are hoping to be on the list.

“The Tech Hub designation marks in inflection point for the City of Spokane. While innovative manufacturing and collaborative research are already happening here, the Tech Hub will take the region to new heights by bolstering that work, boosting our local economy, and creating desirable, good-paying jobs,” Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown said in a statement emailed to GeekWire.

What’s the Tech Hub all about? Aerospace companies with a Pacific Northwest presence, from Boeing on down, are already spending billions of dollars on carbon composite materials — so what difference could tens of millions of dollars of federal funding possibly make?

A different class of composites

The history of carbon composite materials goes way back. Hybrid materials that incorporate carbon fibers and synthetic resins have been used in aerospace and automotive manufacturing since soon after World War II. But the key innovation targeted by the Spokane Tech Hub has to do with the distinction between the mainstream fabrication process, known as thermoset, and the more recently developed thermoplastic process.

“The easiest thing to visualize this is what I’m always telling my students,” said Navid Zobeiry, an assistant professor in the University of Washington’s materials science and engineering department. “When thermosets go through the process, they are like cooking eggs. You start from runny eggs, and then eventually they solidify, and you have your solid thing at the end. You can’t go back to the runny egg again, which means that thermosets by their nature cannot be recycled.”

In contrast, thermoplastic composites are like butter. “You melt butter, you leave it in the freezer, and it becomes solid again,” Zobeiry said. “And you can go through that process several times, so it’s reversible. … In theory, at the end of life, you can melt it, you can take out the fibers, you can re-form it, you can make a new structure. You can reprocess it, so it becomes a ‘green’ choice.”

Unlike thermosets, thermoplastics can be “welded” together to form larger structures. And for some applications, thermoplastics perform better than thermosets under impact loads, Zobeiry added.

Theoretically, the process for manufacturing components from thermoplastic materials could go much more quickly than traditional methods. Zobeiry said that would be particularly attractive for companies focusing on smaller electric aircraft — including electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft, better known as eVTOLs, air taxis or flying cars.

“If you go to smaller aircraft for urban air mobility, that’s where you have to go to mass market, and then you cannot make that many aircraft using the traditional ways,” he said. “So if you look at the future, we have to go toward a thermoplastic option, both as a green option and for the rate of production.”

Aerospace companies are already starting to head in that direction. The composite materials that Boeing uses in its 787 and 777X jets are “typically a mix of different polymers, mainly thermosets, but also some components of thermoplastics,” Zobeiry said. The mix might be, say, 80% thermoset and 20% thermoplastic.

The down side is that the technology for producing 100% thermoplastic materials on a large scale is significantly trickier than traditional methods. And when it comes to advancing that technology, U.S. manufacturers are lagging significantly behind their European counterparts. The Thermoplastic Composites Research Center in the Netherlands is among the leaders in the field.

That’s the sort of situation the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act, championed by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., was designed to address. The legislation set aside $10 billion over a five-year period to fund the Tech Hubs program and boost investment in innovative technologies that are central to U.S. economic and national security.

The Spokane-based consortium was among nearly 200 applicants seeking to win Tech Hub status. Its members come from more than 50 organizations — including composite suppliers such as ATC Manufacturing, Toray, Electroimpact and Syensqo; aerospace companies such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Blue Origin; and academic institutions, governmental institutions and Pacific Northwest tribes.

Cantwell said the fact that the consortium was chosen to move on to the Tech Hub program’s second phase serves as a vote of confidence in the plan to upgrade thermoplastic composite technology.

“Being designated a Tech Hub means the United States already believes that we are capable of pulling this off,” she said in April at an aerospace materials showcase at Blue Origin’s HQ in Kent, Wash.

What the Tech Hub can do

The Advanced Aerospace Materials Manufacturing Center would serve a base of operations for researchers and the consortium’s members to advance the state of thermoplastic manufacturing.

“Thermoplastics are now used quite extensively in smaller parts, including primary structural parts, but ones that are only up to maybe a few feet at most in size,” said David Leach, director of business development for Idaho-based ATC Manufacturing. “This is about being able to advance that technology to make much larger-scale parts for the next generation of a wide range of types of aircraft.”

The testbed facility has already been chosen: It’s a 386,000-square-foot former manufacturing facility located on 50 acres in Airway Heights, near Spokane International Airport. The building was previously used by Triumph Composite Systems and is now owned by Lakeside Companies.

Why put the hub in Spokane rather than Seattle? The Lilac City and its surroundings aren’t as big of an aerospace powerhouse as the Seattle area, but it does host scores of aerospace suppliers. Boeing’s factories are just a five-hour drive or a quick FedEx hop away. “The proximity of the region to Seattle is really attractive to a lot of suppliers,” said Gynii Gilliam, president of the Coeur d’Alene Economic Development Council. “Of course, operating in both Eastern Washington and Idaho in general is also just less expensive.”

It doesn’t hurt that ATC Manufacturing, one of Lakeside’s companies and a member of the AAMMC consortium, is a long-term supplier of thermoplastic composite components for Boeing.

ATC is also a key commercial partner in NASA’s High-Rate Composite Aircraft Manufacturing project, or HiCAM, which aims to increase the production rate and reduce the cost of composite manufacturing. That’s exactly what the Spokane Tech Hub is aiming to do at the AAMMC facility.

“This takes things from midstream development in the lab to production — which is what I’ve always called the Valley of Death,” said Trevor McCrea, who heads up Syensqo’s thermoplastic application development activities in North America.

The center could provide “one-stop shopping” for companies that want to test-drive new approaches and find their way through that technological Death Valley, said DeWayne Howell, senior applications engineer for Toray Advanced Composites.

If the federal grant comes through, part of the money would be used to purchase a 5,000-ton thermoplastics press capable of stamping out large aerospace components such as door frames or even wing sections.

“We would be the only place in the world to have that capability to make plane parts of that size, and of the type that we need,” Cantwell said in April. “That full-scale fabrication of composite components — for everything from ribs to beams to wings to frames to bulkheads — I think could put us in a place of demonstrating the scale that we need.”

McCrea said one of the goals would be to “bring automotive rates to aerospace quality.” Speeding up the production rate of high-quality parts would help not only the aviation industry, but also the space industry and potentially the automotive industry as well.

The AAMMC is meant to be more than a cookery for carbon composites. “It’s really a testbed facility — not just for proving out the parts, which is a really important part of it — but also for the actual manufacturing techniques to speed up the production and quality,” said Maria Lusardi, the hub’s communications director.

For example, John Shovic, director of the University of Idaho’s Center for Intelligent Industrial Robotics, is working on ways to use robotics and artificial intelligence to improve manufacturing processes.

“What we’re focused on is applying some new AI techniques based on things other than large language models — explainable AI, neural networks and things like that — to specific problems on manufacturing lines, to improve quality, reduce defects and improve efficiency,” Shovic said. “We’re seeing real results with real companies.”

The funding factor

After a year of planning and coalition-building, the Spokane Tech Hub’s organizers are now waiting to find out whether they’ll receive the $72 million they’re seeking from the Economic Development Administration.

In addition to the federal Phase 2 funding, the AAMMC’s five-year budget proposal calls for $8 million in matching funds from industry partners such as Boeing, Collins RTX, Spirit Aero Systems, Synesqo and Toray America, along with venture capital from Lakeside Companies.

The Tech Hub says members of the consortium have pledged $70 million in in-kind contributions — and the Washington state Department of Commerce is offering a $500,000 matching grant that’s contingent on the AAMMC receiving federal funding.

If the AAMMC gets the thumbs up, the money would start flowing in the fall. But it would take a while to ramp up operations.

“The equipment itself is very unique. Some of the pieces have very long lead times, and you have to custom-order them,” Lusardi said. “If we get the funding, there’s a two-phase approach, where we have prioritized what we can get going sooner while we wait on the longer lead-time stuff.”

The Tech Hub is aiming for financial self-sufficiency within three years. And if everything goes right, the hub’s impact could spread beyond the aerospace industry.

