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MINNEAPOLIS - Stanford kicked off the 2023 NCAA Championships on Wednesday afternoon, competing in both the 200 medley and 800 free relays. The Cardinal tallied two top-10 finishes, taking 10th in the medley and seventh in the free.

Leon MacAlister, Ron Polonsky, Andrei Minakov, and Rafael Gu combined to record a 1:22.69 in the 200 medley relay, a season-best mark by more than a second. The Cardinal were in the first field of eight to race, taking first place in the heat.

In the 800 free relay, Stanford occupied lane one in the third heat of the event. Andrei Minakov, Ron Polonsky, Luke Maurer, and Preston Forst took the 800 free relay duties, with Minakov leading the group off with the third-fastest Stanford 200 free this season (1:32.54).

The team combined for a 6:11.49, narrowly behind Stanford's top mark this season at the NC State/GAC Invite.

The Cardinal returns to action tomorrow with the first individual events taking place. Stanford will compete in the 500 free, 200 IM, 50 free, and 1-meter diving in prelims at 10 a.m. with finals starting at 6 p.m.

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Two Top-10 Finishes - Stanford University Athletics - Stanford Athletics

Character.AI, an artificial intelligence start-up founded by two former Google employees, is capitalizing on venture capitalists' unquenchable thirst for deals in technology's hottest space.

The two-year-old company said on Thursday that it raised $150 million at a $1 billion valuation in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, who helped created the architecture used in popular chatbots, left Google in 2021 and founded Character.AI the same year.

Character.AI said in a press release announcing the funding that its technology gives "users the ability to create a fully-customizable and personalized AI companion with a distinct personality and values."

The financing round follows major efforts by Google and Microsoft to develop and embed chatbot software into key products, bringing AI-generated responses into things like search, documents and email. Big tech companies and VCs are rushing into the market after Microsoft-backed OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public in November and saw the free experimental service go viral.

In January, Microsoft announced a ChatGPT-integrated Bing search engine. Earlier this week, Google launched a test version of its chatbot Bard.

"There are some overlaps, but we're confident Google will never do anything fun," Freitas told Axios, regarding Bard. "Because we worked there.

Character.AI said the fresh capital will allow it to expand its "compute abilities resulting in a more sophisticated model with advanced reasoning and greater accuracy." The money will help the company grow its 22-person team and add technical abilities. The company said it's nearing 100 million site visits per month, a four-fold increase in two months."

The 10-figure valuation for a company that's reportedly pre-revenue is reminiscent of other recently hyped technologies like crypto (or more broadly Web3) and social audio. Andreessen Horowitz has been a significant player in driving up prices in both markets. The firm announced a $4.5 billion crypto fund in mid-2022 as the digital currency market was in freefall. A year earlier, it added to its investment in audio app Clubhouse, valuing the early-stage startup at $4 billion. The Clubhouse buzz quickly quieted as the post-lockdown economy reopened.

Character.AIdidn't provide additional comment.

Sarah Wang, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said in the release that Character.AI is rapidly and dramatically advancing generative AI, with the potential to transform how humans connect not just with AI, but more broadly reinvent how we interact with technology as a whole in our everyday lives.

Other investors include former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Elad Gil, A Capital and SV Angel.

Jill Chase, who leads AI investments at Alphabet's late-stage venture group Capital G, previously told CNBC that Shazeer is the type of person who "can go into their basement for 18 months and change the world."

"I've spent a lot of time with Noam," she said. "He is an exceptional technologist."

Watch: AI arms race

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Ex-Google employees' A.I. chatbot startup valued at $1 billion after Andreessen Horowitz funding - CNBC

Enterprise software vendors big and small are moving quickly to adopt the technology behind ChatGPT, the popular artificial intelligence tool developed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI.

San Francisco-based startup Klarity Intelligence is among early adopters that are marketing new tools targeted at finance departments in particular.

Its very clear that this is a technology that can bring immense value to finance teams,Nischal Nadhamuni, chief technology officer and co-founder of Klarity Intelligence, said in an interview.

Klarity, which focuses on helping businesses to automate document-heavy workflows, is leveraging OpenAIs technology in a new demo product available for free on the internet, with plans to unveil an enterprise-ready version within coming weeks.

The upgrade will allow clients to more quickly and easily perform functions such as validating billing and revenue data, according to Nadhamuni.

ChatGPT is an AI-driven natural language processing tool capable of interacting in a conversational way and producing responses to questions across a number of subject areas. The technologys popularity is rapidly increasing, even as some worry about risks such as data security breaches.

Klaritys demo product incorporates a new model of the technology, known as GPT-4. However, the tech startup is working to address data security issues and other potential concerns before making the upgraded system available to its clients, which include online video conferencing company Zoom Video Communications Inc. and cybersecurity firm Cloudflare Inc.

We want to be able to test more internally before we do that, Nadhamuni said. Among other security protocols, Klarity is using end-to-end encryption and has opted out of any of its customer or user data being used by OpenAI for ChatGPT model training, he said.

