Yup, Jony Ive is working on an AI device startup with OpenAI

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Image Credits: David Livingston / Getty Images

Jony Ive, the legendary designer who left his full-time role at Apple five years ago, is working on a new startup with OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman.

The collaboration was first reported last year, and Ive confirmed it in a New York Times profile about what he’s been up to since leaving Apple.

If the startup has a name, Ive isn’t sharing it, but it apparently emerged from dinners with Altman last year where the pair discussed the potential of generative AI. With Ive’s firm LoveFrom leading the design, the profile describes the goal as building “a product that uses A.I. to create a computing experience that is less socially disruptive than the iPhone.”

So perhaps Ive and Altman can succeed where other AI device companies like Humane have struggled.

Industrial designer Marc Newson, who’s working with Ive, said the product specifics and release timing haven’t been decided. Despite that vagueness, the startup is fundraising, with Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective and Ive himself contributing. It sounds like the company is aiming to raise up to $1 billion by the end of the year.

OSOM is shutting down on Friday

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Image Credits: OSOM

Launching a phone company is a remarkably difficult — some even say foolish — thing to do. OSOM Products, which rose out of the smoldering ashes of Essential in 2020, is closing shop. Android Authority was first to report the news, after gaining access to an internal announcement from CEO Jason Keats.

OSOM always had a difficult road, with plans to launch a privacy-focused handset. And much like Essential before it, the company dealt with its own legal struggles — namely a lawsuit against filed by a former employee alleging financial mismanagement.

For its part, the company did manage to release a mobile device, though not the first-party phone it had announced. Rather the company lent its technology to a Web3 focused devices from Solana.

OSOM did manage to bring a product to market under its own name. The OSOM Privacy Cable is effectively a USB cord whose data transfer can be disabled in situations where “juice jackers” might be present.

“The report in Android Authority is correct, OSOM is sadly shutting down. In May of 2024, having no customers for a mobile phone despite concerted efforts, OSOM at the time decided to pivot to a new project,” CEO Jason Keats said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “OSOM was forced to let go of a number of employees at that time to reduce our burn rate.”

The “new project” would appear to refer to an “AI-powered camera” it planned as a followup to its unreleased smartphone. According to initial reports, Keating had attempted to sell the company off to HP, but was unable to strike a deal.

“Unfortunately, given the bleak market climate for fundraising for consumer electronics startups, we were unable to raise a new round,” Keats says. “While some maintenance operations to ensure contractual requirements will proceed, OSOM’s general operations will shut down on September 6.”

X lets you edit DMs — here is how to use the feature

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X (formerly Twitter) logo on a cracked wall

Image Credits: TechCrunch

X, the social network owned by Elon Musk, is finally rolling out one of the most sought-after features for direct messages: the ability to edit the message.

Over the weekend, X made the edit message feature available to iOS users. One of the engineers at the company posted about the roll-out and said the edit messages function will be available on more platforms soon.

Here is how you can use it:

Open any direct message chat from your X iOS app.Long press on any message that you sent or tap on the three-dot menu beside the message.Select the “Edit message” option to modify the sent message.

According to a support page, there is no time limit for editing the messages. In our testing, we found out that you can also edit older DMs on the platform too. However, you can only make five edits overall to a message. The social network applies the same limit on editing posts as well.

While X said that it keeps a log of edited messages for security reasons, it doesn’t show the version history of edited messages at the moment.

Users expect to be able to edit their messages in messaging apps, as other chat apps, such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and Messenger have had this functionality for a while now. Apple also added the ability to edit messages sent via iMessage with iOS 16.

A16z’s Joshua Lu says AI is already radically changing video games and Discord is the future

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Image Credits: a16z

Andreessen Horowitz’s partner Joshua Lu knows that, in the video game industry, you can never get too comfortable. When he was head of product at Zynga, he experienced the height of mobile games, working on hits like Words with Friends; then as a vice president at Blizzard Entertainment, he helped produce tentpole hits like Diablo Immortal. And then, as a director of product management at Meta, he learned to see games in new dimensions while working on the VR game, Horizon Worlds. 

“I had to forget what I thought were universal truths and learn a whole new set of ways to do things,” Lu told TechCrunch.