“Innovation begets innovation,” said Gary Ballew, vice president of economic development at Greater Spokane Inc. “We look at the Seattle area in the ’90s. And yeah, you had tech, you had Microsoft, but you also had people who thought, you know what, we can charge $5 for a cup of coffee. We can bundle things and have a massive selection of products in this huge warehouse, and people will shop there, as long as we have $1.50 hot dogs. You saw a lot of innovation around that.”

Ballew is hoping the Tech Hub will set off a similar snowball effect in Spokane.

“You just have these people who are thinking innovatively, and will create new things, whether it be in clean tech, or information technology, or cybersecurity or AI,” he said. “So the opportunity itself is super-exciting, but it also puts our area on the map.”

Greater Spokane isn’t the only area vying to be put on the map, however. There are 30 other regional consortiums competing for the Tech Hub program’s five to 10 multimillion-dollar Phase 2 grants. Some of them highlight technological frontiers that are arguably sexier — such as nuclear energy, quantum computing and AI-driven biotech. A couple of the other hubs are also based in the Pacific Northwest, setting up the potential for a regional rivalry.

So what happens if Spokane loses out?

Lusardi said the Tech Hub will keep going, with or without the Phase 2 grant. “We’re looking at other grants and other sources of funding, for both the workforce side and the industrial side,” she said. “The framework is there that we can build upon moving forward. Like many of the other Tech Hubs, it just changes the timeline.”

Leach said the Spokane hub’s industry partners are committed to supporting the AAMMC, one way or another. “I think they all see a great need for this,” he said. “Aside from an actual award, they’re very interested in pushing it forward.”

Back at the University of Washington, Zobeiry said industry backing for advanced materials development is essential — but if there’s going to be a bright future in thermoplastics, government backing is needed as well.

“If you look at the state of research centers for composites in Japan, or in Europe and the U.K., in Canada, they are very different from the U.S.,” he said. “There’s very heavy involvement of governments, because it’s for the national interest. So, I would say we definitely need support from governments when it comes to this important technology. Industry is ill-prepared to do it alone.”

AI startups accounted for 40% of total venture funding in May. So it may seem strategic for startups to include AI as part of their pitches to investors.

But founders and CEOs should tread carefully when talking about their company’s use of the trendy tech, according to two Seattle-area venture capitalists who spoke at the PAN-IIT Seattle 2024 Conference event in Bellevue, Wash., earlier this month.

Over-branding in AI “shows you as an unserious company and unserious people,” said Vivek Ladsariya, who recently joined Pioneer Square Labs as a managing director.

“Serious investors — and more importantly serious customers — will really see through that,” he said. “That’s not the brand you want to build.”

AI has “sort of become table stakes” and should be part of a company’s strategy, but not overstating its role is crucial, said Heather Redman, co-founder and managing partner at Flying Fish.

“You can really lose a lot of credibility,” she said.

Vikram Chalana, CEO of Seattle startup Pictory.ai, joked that he went against the advice shared by the investors since his 4-year-old company literally has AI in its domain name.

AI is core to Pictory’s product, which automates video creation.

“At the end of the day, it has to be about a customer problem,” Chalana said.

Ladsariya echoed that sentiment.

“If you’re speaking to customers, it’s really important to talk about what you can do, rather than a general technology,” he said.

AI has been a core thesis at Flying Fish since it launched eight years ago. Redman said the firm specifically targets founders and teams with AI backgrounds.

“We are generally looking for a PhD on the team,” she said. “It’s not a must-have, but certainly a nice-to-have.”

But Anoop Gupta, CEO of SeekOut, said companies don’t necessarily need “AI experts” to take advantage of generative AI.

“If you’re building AI infrastructure, then having a lot of deep experience is necessary,” he said. “But my sense is that a smart engineer, a computer scientist — they can learn a lot about [AI]. Their sense of conceptualization and problem definition and how to experiment can take you a long way. You don’t need a machine learning specialist.”

Chalana agreed, noting that he’s seen people with advanced AI experience and education struggle with adopting generative AI. He said the best generative AI engineer on his team is a 26-year-old software developer.

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My idea of weekend fun is browsing the racks at Seattle-area thrift stores in search of once-prized tech swag that has become castoff apparel, as a barometer of the status of the companies and brands emblazoned thereon.

Seriously, I love to do this.

Here are my best finds from today’s visit to the Goodwill. 

EST. 2015, R.I.P. 2023 … I bought this one, $2.99 red tag. A very nice shirt.

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This week on the GeekWire Podcast: It was a big week for cybersecurity for Seattle’s cloud giants, albeit in very different ways for each.

Microsoft President Brad Smith was in Washington, D.C., testifying before the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee about Microsoft’s security challenges — stay tuned for highlights at the end of the show.

Amazon held its annual AWS re:Inforce cloud security conference in Philadelphia. Generative AI has added some big new wrinkles to cybersecurity, and that was one of the main topics in my recent conversation with one of the people who keynoted the AWS event this week, Steve Schmidt, Amazon’s chief security officer.

Listen below, and continue reading for highlights, edited for context and clarity.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

How generative AI is changing the security landscape: “Generative AI very definitely does enable attackers to be more effective in some areas. For example, when crafting more effective phishing emails, or crafting solicitations for people to click on links or things like that, it definitely enables the attacker a lot more.

“But it can also enable the defender, because when we take advantage of generative AI, it allows our security engineering staff to be more effective. It allows us to unload a lot of the undifferentiated heavy lifting that the engineers had to do before, and to let them do that thing that humans are the best at, which is looking at the murky gray area, and sifting through the little tiny pieces that don’t seem to make sense, and putting them together in a puzzle picture that all of a sudden makes them go, ‘Aha. Alright. I know what’s going on here.’

“In most cases, when we apply generative AI to the security work that we have to do, we end up with happier security engineers on the other end, because ultimately, they don’t want to do the boring, laborious stuff. They want to apply their minds. They want to think about the interesting angles to the stuff that they’re working on — the stuff that generative AI can’t do right now.”

One use case for generative AI in security: “An easy example is plain language summarization of very complex events. If you think about the security job that I’ve got here, a lot of it is taking little tiny pieces of technical data and forming them into a story about what’s going on.

“Creating that story, and then taking that information and conveying it to business owners, is something that every security professional has to do. It is arguably one of the hardest parts of our job — taking something that’s incredibly complex, technical and nuanced, and putting it in a language that makes sense to a chief financial officer, or a chief executive officer. Generative AI is actually turning out to be very useful in that space.”

Three big questions companies should ask to adopt generative AI securely:

1. Where is our data? “Business teams are sending data to an LLM for processing, either for training or to help build and customize the model, or through queries when they use that model. How has that data been handled throughout that workflow? How was it secured? Those are critical things to understand.”
2. What happens with my query, and any associated data? “Training data isn’t the only sensitive data set you need to be concerned about when users start to embrace generative AI and LLMs. So if your user queries an AI application, is the output from that query and the user’s reaction to the results used to train the model further? What about the file that that user submitted as part of the query?”
3. Is the output from these models accurate enough? “The quality of the outputs from these models is steadily improving. And security teams can use generative AI as one of the tools to address challenges. From the security perspective, it’s really the use case that defines the relative risk.”

How Schmidt’s past experience at the FBI informs his approach: “The thing that I took the most out of my experience at the FBI was a focus on the people behind adverse actions. A lot of my career, for example, I was focused on Russian and Chinese counterintelligence. If you look at the motivators for espionage, in the classic world, they’re exactly the same things that are motivators for hackers, right now. It’s money, ideology, coercion, or ego.”

What he gets from his volunteer work as an EMT and firefighter: “As people, we crave feedback. We want to see that we are successful, we want to see that what we do matters. And in the computer world, a lot of what we’re dealing with is virtual. So it’s really hard to see the result of your action. It’s also really hard to see an individual impact in an area where you’re looking at, like I am, hundreds of millions of machines.

