Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Everyone suddenly seems convinced that AI companions will be at the heart of the next major computing platform shift (Mustafa Suleyman saying that verbatim earlier this month). It all sounds a bit strange, no?? A bit silly. Even to me. After all, it’s just a personality, a character that you’re interacting with. Can a character truly reshape how we use the internet?
Winners were announced live at the 2025 Oregon Book Awards Ceremony, hosted by Omar El Akkad, at Portland Center Stage at The Armory on Monday, April 28, 2025.
Compliance software maker Navex has tapped Andrew Bates as its new CEO. Bates has spent the last three years as CFO for the Lake Oswego company. He replaces Sean Thompson, who stepped down in January.
Looking back, most of them didn’t work out so well, in areas from scooters to autonomous driving, genetic testing and vertical farming — the list goes on. It was enough to give SPACs a bad name.
Schell, who also led Intel’s sales, marketing, and communications group, reporting directly to the office of the CEO, joined the company in February 2022. He previously was the chief commercial officer at HP; EVP of growth markets for Philips; and a brand management lead at Procter & Gamble.
From a competitive pool of applicants, two of the six visionary finalists are one step away from leading a roundtable session on July 15 at SoWa Power Station in Boston. Your vote determines who makes it.
Andreessen described his job as a nuanced combination of “intangible” skills, including psychological analysis of the entrepreneurs he works with: “A lot of it is psychological analysis, like, ‘Who are these people?’ ‘How do they react under pressure?’ ‘How do you keep them from falling apart?’ ‘How do you keep them from going crazy?’ ‘How do you keep from going crazy yourself?’ You know, you end up being a psychologist half the time.”
If you are a woman entrepreneur with a passion for innovation and a drive to make a difference, we encourage you to apply to participate in this prestigious program. Whether you are in the early stages of launching your startup or have an established business looking to scale, this competition offers a platform to gain visibility, network with industry leaders & investors, and access mentorship.
To disrupt venture investing, we must redefine success beyond unicorn valuations. Sustainable, founder-centric outcomes are essential for a healthier innovation ecosystem. The current system stifles diverse approaches, wastes entrepreneurial talent, and damages the broader landscape by funneling resources to a narrow band of companies that fit an outdated mold.
The key is knowing how to take it in without getting defensive (which I, admittedly, kinda suck at).
This week, we spoke with Ron Bronson, the former Head of Design at 18F. At Code for America, we welcome a broad diversity of viewpoints—and we strive to let people speak in their own words about their own unique experiences. With that in mind, the following has received only minor edits for length and clarity, and the views expressed here reflect those of the author.
Quanta interviewed 19 current and former NLP researchers to tell that story. From experts to students, tenured academics to startup founders, they describe a series of moments — dawning realizations, elated encounters and at least one “existential crisis” — that changed their world. And ours.
Most people living in the United States know little about the International Workers’ Day of May Day. For many others there is an assumption that it is a holiday celebrated in state communist countries like Cuba or the former Soviet Union. Most Americans don’t realize that May Day has its origins here in this country and is as “American” as baseball and apple pie, and stemmed from the pre-Christian holiday of Beltane, a celebration of rebirth and fertility.
Not surprisingly, artificial intelligence led the way for big funding rounds last month, but that wasn’t the only tech that interested investors. Startups in fintech, energy and more all landed big rounds as investors showered some cash in April.
The State of Devs survey is now open to participation, and unlike previous surveys it covers everything except code: career, workplace, but also health, hobbies, and mor
75 years ago, the tiny town of McMinnville, Oregon was struck with UFO fever when a local couple spotted a flying disc over their farm, making national news. 50 years later, the fever descended again with the very first UFO Festival. Time warp to today and our 25th annual festival!
Over the next two decades, demand could increase by between 1.8% and 3.1% annually, the Northwest Power and Conservation Council heard Tuesday. The projected growth will come primarily from companies building more data centers in the region, more electric vehicles on roads, electrifying buildings, computer chip manufacturing and the production of “green hydrogen” created by running an electrical current through water to split the molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have resulted in increasingly anthropomorphic language concerning the ability of LLMs to reason. Whether reasoning in LLMs should be understood to be inherently different is, however, widely debated. We propose utilizing a representation engineering approach wherein model activations are read from the residual stream of an LLM when processing a reasoning task.
According to the New York Federal Reserve, labor conditions for recent college graduates have “deteriorated noticeably” in the past few months, and the unemployment rate now stands at an unusually high 5.8 percent. Even newly minted M.B.A.s from elite programs are struggling to find work. Meanwhile, law-school applications are surging—an ominous echo of when young people used graduate school to bunker down during the great financial crisis.
How much should we be online? Is it crazy to spend the majority of your day in chat groups, answering emails, and scrolling X? Is posing 20 to 30 queries a day to the AIs consistent with having meaningful respect for actual flesh-and-blood human beings?
It’s flattering to imagine myself as this tech industry cryptid. But on a deeper level, the facile binary is irksome. Unfortunately it’s also fairly common in tech: technical versus non-technical. Builders versus users. “Real” developers versus everyone else. These false dichotomies scared me off from coding as much as the code itself; after all, it’s hard to feel invited into a clubhouse that has a “no liberal arts grads allowed” sign out front.
“We think Portland has legs and works long term,” Tarlow told the Business Journal. “If you have the right product and the right location, people are going to want to be there, and the burden of proof may be the tip of the iceberg. But I’d rather be at the front of the wave than at the back of it.”
Swirling in the discourse about this technology is a debate about what it means to be an engineer right now. Some think you don’t even need to learn how to code and instead should focus on building other skills. Others think there will always be a need for engineers, citing concerns about LLM code quality (and its ability to scale) or security.
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