Now Lu wants a front row seat to where video games are heading. After joining the firm as an investor in 2022, Lu helped launch the firm’s Speedrun accelerator, which invests $750,000 apiece into about 40 gaming startups twice a year. Now on the firm’s third cohort — with the applications for the fourth cohort now open — Lu said he’s seen how AI and new distribution platforms are changing the industry.

Half of the accelerator’s current batch are AI companies, doing everything from creating AI-crafted stories to using AI for 3D avatars. “The last game that I worked on at Blizzard took six years and a $250 million budget to ship,” he said, referring to Diablo Immortal. “But wouldn’t it be so great if that kind of quality of game could be done with a 10th of the budget and a 10th of the people?” 

We might quibble with how great it is for AI to kill high-paying developer jobs at the largest game companies. But if AI also helps more startups form and be qualitatively competitive, that’s a compelling thought.

Lu says he’s seen firsthand how companies are getting creative, citing Clementine, a startup that went through Speedrun. The company “released a demo where you had to solve a mystery by talking to AI and making sure that they didn’t find out that you were a human,” he said. That may be a terrifying premise, or a tongue-in-cheek one, depending on how existential a threat you think AI could become.

Lu also mentioned Echo Chunk, a company that raised $1.4 million in a round led by Speedrun. Echo Chunk went viral for its game Echo Chess that uses AI to instantly generate an endless number of levels. “These are all fairly early explorations,” he said. “But we’re excited in general about novel types of game design interactions and game dynamics that can be unlocked because of AI.” 

Lu is also advocating for startups to build games atop Discord. Earlier this year, Discord made it so developers can create apps for people to use within the chatting platform. Lu said that, over the course of his career, he’s seen the places for people to discover games dwindle; for example, no one finds games through social media feeds anymore, like many did with Farmville. “Where can we find the next platform where truly social games can be created and distributed?” Lu said. 

Several companies entered the accelerator building within Discord. Lu said several more pivoted to building in Discord over the course of the 12-weeks. “There are more games being made than ever, and it’s hard for developers to stand out,” he said. He hopes building on Discord will help “people to find pieces of content that they would really like playing.”

Hello Wonder is building an AI-powered browser for kids

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Hello Wonder app displayed on smartphone and computer screens

Image Credits: Hello Wonder

Across the world, regulators have ramped up their efforts to try and increase the safety of kids on the internet. Major social networks are facing scrutiny, and as a countermeasure, trying to roll out tools to protect kids. The core issue in the focus is the content that shows up on children’s screens and how to make it safe.

While a lot of these efforts are geared toward teens, toddlers also use devices to consume content. So, a trio of founders who have worked at companies like Google and Amazon are trying to create an AI-powered browser/companion to create a safe environment for kids to learn and explore through Hello Wonder.

The company currently has an iPad app — which parents have full control over — that lets kids ask questions to an AI chatbot and get answers, videos and interactive experiences that are safe for them. The startup believes that current content tools like YouTube Kids are focused on more engagement and don’t give parents enough insights about what their kids are consuming. That’s the problem the company has set out to solve.

Hello Wonder has raised $2.1 million from investors such as Designer Fund, a16z Scout Fund, Ground Up Ventures and Chasing Rainbows. Investors also include individuals like kids’ content studio PocketWatch’s CEO Chris Williams, Things, Inc. founder Jason Toff and electronics-focused fund MESH’s CEO Tony Fai.

Hello Wonder was founded by Seth Raphael, who led AI prototyping teams at Google and helped built the first version of Google Photos; Brian Backus, who worked as a games producer at Amazon, Disney, DreamWorks and NBCUniversal; and Daniel Shiplacoff, a product designer who worked on Google’s Material Design guidelines.

Raphael built the app out of necessity while raising five children under 12 during the COVID-19 pandemic. He told TechCrunch that while he had seen the potential for AI to help children while studying at university, the technology wasn’t ripe.

“The fundamental problem is that you and I use the internet wonderfully every single day and get tremendous value out of it. But we can’t let our kids do that because there is real harm. Plus, young kids don’t have the ability or tools to find out the content that’s helpful to them,” he said.