“Being a volunteer firefighter, and advanced Emergency Medical Technician, means that if I do my job well, an individual human being who I can see and touch has a better day. And I get that real human feedback that isn’t available from a computer. That’s incredibly satisfying. As a person, I know, I am personally bringing value to this; I am helping that person in a situation which may have been the worst day of their lives, and we’re going to make it better.”

Listen to the full conversation above, or subscribe to the GeekWire Podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

As the presidential campaign was heating up four years ago, the University of Washington and Stanford University led a nonpartisan cohort that monitored and publicized in real time their research on the spread of political misinformation and disinformation online.

As this year’s presidential race unfolds — with heightened concerns around political rumors and false narratives — the watchdog group is no longer active and the Stanford program that participated in it is “dismantling,” according to a report this week from tech news site Platformer.

But researchers with the UW’s Center for an Informed Public (CIP) say they’re committed to continuing their efforts.

“Our UW team has been doing research on online rumors and disinformation campaigns for over a decade, and that work will continue. In particular, we are currently conducting and plan to continue our ‘rapid’ research — working to identify and rapidly communicate about emergent rumors — during the 2024 election,” said Kate Starbird, co-founder and faculty director of the CIP, by email.

The CIP, which launched in 2019, has a team of about 20 researchers currently working on the issue, Starbird said.

The UW and Stanford have been targeted by lawsuits from conservative groups and efforts by Republican leaders to discredit their work.

Platformer linked these attacks to the decision to reportedly wind down the Stanford Internet Observatory, noting the recent departures of key leaders. University officials dispute the assertion that the group is shutting down.

The former coalition led by the two universities was called the Election Integrity Partnership and also included the Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika, a social media analytics firm. The partnership tracked the 2020 election and its aftermath and stopped operating after the 2022 election wrapped up.

The partnership’s work was “focused on a narrow scope of topics that were demonstrably harmful to the democratic process: attempts to suppress voting, reduce participation, confuse voters, or delegitimize election results without evidence. We were interested in these dynamics both during the election cycle as well as after the election,” states the group’s website.

The right-wing activist group Project Veritas in 2021 filed a defamation lawsuit against the UW and Stanford over a blog post from the partnership that alleged the Project Veritas had promoted election disinformation. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in 2022.

Another lawsuit filed last year, alleging censorship of Americans’ speech, targeted specific leaders at Stanford and the UW that were part of the Election Integrity Partnership.

Renée DiResta, technical research manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory, has left her role, according to Platformer. DiResta had previously joined the scientific advisory board for TrueMedia, a new Seattle-based organization detecting political deepfake videos, photos and audio led by Oren Etzioni, a UW professor and former CEO of the Allen Institute for AI. Jevin West, director of the CIP, is also on the TrueMedia advisory board.

The CIP’s Starbird last week was awarded the UW’s prestigious 2024 University Faculty Lecture Award, which is given in recognition of a faculty member’s impacts on their profession and society in general.

This story originally appeared on Real Estate News.

A settlement has been reached between Zillow Group and three multiple listing service organizations in a lawsuit involving the company’s ShowingTime product.

A court document filed on June 13 stated that Zillow Group and the defendants — Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service, Wisconsin’s Metro Multiple Listing Service, and MLS Aligned, an MLS collaboration which developed Aligned Showings — have reached an agreement in principle that will result in the dismissal of claims once finalized.

In December, Zillow filed a lawsuit alleging that plans to remove ShowingTime from ARMLS and Metro MLS — and replace it with the proprietary Aligned Showings platform — effectively created a monopoly in those regions. 

The other member MLSs in the Aligned network — RMLS in Oregon, Northern Nevada Regional MLS, UtahRealEstate.com, MLSListings in Northern California and BeachesMLS in Florida — were not listed as defendants in Zillow’s complaint.

Case background: Zillow alleged that rather than competing on the merits, MLS Aligned conspired to remove the ShowingTime integration in favor of Aligned Showings, noting that Zillow offered ShowingTime access for free in those markets.

Zillow Group “made numerous attempts to convince these two MLSs to keep the seamless ShowingTime integration active as an additional option for their agent members, as other MLSs in the consortium have done,” said Chief Industry Development Officer Errol Samuelson in a blog post, but ARMLS and Metro MLS “declined all offered alternatives and resolutions, leaving their agent members with no choice.”

In a response filed in February, attorneys for the two MLSs said adding a new management platform, Aligned Showings, actually increases competition in the marketplace.

“The notion that ShowingTime’s loss of two integration contracts in a national market of hundreds of MLSs should give rise to antitrust liability is unserious,” the filing stated.

Settlement timing: The court document said the agreement is substantially complete and is expected to be finalized in about a month. The terms of the settlement were not included in the June 13 filing.

Real Estate News reached out to Zillow and ARMLS for details. Both companies said they have no further comment while the settlement is being finalized.

Galvanic Games, the independent Seattle-based developer behind video games such as Some Distant Memory, Rapture Rejects, and last fall’s Wizard With a Gun, is closing its doors.

Studio head and founder Patrick Morgan announced the shutdown in a statement Friday.

“Despite the promising start of Wizard With a Gun, sales are not strong enough to sustain our studio,” Morgan wrote. “The last year has been particularly tough for games.”

Morgan continued: “While we had numerous encouraging conversations at [the DICE Summit] and [the Game Developers Conference], the process of signing new projects … takes longer than the runway we had left.”

Ten employees are expected to lose their jobs in the closure. Galvanic Games has put up a thread on LinkedIn to celebrate their contributions and help affected workers secure new jobs.

Morgan founded Galvanic Games in 2015. Wizard With a Gun might’ve been its highest-profile game to date, made through a collaboration with indie publisher Devolver Digital.

It also toured the indie circuit in 2019 with its story/exploration game Some Distant Memory, and collaborated with Seattle’s tinyBuild and the authors of the webcomic “Cyanide & Happiness” to create the now-defunct satirical battle royale Rapture Rejects.

Galvanic’s shutdown adds to a long list of layoffs that have plagued the video game industry for the last year and a half. More than 10,000 developers have lost their jobs since January, already topping the previous record cuts from all of last year.

The dismissals aren’t coming from any one source, but factors are theorized to include the rising costs of modern “AAA” game development; a dramatic slowdown in available VC investment; a delayed correction after the post-pandemic gaming boom of 2020-2021; a consistently busy release schedule, which may have saturated the market; and the long-term impacts of the industry’s gradual embrace of “games as a service.”

Eric Berlinberg, who spent the past decade at Amazon and was a key leader on the company’s Prime Air team, is moving on from the Seattle tech giant for a new role at Torc Robotics, a subsidiary of Daimler Truck that is developing autonomous vehicle technology for self-driving trucks.

Berlinberg led program management, business intelligence, and more for Prime Air, the drone delivery division of Amazon.

“Almost a decade ago, I stumbled into one of the most incredible professional opportunities: bringing drone delivery to the world,” Berlinberg wrote on LinkedIn. “As one of the first members of this project, it has been inspiring to be at the forefront of this development. Every day, I’ve learned from brilliant engineers, aerodynamicists, and aviators. The attention to safety at all levels, and the unwavering focus on building a safe and scalable delivery system, have always impressed me.”

Berlinberg previously was a director at Manhattan Creative Group and a product manager at Coca-Cola.

He’ll lead program management at Torc, which spun out of Virginia Tech nearly two decades ago and is focused on enabling trucks to drive autonomously between hubs in the U.S.

Amazon has spent years developing drones that can deliver packages to customers. It has missed some projections for customer deliveries but is adding more delivery sites across the U.S. and last month won a key approval from the FAA to fly the drones beyond visual line of sight.

Other key personnel changes across the Pacific Northwest tech ecosystem:

— John Montgomery, who spent more than 26 years at Microsoft and was most recently a corporate vice president, joined Meta as vice president of product management on the company’s infrastructure team. “After 25+ years at Microsoft, it’s invigorating to be starting something new!” he wrote on LinkedIn.