In a related move, finance tech startup Brex has announced plans to launch new ChatGPT-style tools for CFOs.The new tools, which are set to be made available later in 2023 through Brexs Empower platform, expand on work the company has done with Scale AI during the past year to automatically parse receipts and invoices, extracting data to enable automatic policy enforcement, the company said in a March 7press release. Strict privacy controls will be maintained as the new features are rolled out, it said.

Other early ChatGPT adopters include bigger companies with more far-reaching tools.Last week, Microsoft said it was planning to bring ChatGPT-like features to Microsoft 365, its product suite that includes Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and Outlook emails. The software giantannounced in January that it was extending a partnership with OpenAI, making a new multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment in the startup company.

Earlier this month, Salesforce Inc. unveiled a ChatGPT app for its Slack business messaging platform.

Meanwhile, Google is experimenting with a ChatGPT competitor known as Bard.

Klarity said on March 15 that it began using GPT-4 in a demo platform that allows users to extract data from PDF documents and graphs that can then be reviewed and analyzed in minutes. That announcement came just a day after GPT-4 was released to the public. Prior to that, Klarity had been experimenting with the technologys previous iteration, GPT-3.5.

Beginning in April, all new Klarity customers will get the GPT-4 driven platform, and existing ones will be offered migration options, the company said in a press release.

Klaritys platform can extract the payment terms in a PDF contract and automatically populate them into an invoicing system, the company said. It also helps ease order management, billing and revenue recognition reviews, processes that have traditionally been performed manually by large teams of analysts who reconcile data between systems and documents for accuracy and completeness and then populate long revenue checklists, according to the release.

Previously, the company used its own custom AI models to create document summaries for finance and accounting teams that pulled out high-level details such as licensed products, payment terms, addresses and non-standard language, the release said. With GPT-4 embedded across the platform, customers now will have the ability to instantly set up new extraction fields within minutes, as well as use AI capabilities in the tool to compare data such as party names, dates, and addresses, it said.

The enhanced platform also allows users to chat with their documents, according to Nadhamuni. For example, the platform could be asked to search revenue contracts for refund upon termination for convenience clauses.

This is a very damaging clause, because it means your customer can end the contract and be entitled to a refund, so you want to know if your contract has one of those, he said.

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Software vendors race to bet on ChatGPT craze - CFO Dive

CHANDIGARH: Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar said on Friday that Auto Appeal Software (AAS) is playing a pivotal role in the timely delivery of services to the citizens. Since its launch on September 1, 2021, this system has not only brought radical changes in the age-old manual system of the government functioning but has also ensured transparency and accountability of the officers.Khattar shared this while interacting directly with the beneficiaries of Auto Appeal Software (AAS) through audio conferencing here.He said that the revolutionary changes brought by the present state government have certainly given a big sigh of relief to the common man not only in terms of getting their work done in a time bound manner but also saving their time to make rounds of the government offices.The chief minister informed that presently 384 services of 33 departments have been on boarded on AAS. For this, the officers of the Right to Service Commission deserve appreciation.He said that due to the implementation of AAS, an automatic appeal is made on behalf of the citizen to the First Grievance Redressal Authority if the service is not provided on time. If the First Grievance Redressal Authority does not dispose of the appeal within 30 working days, the appeal automatically goes to the Second Grievance Redressal Authority. Similarly, if the appeal is not disposed of within 30 working days, the appeal automatically is forwarded to the Right to Service Commission, shared Khattar.The Chief Minister said that regular monitoring of the AAS software is done by the Right to Service Commission. A total of 6,54,799 appeals have been filed under AAS from September 5, 2021, to March 17, 2023. Out of these, 6,10,145 appeals have been disposed of, informed Khatta

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Auto Appeal Software playing key role in ensuring hassle-free and timely delivery of services to citizens - Times of India

STANFORD, Calif.-After winning the Pac-12 Championship for the second consecutive year, Stanford women's swimming and diving swept the conference's annual swimming awards, the Pac-12 announced on Thursday.

Greg Meehan, the Paul A. Violich Director of Women's Swimming, was honored as the Pac-12 Women's Swimming Coach of the Year for the second year in a row and the sixth time in his career. Torri Huske took home Women's Swimmer of the Year and Claire Curzan was named the Women's Freshman of the Year.

Huske is the 16th swimmer in program history to be named Women's Swimmer of the Year. The sophomore took home the gold in all of her events at the Pac-12 Championships and set program records in the 200 IM and 100 fly at the NCAA Championship last weekend.

The Cardinal has taken home the Freshman of the Year Award eighttimes in the last nine years, with Curzan being the 11th swimmer to earn the award. The North Carolina native took home the NCAA title in the 200 back and set a pool record at 1:47.64.

Stanford returned to the podium in 2023 with a third place finish with 333 points. The Cardinal picked up national titles in the 200 free and 200 back.

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Pac-12 Swim Awards Sweep - Stanford University Athletics - Stanford Athletics