Image Credits: Hello Wonder

Raphael said that he began by trying to find the best content for his children. But that was constraining when kids wanted to explore a certain topic more. Then, he took inspiration from the Montessori method of learning, which involves hands-on learning and activities based on children’s interests. That led the company to build an AI-powered environment to bring content from different corners of the internet in a safe manner.

The company lets parents control what kind of content — videos, games and material from websites — their children are consuming. They can get texts about all kinds of videos or choose to get a daily or weekly summary of their consumption. Parents and guardians can tell the AI through the parent interface in natural language about the content they want and don’t want their children to consume.

For instance, if a family wants to help their kid learn violin, they can tell Hello Wonder that, and the tool will find and insert content about learning violin from time to time.

Hello Wonder, which targets kids from ages five to 10, also lets them interact with trusted family contacts through messages and video calls within the app.

Jordan Odinsky, a partner at Ground Up Ventures, said that Hello Wonder solves the problem of kids having to see unsafe content by involving an AI and having it scan content for safety before serving it to kids.

“Safety systems on today’s apps services for children don’t go far enough. As a browser, Hello Wonder doesn’t lock kids into any one format. They’re free to explore with the AI watching over them. They can consume any type of content as long as it fits within the parent’s values giving them a true internet experience,” he told TechCrunch over a call.

Odinsky added that the app could also be adopted as the child matures and show content to reflect that growth. He said that the app doesn’t have a problem presenting children with a blank search box and leaving them clues about what they want to ask.

“Wonder is built differently. When kids log on, they are prompted each time with ideas to search for. From there, it sparks new ideas to explore that you simply input by speaking. Many of the things browsers deal with, from exploration to discovery to figuring out the best prompt to achieve a desired result, are removed from the Wonder experience,” he noted.

The company is not charging a fee for the app at this time but will introduce a subscription layer in the future. It is also testing to expand the app to Android tablets and Chromebooks.

Exclusive: Dandelion co-founder is back to help you electrify your home for less

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Man carrying a solar panel on a roof in Southern California.

Image Credits: adamkaz / Getty Images

In the nearly 20 years that James Quazi has been a climate tech founder and operator, he’s seen a lot. From solar to geothermal, energy audits to energy storage, he’s had a front row seat as homeowners have sought to slash their energy use.

He’s also been able to observe what makes those startups successful. “You have to be able to model energy systems to a high degree of accuracy, and you have to be able to finance things,” Quazi told TechCrunch. “It just always comes up.”

He’s taken those observations to heart, starting a company that hopes to speed the electrification of homes throughout the U.S. by helping homeowners choose and finance the projects that make the most sense for them. Called Balto Energy, the Southern California-based startup has been operating stealthily, and Quazi recently shared details on the new venture exclusively with TechCrunch. To get off the ground, the startup raised $1 million from KDX, Leap Forward Ventures and others.

Most recently, Quazi was living quasi-retired, having served as CTO at Dandelion, the home geothermal startup that spun out of Alphabet’s X division; before that he was an executive at SolarCity. But after he started studying a recent change in California’s solar power incentives for homeowners, he couldn’t stay out of the game. 

The new regulations, known as NEM 3.0, lengthened the amount of time it takes for solar panels to pay off, but it significantly reduced the payoff period for solar panels when installed alongside a battery. The goal was to encourage consumers to store more of their solar power for later, but it had the unintended consequence of dragging down California’s solar market.

To Quazi, the solution to installers’ woes came quickly to him: They needed to branch out beyond just solar panels. Many have also begun installing batteries, yet Quazi knew they’d also have to consider adding to their roster other electrification projects like electric vehicle chargers, heat pumps and heat pump water heaters. “We found that some of those contractors are interested in doing other portions of the work,” he said. 

But solar panels are one product with a very straightforward sales pitch: They’ll save customers money on their electric bills. Homeowners could stand to save even more money with heat pumps, too, but the math behind the pitch gets a lot more complicated.

Today, most solar installers haven’t ventured beyond rooftop panels and the occasional battery. That has forced homeowners to turn to a menagerie of contractors, from electricians to plumbers to HVAC specialists. To fully electrify, they have to be willing to serve as a de facto general contractor, envisioning each job as a part of a system.