— Longtime marketing executive Jay Wampold joined Buildkite, a Perth, Australia-based software company. Wampold previously held marketing leadership roles at FasterBetter, Pulumi, Commerce IQ, and Cloudability. Former Chef CEO Barry Crist was named board chair of Buildkite last year.

— Michael Vogelsong, who co-founded Amazon’s Deep Learning Technologies team, joined Collaborative Robotics, the Santa Clara, Calif., company founded in 2022 by former Amazon Robotics VP and Distinguished Engineer Brad Porter that recently opened an office in Seattle.

— Katherine Bajjaliya Keileh joined Seattle-based risk intelligence startup Pendulum as head of sales. Keileh previously worked for One and EverFi.

— Whitney Ellison, former director of brand activation at Alaska Airlines, joined Starbucks as senior manager of brand marketing (coffee & culture). She previously worked at Hightower and CenturyLink.

— Aaron Kornblum is departing his role as global general counsel at BYJU’S Learning, part of the India-based edtech company BYJU. Kornblum was a former Microsoft manager and former general counsel at Bungie.

— Mark Musburger is stepping down as CFO of Seattle-area marketing software company Banzai. Musburger joined the company in 2022; Banzai went public late last year. He previously worked at Avalara, Identity Digital, and Corvee.

The founders at Autev envision a future where EV drivers simply park their vehicles in a garage, open an app and enter a parking space number. When they return, their EV battery is topped off.

The technology that could make this vision a reality includes autonomous robots being developed by the Autev team that charge electric vehicles without human assistance.

“It’s like a gas can on wheels,” said Syd Manna, co-founder and chief operations officer at Autev.

The device is essentially a giant, mobile battery outfitted with navigational sensors to help it independently maneuver to a vehicle, and it has a robotic arm with a nozzle that inserts into a vehicle’s charging port.

While the team is still developing prototypes, the Seattle-based startup hopes to be one of the solutions in the build-out of much-needed EV infrastructure, targeting charging opportunities at workplaces, apartments and condo buildings.

The EV industry needs more chargers, but they can be expensive to install given that many require costly electrical upgrades to existing infrastructure to meet high energy demands. Autev’s system provides an alternative, since its robots are simply recharged from a battery-powered docking station. That allows the Autev system to plug into existing power outlets.

“You don’t need to do any infrastructure. It’s a mobile service that’s plug and play,” said co-founder and CEO Osama AlSalloum.

By using mobile chargers, any parking spot can become an EV charging stall and there’s no worry about someone hogging a parking stall outfitted with a stationary charger. The plan is for users to schedule half-hour reservations for the robotic units, which should be able to recharge approximately 25% of an EV’s battery in that time.

The system will have multiple DC fast-charging robots per location, allowing some robots to charge EVs while others can be docked at the base, recharging themselves.

Autev aims to price the systems at $50,000, which would include one of the robot chargers and the base for recharging. Additional robots would cost $20,000-to-$30,000 depending on the number ordered. Each base could accommodate two or four robots.

While still costly, the installation of a conventional, slower charging Level 2 charger costs about $10,000-to-$20,000, while a station with four DC fast chargers can cost $750,000 or more.

Customers for the Autev system would be property owners and managers for residential buildings and office spaces. The team is considering offering their system as a service, in addition to selling it. Customers could recoup some of their costs when drivers pay for charging their EVs.

‘Legitimate effort’

But even if Autev’s solution is more affordable, the market is uncertain.

As EV charging speeds are getting faster, it’s possible that it would make more sense for EV owners in multi-family buildings to charge up at public fast chargers instead of plugging in at home.

That said, if the team is able to fully automate the charging process, “it has definite potential. I think it’s kind of a neat solution,” said Matthew Metz, co-founder and executive director of Coltura, a nonprofit promoting EV use.

But Metz had questions about the system’s practicality.

While relatively compact, the charging units are still a significant size, measuring 5-feet long, 3-feet wide and 4-feet tall. The charging base will take up space, and it could be tight fit for a robot to navigate a jam-packed parking lot and reach a charging port. The Autev team has tried to address this issue by designing the robot to connect to EVs from behind the car, and by making a robotic arm with a high amount of mobility.

Another concern is if there are problems with the autonomous service — a device gets stuck somewhere, or a nozzle fails to engage or disengage — which could create headaches and frustration for Autev users.

The startup team said that someone will be onsite when the first devices are deployed to address any technical issues. And every unit will remotely communicate with the main system so problems can be identified and reported, and someone with the company will quickly respond to problems.

“It is a pretty legitimate effort at dealing with a significant problem,” Metz said, but he still expects “it’s going to have significant headwinds.”

Charging ahead

Autev launched in October 2022 and has built a proof-of-concept device that can deliver slower, Level 1 charging and is manually controlled. The group is building their second prototype with Level 2 charging that operates autonomously. The goal for the third version is a prototype that will deliver a fast charge and be ready for manufacturing.

The startup founders are bootstrapping their effort, but looking to raise money in the coming months. They are targeting production by the end of next year.

The trio met as students in the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business Masters of Entrepreneurship program. Jay Strickland, portfolio analyst with The Energy Authority, is a technical advisor.

Autev is based at the UW’s CoMotion Labs in Fluke Hall as part of its Hardware Incubator. The startup has taken advantage of its university location and has 15 high school, undergraduate and graduate students working as unpaid interns or for college credits.

Others companies are developing related EV charging technologies. Automakers Hyundai and Volkswagen are working on robotic EV charging, though the devices don’t appear to be mobile units or include batteries. Seattle startup Electric Era, which recently won GeekWire’s Sustainable Innovation of the Year award, sells stationary EV charging system that also relies on batteries.

The Autev team is optimistic about future success, noting that all of the components of its system have been proven out technologically in other applications.

“We’re just combining it in a unique way,” Strickland said.

Brex is opening an office in downtown Seattle.

The Salt Lake City-based fintech giant operates as a “remote-first” company and a spokesperson said the Seattle office will be used “in a hybrid capacity which will allow us to advance competitively.”

The Puget Sound Business Journal first reported the news.

Brex already employs around 60 people in Seattle, and more than 200 across the Pacific Northwest. Brex President Karandeep Anand and VP of Engineering James Reggio both live in the Seattle region.

Founded in 2017, Brex raised more than $1 billion and gained widespread adoption among startups with its corporate card and expense management platform. It was valued at more than $12 billion in 2022.

However, following the tech downturn and companies tightening their spending, Brex laid off 20% of its staff earlier this year and lost two key executives.

The company ranked No. 4 on CNBC’s latest Disruptor 50 list. It has 1,000 employees.

Brex joins a number of other companies that operate satellite engineering offices in the Seattle region.

The Department of Defense has put Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin in the running for a share of up to $5.6 billion in national security space launch contracts, marking a first for Jeff Bezos’ space venture.

The decision means Blue Origin’s orbital-class New Glenn rocket is now eligible to be selected for the Pentagon’s most sensitive launches, joining rockets offered by SpaceX and United Launch Alliance.

The ordering period for what’s known as the Phase 3 Lane 1 procurement process runs through mid-2029, with an optional five-year extension. “This award is the result of a competitive acquisition, and seven offers were received,” the Department of Defense said in today’s contract award announcement.

“We’re honored by the opportunity to compete for these National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1 missions with New Glenn,” a Blue Origin spokesperson told GeekWire in an email.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, named after the late NASA astronaut John Glenn, is still under development at the company’s facilities in Florida. New Glenn’s first launch is currently set for no earlier than September. It’s expected to send a pair of robotic probes to study Mars’ magnetosphere for NASA’s EscaPADE mission.

The amounts going to each of the three launch providers in the Phase 3 Lane 1 program will be determined by the task orders that go out for specific launches over the next five years. In a news release, the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command said it was releasing requests for proposals relating to two task orders so far — one that would cover seven launches for the Space Development Agency, and another for the National Reconnaissance Office.

“Any launch provider on the base IDIQ [indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity] contract can bid for launch service task orders provided they have completed a successful orbital launch prior to the proposal due date,” the Space Systems Command said.

