Former Brex COO who now heads unicorn fintech Figure says GPT is already upending the mortgage industry

by with No Comment Tech

Figure CEO Michael Tannenbaum

Image Credits: Figure

Lending startup Figure announced today a rollout of AI tooling to make the home lending process more efficient. The company will be launching an AI tool powered by GPT-4 to help catch errors in lending documents. 

Figure, founded in 2018, specializes in helping consumers secure home equity lines of credit. The company touts that its all-online process condenses a normally 45-day process to five. More than half of Figure’s business is B2B, where it’s embedded in companies like solar panel loan company GoodLeap.

The company, which has raised over $1.5 billion and was last valued at around $3 billion, according to PitchBook, is now making a push into AI — a strategy heralded by new CEO Michael Tannenbaum, who left his station as COO at Brex to join the firm. “I thought that this was something that could really transform the way that fintech businesses work,” he said of his move. 

The key AI product he’s pushed for is to help with “stare and compare” instances in the lending process. He gave the example of a property-level description, which is a unique description of the asset that has to be exactly the same on many of the legal documents. Traditionally, a human would have to look through over 60 pages to ensure the description is the same. Tannenbaum said their new feature massively decreases the manual labor and time it takes to verify the documents. It’s an example, he said, of AI “taking costs out of complex processes.” 

Given the personal information in loan applications, the company had to go back and forth with OpenAI to make sure their privacy agreement was ironclad and “that the models were not being trained on our customer data in a certain way,” he said. 

Although the feature runs on GPT-4, Ruben Padron, chief data officer, emphasized that the company made it a priority to build model-agnostic systems. “We’re constantly testing and evaluating different models as they come out, and almost weekly, or sometimes daily,” he said. Their systems “offer us a lot of flexibility to allow us to quickly and dynamically pivot to whatever vendor is offering the highest performance.” 

Padron sees many more AI offerings in Figure’s future, emphasizing that the more they can automate the lending application process, the less chance for error or bias. “We’re really trying to lower the cost, eliminate the manual work, reduce the bias,” Padron said. “It’s very much a journey. It’s not a destination.” 

blue sky with white clouds

Bluesky is now allowing heads of states to sign up

by with No Comment Tech

blue sky with white clouds

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Social networking service Bluesky is now allowing heads of state to sign up and join the platform. The move comes ahead of major general elections in countries like the U.S. and India this year.

Last year, during Bluesky’s invite-only period, the company stated that it didn’t allow heads of state to sign up, and asked users to contact the startup before inviting prominent figures.

“We appreciate everyone’s enthusiasm in sending invitations, but our current policy is that we cannot accommodate heads of state to join us in our beta yet. This applies to recent/prominent heads of state as well,” the company said at that time.

In February, the company opened the platform to everyone after staying in invite-only mode for almost a year.

Bluesky faced moderation challenges early in its life, and has had to face issues like preventing users from using racial slurs in their handles. Separately, its users have continuously pushed the platform to clamp down on hate speech.

The platform has since taken steps to improve its moderation, adding moderation lists and automated moderation tools in December 2023. Last month, it announced Ozone, a tool that allows users to build their own moderation and labeling services.

Bluesky’s rival Threads has distanced itself from actively recommending political content. However, Bluesky users don’t have to rely on a central algorithm to see content, as they can subscribe to different feeds.

In Seoul summit, heads of states and companies commit to AI safety

by with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: Sungjin Kim / Getty Images

Government officials and AI industry executives agreed on Tuesday to apply elementary safety measures in the fast-moving field and establish an international safety research network.

Nearly six months after the inaugural global summit on AI safety at Bletchley Park in England, Britain and South Korea are hosting the AI safety summit this week in Seoul. The gathering underscores the new challenges and opportunities the world faces with the advent of AI technology. 

The British government announced on Tuesday a new agreement between 10 countries and the European Union to establish an international network similar to the U.K.’s AI Safety Institute, which is the world’s first publicly backed organization, to accelerate the advancement of AI safety science. The network will promote a common understanding of AI safety and align its work with research, standards, and testing. Australia, Canada, the EU, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the U.K., and the U.S. have signed the agreement.

On the first day of the AI Summit in Seoul, global leaders and leading AI companies convened for a virtual meeting chaired by U.K. prime minister Rishi Sunak and South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol to discuss AI safety, innovation and inclusion. 

During the discussions, the leaders agreed to the broader Seoul Declaration, emphasizing increased international collaboration in building AI to address major global issues, uphold human rights, and bridge digital gaps worldwide, all while prioritizing being “human-centric, trustworthy, and responsible.”

“AI is a hugely exciting technology — and the U.K. has led global efforts to deal with its potential, hosting the world’s first AI Safety Summit last year,” Sunak said in a U.K. government statement. “But to get the upside, we must ensure it’s safe. That’s why I’m delighted we have got an agreement today for a network of AI Safety Institutes.” 

Just last month, the U.K. and the U.S. sealed a partnership memorandum of understanding to collaborate on research, safety evaluation, and guidance on AI safety. 

The agreement announced today follows the world’s first AI Safety Commitments from 16 companies involved in AI, including Amazon, Anthropic, Cohere, Google, IBM, Inflection AI, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Open AI, Samsung Electronics, Technology Innovation Institute, xAi and Zhipu.ai. (Zhipu.ai is a Chinese company backed by Alibaba, Ant and Tencent.) 

The AI companies, including those from the U.S., China, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), have agreed to the safety commitments to “not develop or deploy a model or system at all if mitigations cannot keep risks below the thresholds,” according to the U.K. government statement. 

“It’s a world first to have so many leading AI companies from so many different parts of the globe all agreeing to the same commitments on AI safety,” Sunak said. “These commitments ensure the world’s leading AI companies will provide transparency and accountability on their plans to develop safe AI.” 

At Bletchley, Rishi Sunak confirms AI Safety Institute but delays regulations for another day

Politicians commit to collaborate to tackle AI safety, US launches safety institute