“We still don’t have, like, a great tool that coaches homeowners through what that experience would be,” Quazi said. “There isn’t a holistic view of it.”

Quazi hopes that Balto is that tool. Many homeowners’ electrification journeys start with solar, which is where Balto is starting, too. For homeowners, the technology is mature, and the financial benefits are widely known. For Balto, there are a large number of solar installers who might benefit from additional work outside of installing new panels; the startup will charge them a fee for access to the platform, which includes various sales tools. In the future, it’ll be available to other trades. “We were very adamant that we want a path that is agnostic of any contractor,” Quazi said.

Balto functions as a sort of decision tree for homeowners to help them decide where they’d like to start and which projects they’d like to tackle and when. Are they only interested in saving money? Then a relatively simple solar-plus-battery installation with an EV charger might be the answer. Or maybe they want resiliency during extreme weather or natural disasters? In that case, they also might want to electrify more of their home, including heating and cooling, hot water, and even cooking.

“You have to help people understand what the options are and what’s the best one for them,” Quasi said. To provide recommendations that make sense, Balto models energy usage for a home using customer-provided utility data.

All those projects, though, can be expensive propositions. Solar panels alone tend to cost tens of thousands of dollars; the same is true of heat pumps. An all-in electrification plan would be far more. That’s a hefty sum that most homeowners don’t have, and with interest rates being high, they wouldn’t be jazzed about financing it, either.

Quazi thinks he can ease the burden by offering a form of financing that he said is not a loan. “For a residential project that’s financed through a loan, a lot of benefits actually fall on the ground. There’s a bunch of trailing things that we think we can monetize,” he said, including depreciation and renewable energy credits that it sells to other companies.

That’s because Balto would be owning the solar assets for a period of time, making it the entity that receives the credits. Some of its revenue would come from that revenue stream, and it would direct another portion of it toward reducing the interest rate on the financial instrument it offers customers. “While you might take out a loan today [for solar], and if that loan is 20 years, the interest rate could be 12%. We’re looking at half that or less,” Quazi said.

We’ll know in a few years if Quazi is right, that creative financing is what’s really needed to speed the electrification of American homes. He’s hoping that, when that time comes, “infrastructure that pumps combustible gases in the people’s homes” will fall out of favor. “It’s one of the things we’ll look back and be like, ‘That was crazy. We shouldn’t have done that.’”

A new startup from Figure’s founder is licensing NASA tech in a bid to curb school shootings

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Cover scanner

Image Credits: Cover

In 2013, there were 26 reported school shootings in the U.S. That figure rose to 82 a decade later. America has a school shooting problem, this much we can agree on. The cause of — and solution to — the issue, on the other hand, is where things start to fall apart. It has become one of the most polarizing topics for a very polarized country. Solutions range from far stricter gun enforcement and more robust mental health investments to locking doors and arming teachers.

The dramatic uptick in instances has create a cottage industry of tech startups hoping to address the problem. There’s ZeroEyes, which uses AI imaging monitored by law enforcement, panic alert system Centegix and scanner-maker Evolv Technology, among others. Studies conducted by research institutes like Johns Hopkins have, however, called their efficacy into question.

Cover, a new startup from Archer and Figure AI founder Brett Adcock, thinks it has cracked the code. At its core, the company’s approach isn’t wholly dissimilar from existing methods like metal detectors and scanners, in that it monitors a school’s entryway. A pair of the objects seen above are mounted on a doorway, scanning those who walk through.

Cover says what sets it apart is the underlying technology it employs, which has been exclusively licensed from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). In fact, the startup is headquartered in Pasadena, California, as several employees at the nearby JPL facility have joined on.

Adcock compares the underlying technology to full-body scanners that supplement metal detectors at many airports. “Our system is very similar to that, but it’s, like, 10x more powerful and accurate,” he told TechCrunch. “So, we can basically do very long-distance scanning. Ten to 15 feet away, we can scan somebody, instead of having them sit here for a couple of seconds in line.”

The comparison to TSA scanners, however, points to what could well prove a major hurdle for the technology’s wide-scale adoption. The topic has been a minefield of privacy advocate pushback, owing to their ability to effectively see under clothing. In 2019, the TSA announced that it would require full-body scanners to add a layer of privacy protection. Such concerns will likely be exacerbated by the fact that the technology will largely be scanning minors in a school setting.