The Phase 3 program also sets aside funding for each of the providers to conduct an initial capabilities assessment and explain how they’ll approach the Pentagon’s requirements for mission assurance. As a new provider, Blue Origin will receive $5 million, while SpaceX and ULA — which have already been conducting national security launches — will receive $1.5 million each.

Blue Origin has long sought to take part in the multibillion-dollar national security launch program. It lost out in the competition to participate in Phase 2 in 2020.

As part of the Pentagon’s effort to widen competition for national security launches, Phase 3 has been structured to offer contract opportunities in two “lanes.”

“Today marks the beginning of this innovative, dual-lane approach to launch service acquisition, whereby Lane 1 serves our commercial-like missions that can accept more risk and Lane 2 provides our traditional, full mission assurance for the most stressing heavy-lift launches of our most risk-averse missions,” said Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration.

At least 30 Lane 1 missions are expected to be completed over the five-year ordering period, the Space Systems Command said. More providers may be added to the Lane 1 list as their launch capabilities mature. Details about the Lane 2 process — including eligible providers — are to be announced this fall.

In a speech peppered with mentions of his own sports failings and achievements, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy offered up some advice for winning at life and work to graduates of the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.

“It’s a pretty amazing accomplishment to get into UW, and then to get into one of the very best engineering schools in the world, and then to actually graduate,” Jassy said in the opening remarks of his commencement speech last week in Seattle. “You may or may not realize that this is a remarkable feat, and it may take you until later in your life to appreciate it.”

He went on to share with grads some of the things that it took him the past 30 years to realize, and that he said he wished he’d known when he was 22.

• Career plans change: Jassy wanted to be a sportscaster out of college, got a couple nibbles on his resume reel and ultimately decided he “didn’t have the passion for that profession to pay the dues necessary to be successful.”
• You don’t have to have it all figured out: Some people know what they want to do from a very young age and go on to do just that. Others should realize that it’s OK if interests change over time, and that “life is an adventure” that takes “a lot of unpredictable twists and turns.”
• Don’t let others tell you who you are: A teacher once said a 5-year-old Jassy wasn’t very athletic, but he went on to become a two-sport all-section athlete in high school who later played intercollegiate sports. “Nobody writes your book for you. You write it. And in almost every imaginable case, whatever was initially written can be amended and rewritten.”
• Put yourself out there, take your shot: Jassy said he wasted a lot of energy early in life worrying about asking the wrong question or not knowing the answer to others’ questions. “In my life, my biggest regrets were not the occasions I failed. In fact, in some cases, they’re some of my proudest scars. Rather, my biggest regrets have been the times I didn’t take the risk and leave it all out there.”
• Be a willing and ravenous learner: The memorable people Jassy went to school with or worked with maintained an excitement about continuing to improve. “To me, the second you think there’s little left to learn is the moment you either realize you’re in the wrong situation or starting to unravel if you remain where you are.”
• Control your attitude: How successful people are in what they choose to do, especially early in life, has to do with attitude, Jassy said. “Do you work hard? Do you do what you said you were going to do? … Can you work in teams? Do you care more about the mission of the organization versus your own outcome? These seem pretty simple and obvious, but you’d be surprised by how infrequently people exhibit these characteristics.”

Watch Jassy’s full speech and read the transcript below:

I have been in this arena many hundreds of times as a basketball fan. I’ve always dreamed of being in the Dawg Pack. This is not quite the Dawg Pack, but it’s probably as close as I’ll get.

Thank you, and congratulations to all the 2024 Allen School UW graduates.

It’s a pretty amazing accomplishment to get into UW, and then to get into one of the very best engineering schools in the world, and then to actually graduate. You may or may not realize that this is a remarkable feat, and it may take you until later in your life to appreciate it, but I’m guessing most of your parents and family realize what it means and are proud of you.

When I thought about what I might share with you today, I thought it might be interesting to share what I’ve learned the last 30 years, that I wish I knew when I was 22.

First, I am not going to be a famous sportscaster. That’s what I wanted to do when I was graduating from college and spent three summers in between years of college interning and making a resume reel. I sent my reel to about 80 small-market stations, got two nibbles, couldn’t pull the trigger on either of them because I didn’t want to live in those cities, and then found that I didn’t have the passion for that profession to pay the dues necessary to be successful.

Second, I’m going to pursue a lot of different jobs. Some I simply interview for and don’t get an offer. Others, I try for some time and decide they’re not what I would want to spend my life doing. These include TV production, consulting, investment banking, sales, coaching a high school soccer team, working in a golf retail store and starting several new businesses. You don’t have to know definitively at 22 years old what you’re going to do long term. In fact, you don’t have to know at 25 or 30, or in my case, until I was about 40. Some people have known what they wanted to do from a very young age and done just that. Many of you, as engineering-focused graduates, may be in this group, and if so, that’s great. However, if you aren’t in that group, or if your interests change over over time, that’s also fine. Life is an adventure. It takes a lot of unpredictable twists and turns. You meet people who influence you along the way, you’ll find yourself surprised by what inspires you that you would not have guessed. There are more interesting opportunities to make a difference than you probably realize. Be open to what’s out there, and if you don’t find your groove right away, that’s OK. Life is long for most of us. Figuring out what you don’t want to do early in life is perhaps as important as figuring out what you do want to do.

Third, don’t let others tell you who you are. When I was in Pre-K, my teacher wrote in my report card that I was I was not going to be athletic because I struggled to hop on one leg. My parents were apparently pretty distraught about this, while I was blissfully ignorant of this assessment. It was, of course, a silly generalization, and I went on to be a two-sport all-section athlete in high school and played intercollegiate sports in college. I ignored this judgment because I was five years old and was never told. But as we get older, we’re no longer sheltered from many of the judgements people make of us. And I have experienced, first and secondhand, what it feels like to believe what uninformed people say about you. Remember, nobody writes your book for you. You write it. And in almost every imaginable case, whatever was initially written can be amended and rewritten. You will control what happens to you, not some teacher or boss or reporter or peer or even a family member. And whatever you are now, you can keep evolving, if you want.

Fourth, and somewhat related. I wished I’d understood that every presentation or meeting I was going to do was not a pass/fail referendum on my competence. I wasted so much angst and energy earlier in my life worrying people would think I was an idiot if I asked a dumb question or didn’t know the answer to somebody else’s question, or my hypothesis was flawed, or people just didn’t like my creative idea. There is no person in the world who performs perfectly, or has it right 100% of the time, or whose ideas are coherent or sensible every time. That’s not reality. It is, however, a sure bet that you will never do something needle-moving if you don’t put yourself out there and take a shot. In my life, my biggest regrets were not the occasions I failed. In fact, in some cases, they’re some of my proudest scars. Rather, my biggest regrets have been the times I didn’t take the risk and leave it all out there. In retrospect, you always wonder what would have happened if you had.

Fifth, be a willing and ravenous learner. If I look at the people I’ve gone to school with or started working with at various jobs, perhaps the single biggest factor in what all of us are doing now is the propensity we had to learn. To be a great learner, you have to be observant, self-reflective about what you’re doing well, how people are responding to you and what you could be doing better. You have to be excited about continuing to improve, versus frustrated that there’s more to do or threatened that you still don’t know at all. A lot of people get to a point in life where it’s disconcerting to them that they still don’t have it all figured out. To me, the second you think there’s little left to learn is the moment you either realize you’re in the wrong situation or starting to unravel if you remain where you are. And then to be a great learner, you can’t just assess and talk about what you need to change. You have to then put it into action and make it so. Believe me, life is much more fun and rewarding if you’re learning.

Finally, an embarrassing amount of how successful people are in whatever they do, particularly early in your life, has to do with attitude. Do you work hard? Do you do what you said you were going to do? Do you have a positive, can-do attitude versus a naysaying, energy-sucking approach? Can you work in teams? Do you care more about the mission of the organization versus your own outcome? These seem pretty simple and obvious, but you’d be surprised by how infrequently people exhibit these characteristics. There are so many things that you can’t control in your life, but you can control your attitude, and it makes a big difference.

One last thing about working hard. It seems a little less in vogue today. I also recall early in my career how much pressure I got from certain friends that wasn’t cool to be putting in the extra hours. But if you study those who you think are great at anything — programming, parenting, business, sports, art, writing, teaching, whatever — they’re almost always the hardest workers at their craft. They either love or just plain accept and embrace the process of what it takes to be excellent. You can’t cheat that process, it always catches up with you.

2024 graduates, you have so many options in front of you, and consider this chapter one of your options. They’re going to keep presenting themselves to you over time. Be curious. Be experimental. Control what you can control. Leave it all out there in whatever you go after, and then be kind to yourself when certain things don’t pan out, and many won’t. Remember that you write your own story. And I wish you the very best of luck on the adventure you’re about to embark on. Thank you. Congratulations.

Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite broadband network has been tapped to provide internet connectivity to customers in seven South American countries, under the terms of a newly announced deal with Vrio Corp., the parent company of DirecTV Latin America and Sky Brasil.

Vrio plans to use the Kuiper network to serve residential customers in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay. The area takes in about 383 million people, including tens of millions of people who still aren’t connected to the internet, according to World Bank estimates.

In a news release, Vrio President Dario Werthein said the collaboration with Project Kuiper addresses his company’s concerns about “bridging the technology gap and even more so the digital divide for our future generations.”

The agreement with Vrio follows similar connectivity deals that Project Kuiper has made with Verizon in the U.S., Vodafone and Vodacom in Europe and Africa, and NTT and SKY Perfect JSAT in Japan.

Amazon is wrapping up a monthslong series of tests of two prototype Kuiper satellites — and ramping up the production of operational satellites at its facilities in Redmond and Kirkland, Wash.

The first of those production-grade satellites is due to be launched sometime in the next few months. Amazon plans to start service demonstrations with Vrio and other select customers by the end of the year, and launch commercial service in 2025.

Project Kuiper is far behind SpaceX’s Starlink network, which is providing broadband service to more than 3 million subscribers in 99 countries with a constellation of roughly 6,000 satellites.

GeekWire on Wednesday celebrated its new headquarters at the center of the universe — otherwise known as Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood.

Business leaders, GeekWire sponsors and members, neighbors and representatives from the Fremont Chamber of Commerce gathered for the event on the sunny decks of the office space, which in previous incarnations was a coffee shop and a residence.

Cyclists pedaled past on the Burke Gilman Trail and seaplanes departing from Lake Union buzzed overhead during the requisite ribbon cutting.

Given that the occasion was focused on GeekWire’s new workspace, we took the opportunity to talk to guests about their offices and how they’re navigating the world of remote and in-person work.

While adjustments are still being made, some time has passed since companies began establishing back-to-office policies coming out of the COVID pandemic. Amazon, for example, implemented its three-days-a-week in-person mandate about a year ago.

Here’s what attendees had to say.

Perry Atkins, managing director and family wealth advisor at Baird

In-person policy: Set by individual teams, his requires two days in-person (everyone on Tuesdays, the other day is a personal choice).

How it’s going: “It has been a really robust, happy work environment for people because they feel like they have agency about their lives for the first time in their careers. And I think that from a recruiting standpoint it’s going to be a plus, because I’ve watched some of the other people in my business make their employees come in five days a week.”

A caveat: While the policy works for Atkins’ team of seven, it’s a group of more senior employees. A less experienced cohort could require more in-person interactions to give them the chance for mentoring and to better understand culture and professional conduct, he said.

Shannon Swift, founder and CEO of Swift HR Solutions

In-person policy: Swift HR Solutions, a 20-year-old Seattle-area HR and recruiting company, doesn’t have an office space. The business provides fractional employees who work onsite for clients with workspaces, or remotely for those without.

How it’s going: “Companies are still feeling their way. The ones that took a really hard and fast stance have seen that maybe that wasn’t the best approach. They’ve maybe lost some team members they didn’t want to lose. Morale has been impacted. And so there may be softening a little bit. Others that thought, ‘Oh, this is working great and we can just completely stay remote’ are seeing that maybe over time they’re starting to lose some of some of what made them successful. And so they’re saying, ‘OK, maybe we need to find some way to bring some sense of going back into play.'”

Variables: With Swift HR clients, multiple factors determine onsite policies: the nature of the work, the business model, the company’s culture, and the experience level of the employees, Swift said. For those working remotely, some might convene online for regular morning meet ups or even have Microsoft Teams or Zoom on all day, working together while apart.

Alison Beason, director of life science and global health at the Washington State Department of Commerce

In-person policy: None for her department — employees have offices they can use, or work remotely.

How it’s going: “Now that people are able to work from home, you get more representation in government from across the state. When we had to be in the office in Olympia or in Seattle, we had people that only were very Seattle or Olympia strictly minded. The government encouraging working more remotely or hybrid allows different voices to be at the table when we make these decisions for Eastern Washington, Central Washington, Spokane, Yakima, Vancouver.”

Productivity: The opportunity to work from home creates more flexibility for working hours so if you work late one day, you can push back your start time the next, Beason said. That freedom also means she might check her email on a Sunday so she’ll start ahead of the curve on Monday.

Todd Owens, co-founder and CEO of Kevala

In-person policy: Since the 2020 launch of Kevala, a Seattle startup that helps facilities manage healthcare shifts, employees have been required to work Tuesday to Thursday in the office, and Monday and Friday from home.

How it’s going: “To be honest, when we’re in the office, we are actually huddling and brainstorming and it’s not really a good place for heads down work. So that balance between a couple of days together and a couple of days at home, to me, is the sweet spot.”

Asynchronicity: Some managers were granted approval to work from home on Wednesdays too, but their employees often don’t come in that day as well, Owens said. The startup also hired some 100% remote people based out of state who are great employees, but it adds complexity to have the in-person policy applied unevenly.

Jon Prentice, senior vice president at Silicon Valley Bank

In-person policy: Set by individual teams, which for his group of 20-30 employees requires everyone in the office Mondays and Thursdays.

How it’s going: “I think most people kind of enjoy coming together in the office. I would not want to go in to work every single day, but couple days a week is great. I think I’m less productive the days I go in the office, because it tends to be heavy with internal meetings. So there’s a time and place for that, but I don’t get as much core work done.”

Other improvement: In the pre-COVID world, there was an unspoken rule that everyone started work at 9 a.m., Prentice said. Now if he has an appointment for his kid or another obligation, he can do that and come in later. “Flexibility is a big part of our work environment and our work culture,” Prentice added.

Adam Chapman, managing director, and Blair Stern, executive vice president at JLL

In-person policy: JLL, a real estate services company, has most employees working onsite, with some limited work-from-home and flexibility in onsite hours.

How it’s going: “I totally enjoy it. I love my team. I like being there,” said Chapman.

“I don’t find much excitement just sitting at home by myself,” said Stern. “I love the impromptu conversations, that collaboration, brainstorming with a colleague right next to each other. I love human connection. That’s just me.”

Attractions: Companies eager to get employees onsite are seeking offices with great amenities, said Chapman, which includes restaurants and cafes, gyms and parking garages. And once workers return, it creates momentum.

“As more people came back, FOMO set in,” Chapman said of JLL. “Some of our employees hadn’t been in and they maybe came to check it out, and they’re like, ‘You guys are all closer friends now. I’ve missed out on this.'”

Keep scrolling for more images from Wednesday’s event:

Updated below with details from hearing.

Microsoft President Brad Smith previewed his approach in prepared written testimony for his appearance Thursday before the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security for a hearing about the company’s security failures.

“Before I say anything else,” he wrote, “I think it’s especially important for me to say that Microsoft accepts responsibility for each and every one of the issues cited in the CSRB’s report,” he wrote, referencing an April report by the U.S. Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) that took Microsoft to task for its “inadequate” security culture.