Adcock explains that the system will be monitored by AI, rather than humans, while only looking for a “finite” number of weapons, including guns, knives and explosives. “That’s all we’ll be looking for,” he said. “We’re not going to surface uncompressed files out of the system. We won’t have a place to store them, we won’t need them. We’re just using an onboard neural net to look for weapons. There will be no [issue with] how we protect people’s faces, because we won’t even log it or store it.”

Once a threat is identified, a cropped image of the object will be made available to administration.

How opt-in this system will ultimately be and what alternatives will be in place falls at the feet of the schools and districts that choose to implement the technology. The system will identify potential risks based on factors including size, shape and material. The latter, for instance, should help tell the difference of a handgun from a squirt gun.

“People should not be bringing squirt guns into school during this level of security risk,” Adcock said. “I would say if people are bringing in a squirt gun, we’d really want to detect it. Now, I do think we’ll actually be able to detect the difference between a squirt gun and a [hand]gun, because metal and water are very different. I think the image will be very helpful here in figuring out whether it’s a false positive.”

Like Figure AI, Cover is being bootstrapped by Adcock, who has thus far put around $2 million into the young startup.

Exclusive: E-fuels startup Aether Fuels is raising $34.3 million, per filing

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Aircraft landing on runway

Image Credits: Derek Croucher / Getty Images

Aether Fuels has raised $30.4 million of a $34.3 million round, according to an SEC filing.

The e-fuels startup is working on producing fuel for aviation and maritime shipping using carbon dioxide and other waste carbon streams. The new round would give the company’s bank account a healthy bump; Aether Fuels had previously raised $8.5 million via convertible notes in late 2023.

The startup was spun out of Xora Innovation, an early-stage, deep-tech incubator run by Temasek. A company spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Since then, Aether Fuels has been working to refine its technology. The company says that its technology can use carbon from a range of waste streams, including industrial pollution, methane from landfills and leftover plant debris from farms.

Not much is publicly known about exactly how Aether Fuels converts carbon dioxide to fuels, though a patent application filed in January suggests the company is exploring one avenue that involves using natural gas. The process gasifies solid waste, blends it with natural gas and then transforms the mix into a liquid fuel (with any waste carbon dioxide captured along the way). 

In February, it announced a deal that gave it access to a gas-to-liquid program started by GTI Energy, a natural gas nonprofit. 

Airlines and maritime shipping companies have been pursuing bio-derived sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and e-fuels as a way to decarbonize their energy-intensive industries. However, those efforts have been nascent at best. The amount of SAF produced today, for example, only amounts to less than 0.1% of total use, and SAF is a much more mature industry than e-fuels. 

Women in AI: Charlette N'Guessan is tackling data scarcity on the African continent

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Image Credits: Charlette N’Guessan / Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution.

Charlette N’Guessan is the Data Solutions and Ecosystem Lead at Amini, a deep tech startup leveraging space technology and artificial intelligence to tackle environmental data scarcity in Africa and the global South.

She co-founded and led the product development of Bace API, a secure identity verification system utilizing AI-powered facial recognition technology to combat online identity fraud and address facial recognition biases within the African context. She’s also an AI expert consultant at the African Union High Level Panel on Emerging Technologies and works on the AU-AI continental Strategy titled “Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for Africa’s Socio-Economic Development” with a focus on shaping the AI governance landscape in Africa.

N’Guessan has also co-authored several publications and is the first woman recipient of the Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation awarded by the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Briefly, how did you get your start in AI? What attracted you to the field?

I have an engineering background from a formal and informal education. I have always been passionate about the use of technology to build solutions that would positively impact my communities. This ambition led me to relocate to Ghana in 2017, where I aimed to learn from the anglophone market and kickstart my tech entrepreneurial journey.

In the development process of my startup, my former co-founders and I conducted market research to identify challenges in the financial sector, resulting in online identity fraud. We then decided to build a secure, reliable, and effective solution for financial institutions to bridge the gap in serving the unbanked populations in remote areas and establish online trust. This led to a software solution leveraging facial recognition and AI technologies, tailored to facilitate organizations in processing online client ID verification while ensuring our model was trained with representative data from the African market. This marked my initial involvement in the AI industry. Note that in 2023, despite our efforts, we encountered various challenges that led us to stop commercializing our product on the market. However, this experience fueled my determination to continue working in the AI field.