Smith wrote that the company is committed to changing its ways. He cited evidence including Microsoft’s introduction last fall of its Secure Future Initiative, the more recent commitments by CEO Satya Nadella to put security above all else, and the company’s move to base part of senior executive compensation on security.

He said the company is committed to implementing each of the CSRB’s recommendations. He referenced, as an example, its move Friday to update the “Recall” feature on its Copilot+ PCs to address security concerns.

But if Microsoft is truly prioritizing security over new product features, why did it go forward with the Recall feature in the first place?

Microsoft has repeatedly promised to put security above features in the past, stretching back nearly 25 years — so what’s different this time?

And how can Microsoft justify making as much $20 billion a year on security products, given these problems with its core software products and services?

Those are the types of questions that Smith will face during the hearing, titled, “A Cascade of Security Failures: Assessing Microsoft Corporation’s Cybersecurity Shortfalls and the Implications for Homeland Security.”

Like the CSRB report, the hearing will focus in part on a high-profile incident in May and June 2023, when the Chinese hacking group known as Storm-0558 is believed to have compromised the Microsoft Exchange Online mailboxes of more than 500 people and 22 organizations worldwide, including senior U.S. government officials.

While accepting responsibility and acknowledging Microsoft’s shortcomings, Smith put the issue in broader geopolitical context in his written testimony, citing the potential for China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea to not only act on their own but to collaborate in the future to potentially devasting effect.

Make no mistake, we are all in this together. The CSRB report was sparked by a successful Chinese attack on Microsoft, and we understand every day that we have by far the first and greatest responsibility to heed its words. We’re committed to doing so and to playing an indispensable leadership role in defending not just our customers, but this country and its allies. But no single company can protect a country and other nations from what is emerging as a cyberwar waged by four aggressive governments.

Whether or not this scrutiny makes a meaningful difference in the security of Microsoft’s products, the company’s competitors are hoping that it raises awareness of the issue, at least, and causes government officials and corporate decision-makers to rethink the choices they make when buying software and cloud services.

“Microsoft poses an especially acute national security risk given it has a dominant 85 percent market share in the U.S. government’s productivity software market, which makes the government dependent on Microsoft products including Outlook email, Word, Excel, Teams instant messaging, and the Azure cloud platform,” wrote NetChoice, a trade association whose members include Google and Amazon, in its own letter to the House Homeland Security Committee.

The hearing begins at 10:15 a.m. Pacific. It can be viewed here or above.

Stay tuned for updates, and read Smith’s full written testimony here.

Update, 8:30 a.m.: In a follow-up letter to the Homeland Security Committee, Smith provided details on the Microsoft board’s decisions this week regarding the new security components of senior executives’ compensation.

He wrote, in part, “Beginning with the start of the company’s new fiscal year on July 1, one-third of the individual performance element for each SLT member’s bonus will be based exclusively on the [Microsoft Board Compensation] Committee’s assessment of the executive’s individual performance relating to cybersecurity.”

Update, 10:50 a.m.: In his opening statement, ranking member Rep. Bennie Thompson cited a ProPublica article published Thursday, in which a former Microsoft employee said he tried, without success, to warn execs about a flaw that ultimately left customers vulnerable to the 2019 SolarWinds attack.

Asked about the ProPublica report, Smith cited subsequent changes by the company including the addition of deputy chief information security officers into individual product groups. “The job of these individuals is to constantly monitor and assess and pick up feedback and apply a principled approach to things,” he said.

Asked how the company can earn back the trust of customers, Smith said, “I think it’s just critical that we acknowledge shortcomings, accept responsibility, devise the strategy to address them, change the culture, be transparent about what we’re doing, and always listen to feedback.”

Update, 11:05 a.m.: Members questioned Smith about Microsoft’s failure to update a blog post with information about the 2023 Storm-0558 attack.

Rep: Clay Higgins: Why did it take six months for Microsoft to update the means by which most Americans would be made aware of such a hack?

Smith: Well, first of all, I appreciate the question. It’s one that I asked our team. When I read the CSRB report, that’s part of the report that surprised me the most.

We had five versions of that blog: the original, and then four updates. And we do a lot of updates of these reports. And when I asked the team, they said the specific thing that had changed, namely, a theory, a hypothesis about the cause of the intrusion, changed over time, but it didn’t change in a way that would give anyone useful or actionable information that they could apply.

Higgins: Okay, so you see Mr. Smith, respectfully that answer… does not encourage trust. … The means by which you communicate with your customers was not updated for six months. So I’m just gonna say I don’t really accept that answer. …

Smith: I said the same thing, and we had the same conversation inside the company.

Higgins: Okay, I accept that.

Later, in response to a follow-up question from Rep. Eric Swalwell, Smith elaborated: “We updated that particular blog four times. It was at least one time too few.”

Smith answered another question about competitive alternatives to Microsoft software: “People can compete. Somebody said there’s no Plan B. I think about two-thirds of the folks sitting behind me in this room are trying to sell Plan B to you in one way or another, and that’s okay.”

Companies of all shapes and sizes need to secure their infrastructure. But it’s not always clear what type of cybersecurity software can meet their needs. And it’s difficult to navigate marketing and sales tactics used by security services.

Cypher wants to help.

The new Seattle startup aims to democratize information about cybersecurity products while connecting buyers and sellers through its platform.

“The root of the problem is that what gets discovered is what gets marketed really well,” said Cypher co-founder and CEO Vinay Narayan.

Narayan said there are cheaper tools that provide adequate security protections — but they are harder to find.

Cypher also wants to help buyers who may not have big marketing budgets and can’t “pay to play” as effectively.

“We’re going to level the playing field between the haves and have-nots,” Narayan said.

Cypher’s software uses generative AI to understand a company’s cybersecurity needs. Its recommendation algorithm then offers a list of providers who can help.

The company, which is bootstrapped, generates revenue by charging buyers premium subscription offerings, including the ability to get more data points about sellers. And it makes money from sellers who use Cypher to find customers.

Narayan, who moved to Seattle from Silicon Valley three years ago, was previously a business strategy leader for the Oculus and Portal teams at Facebook. He also spent three years at Google.

Cypher co-founder and CTO Sachin Goyal was previously vice president of engineering for Multiverse, and was director of engineering at FanDuel.

Collaborative Robotics, the Santa Clara, Calif., company founded in 2022 by former Amazon Robotics VP and Distinguished Engineer Brad Porter, has hired Michael Vogelsong, who co-founded Amazon’s Deep Learning Technologies team.

Vogelsong will lead the company’s new Foundation Models AI research team from a newly opened Seattle office in an emerging AI corridor on the north side of Lake Union, close to the University of Washington and the Allen Institute for AI.

In addition, the company is making a grant to the UW Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering to support research led by Sidd Srinivasa, a professor and former Amazon exec who is also an advisor to Cobot.

Collaborative Robotics, also known as Cobot, is building a yet-to-be-revealed mobile collaborative robot that is already in use at a transload facility in the Seattle region as part of a global shipping and logistics operation.

Porter, the Collaborative Robotics CEO, oversaw the development and deployment of hundreds of thousands of robotic units at Amazon. He describes Cobot’s robot as “human-capable, but not humanoid,” with fewer design constraints than those that mimic the human form.

Competitors in the broader field of AI and robotics include Covariant, Figure AI, Agility Robotics, 1X, Sanctuary AI, and others.

Collaborative Robotics’ expansion, which follows its $100 million Series B funding in April, illustrates Seattle’s rise as an AI hub, and the broader implications of fundamental AI advances for a new wave of robotics technology.

“Between Oculus, Google, Apple, and Microsoft, there’s a ton of AI talent up there,” Porter said in an interview this week. However, there are fewer good options for AI specialists seeking to join startups in Seattle than there are in Silicon Valley. “So we think it’s going to be a great place to recruit,” he said.

The company has initially leased enough space for about 30 people. Porter said he’s bullish about the future of the Northlake Avenue corridor as an AI hub, along the Burke Gilman Trail between Fremont and the University of Washington, with future opportunities for expansion in existing and new office space.

Collaborative Robotics employs about 40 people overall. Beyond the new Foundation Models AI research group, the new office will also serve as an in-person workplace for some of the company’s Seattle-area employees who were previously working remotely, allowing them to shift to a hybrid model locally.

For example, Alex David, a senior software engineer who was one of the company’s earliest employees, joining Collaborative Robotics in August 2022, was working in the office when GeekWire visited Wednesday.

Porter said AI will play a key role in advancing robotics in areas like manipulation and human collaboration. The company wants to make robots that can better understand humans and assist with tasks through the use of advanced foundation models, with the ability to generalize to a wider range of capabilities after training.

Vogelsong worked at Amazon from 2014 to 2020, on a range of AI and robotics projects, and was most recently chief machine learning engineer for Groundlight AI.

Collaborative Robotics’ new group will conduct fundamental research into AI foundation models and partner with others in an effort to advance the broader field. It’s hiring for roles including AI Research Scientist and AI Research Engineer.

Vogelsong said the field of robotic task learning and manipulation is benefitting from the growing multimodal capabilities of AI foundation models, including not just text and language but also computer vision, for example.

“We see that as a really interesting area to work on,” Vogelsong said. “Our goal is to establish more of this research direction, understand where this field is heading, and where we can bring that into Cobot.”

Vogelsong and others from the company are planning to attend the annual Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference in Seattle next week.

Collaborative Robotics’ $100 million round was led by General Catalyst, joined by Bison Ventures, Industry Ventures and Lux Capital. Existing investors Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, Mayo Clinic, Neo, 1984 Ventures, MVP Ventures and Calibrate Ventures also took part. Its total funding is more than $140 million.

At the same time as the funding, Collaborative Robotics also announced former Amazon and Microsoft public sector leader Teresa Carlson as an advisor.

Will intelligent AI agents take on the job of capsule communicator in future missions to the moon, Mars and other space destinations?

It could happen, says James Burk, the executive director of the Mars Society.

“One of our advisers did a really deep dive on how the Apollo astronauts interacted with each other and with the CapCom back on Earth, and he came to the insight that the Apollo 17 astronauts were using CapCom almost like an AI bot — because the CapCom knew everything,” Burk said during a panel discussion focusing on the intersection of artificial intelligence and space ventures.

“You can imagine having an AI edge device which could be like a rover following the crew around, walking around the moon or Mars,” he said. “It’s watching them and taking stock of how everyone’s doing.”

Tuesday’s panel was a crossover session presented at Madrona Venture Labs by the Washington Technology Industry Association for Seattle AI Week, and by Space Northwest for Seattle Space Week. “When you think about the kinds of megatrends of our time, two of the big ones are space and AI,” said Mike Doyle, Space Northwest’s president and co-founder.

Putting AI into space adventures isn’t exactly a new idea: The best-known sci-fi example is HAL, the AI who goes psycho in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” There’s also the no-nonsense computer voice in the Star Trek saga, or Marvin the Paranoid Android in “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

But the real world isn’t science fiction. Yet.

Dealing with data

“I don’t think we’re going to see a ‘HAL’ business,” said Keith Rosema, a partner at Madrona Venture Labs who has previously worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture and the late Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc.

Instead, AI is helping humans make sense of the flood of imagery and other data coming down from Earth orbit. Kelsey Doerksen, a Ph.D. student at the University of Oxford who’s affiliated with JPL, said one of her jobs is to “make space scientists’ life easier” — specifically when it comes to doing atmospheric science.

“When we’re trying to run physics-based models, with hundreds if not thousands of different parameters and various tweaks of how you could initialize your parameters and these physics models, it takes hours, days, weeks to run these types of models to get results out,” she said. “Whereas with the AI pipeline that we’re building at JPL, we can do things in a matter of hours.”

Hanna Steplewska, the president of Seattle-based Cognitive Space, said AI-driven software tools are making headway in the commercial space industry. For example, a search engine called Danti is optimized to sift through Earth observation data.

Multiple companies — including BlackSky, which has deep roots in Seattle — employ AI to help government and commercial customers make sense out of a variety of geospatial data, ranging from satellite views to social media. Microsoft and the Allen Institute for AI have also gotten into geospatial data analysis.

Training for space

Steplewska’s company is focused on applying AI tools to the thorny problem of tracking thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit.

“Cognitive Space has a very clear 10-year goal,” she said. “We want to orchestrate a million intelligent machines across a multiplanetary system. So, everything that we’re learning about how to fly constellations effectively applies to constellations of things that are on Earth, on the moon’s surface, in orbit around the moon, in orbit around Mars, on Mars’ surface and beyond.”

What about generative AI, which has quickly revolutionized so many tech sectors? When it comes to space operations, one of the big technical hurdles has to do with the fact that large language models really don’t know that much about the final frontier. Burk recalled a test case that the Mars Society ran, in which ChatGPT was asked to design a valve for a zero-pressure, high-altitude balloon.

“The answer it came back with was factual … but it was totally wrong,” he said.

Doerksen said satellite constellations could provide “the perfect use case” for training better AI models and automating space operations. “If you’ve had the same satellite launched in 2015, and a similar generation in 2022, you can use that historical data to train a model to still be used in the future,” she said.

The AI revolution isn’t just affecting space operations on Earth: The Seattle area’s biggest players in AI and cloud services — Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure — are working with partners to expand edge computing to the edge of space. This year, a Seattle-area startup called Lumen Orbit came out of stealth with a plan to send hundreds of data-center satellites into orbit. The idea is to run data through AI models in space, and then downlink only the most valuable bits.

“You know, there was a Super Bowl commercial for Salesforce recently that said something like, ‘If AI is the Wild West, isn’t big data the new gold?'” Burk said. “I think our approach to get ready for AI at the Mars Society, with our scientific research, is to really be thoughtful about how we’re collecting data, to have standards where they don’t exist.”

Power tool? Space pal? Or HAL?

In the years to come, maybe AI will just blend into the woodwork — or more accurately, the silicon and steel — of space infrastructure.

“I will hold back from saying [that] in 10 years we’ll have an AI overlord,” Rosema said. “In all seriousness, I actually think this might be more boring. Right now, AI is very much in our face. And if I look at other historical technical trends — internet, mobile phones — originally, those things were all very much in our face. I hope that AI does the same thing: It just melts into the background and becomes another power tool for us.”

But maybe space-based AI will become more than a power tool. During NASA’s uncrewed Artemis 1 mission, which circled the moon in 2022, Amazon teamed up with Lockheed Martin and Cisco to put an Alexa-type voice assistant inside the Orion capsule. During future missions to deep space, a smarter version of the assistant could keep a spacecraft’s crew up to date on what’s happening around them — and, in the words of an Amazon executive, provide “some form of companionship.”

Hmm … Burk’s AI CapCom might not be such a flight of fancy after all. Let’s just hope it doesn’t end up turning into HAL.

Other highlights from Seattle Space Week:

• Recruiting talent for space projects can be a challenge. “As a VC-backed startup competing with Google for data scientists, talent is really hard,” Steplewska said. But Burk said “it’s been really easy for me to recruit talent, because there’s a lot of tech people who are interested in space.” AI projects are among the top priorities for the Mars Technology Institute that the Mars Society is setting up, potentially in the Seattle area.
• During a Monday session in Redmond, Wash., a panel of entrepreneurs weighed in on other challenges related to sustaining a startup in the aerospace industry. Bill Bruner, co-founder and CEO of New Frontier Aerospace, said he was counting on Congress to pass a bipartisan bill providing additional tax relief for research and development. “This is really an existential issue for startup companies,” he said.
• Seattle Space Week continues tonight with a Space Happy Hour at the Doubletree Southcenter. The invitees include participants in this week’s State of the Space Industrial Base workshop at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. Check the event’s registration page for additional information.
• Space Happy Hour is organizing a night at the ballpark for Thursday’s game between the Seattle Mariners and the Chicago White Sox at T-Mobile Park. Check out the “Spaceball” webpage for ticket information.