What attracted me to AI was the realization of its immense power as a tool for solving societal problems. Once you grasp the technology, you can see its potential to address a wide range of issues. This understanding fueled my passion for AI and continues to drive my work in the field today.

What work are you most proud of in the AI field?

I am incredibly proud of my journey as a deep tech entrepreneur. Building an AI-driven startup in Africa isn’t easy, so for those who have embarked on this journey, it’s a significant achievement. This experience has been a major milestone in my professional career, and I am grateful for the challenges and opportunities it has brought.

Currently, I am proud of the work we do at Amini, where we are tackling the challenge of data scarcity on the African continent. Having faced this issue as a former founder myself, I am very grateful to work with inspiring and talented problem solvers. Today, my team and I have developed a solution by building a data infrastructure using space technology and AI to make data accessible and comprehensible. Our work is a game-changer and a crucial starting point for more data-driven products to emerge in the African market.

How do you navigate the challenges of the male-dominated tech industry and, by extension, the male-dominated AI industry?  

Truth is, what we are facing today in the industry has been shaped by societal biases and gender stereotypes. This is a societal mindset that has been nurtured for years. Most of the women working in the AI industry have been told at least once that they were in the wrong industry because they were expected to be  A, B, C and D.

Why should we have to choose? Why should society dictate our paths for us? It’s important to remind ourselves that women have made remarkable contributions to science, leading to some of the most impactful technological advancements that society is benefiting today. They exemplify what women can achieve when provided with education and resources.

I am aware that it takes time to change a mindset, but we can’t wait; we need to continue encouraging girls to study science and embrace careers in AI. Honestly, I’ve seen progress compared to previous years, which gives me hope. I believe that ensuring equal opportunities in the industry will attract more women to AI roles, and providing more access to leadership positions for women will accelerate change toward gender balance in male-dominated industries.

What advice would you give to women seeking to enter the AI field?

Focus on your learning and ensure you acquire the skills needed in the AI field. Understand that the industry may expect you to demonstrate your capabilities more intensely compared to your male fellows. Honestly, investing in your skills is crucial and serves as a solid foundation. I believe this will not only boost your confidence in seizing opportunities but also enhance your resilience and professional growth.

What are some of the most pressing issues facing AI as it evolves?

Some of the most pressing issues facing AI as it evolves include challenges in articulating its short-term and long-term impacts on humans. This is currently a global conversation due to uncertainty surrounding emerging technologies. While we have witnessed impressive applications of AI in industries globally, including in Africa, particularly with the recent advancements in generative AI solutions and the capability of AI models to process vast volumes of data with minimal latency, we have also observed AI models riddled with various biases and hallucinations. The world is undeniably moving toward a more AI-driven future. However, several questions remain unanswered and need to be addressed:

What is the future of humans in the AI loop?What is the appropriate approach for regulators to define policies and laws to mitigate risks in AI models?What does AI responsibility and ethical framework mean?Who should be held accountable for the outcomes of  AI models?

What are some issues AI users should be aware of?

I like to remind people that we are all first AI users before any other title. Each of us interacts with AI solutions in various ways, whether it’s directly or through our people (such as family members, friends, etc.) using various devices. That’s why it is important to have an understanding of the technology itself. One of the things you should know is that most AI solutions on the market require your data, and as a user, be curious to understand the extent of control you give the machine over your data. When considering consuming an AI solution, consider data privacy and the security offered by the platform. This is crucial for your protection.

Additionally, there has been a lot of excitement about generative AI content. However, it’s essential to be cautious about what you generate with these tools and to discern between content that is real and that which is false. For instance, social media users have faced the spread of deepfake-generated content, which serves as an example of how people with malicious intentions can misuse these tools. Always verify the source of generated content before sharing it, to avoid contributing to the problem.

Lastly, AI users should be mindful of becoming overly dependent on these tools. Some individuals may become addicted, and we’ve seen instances where users have taken negative actions based on recommendations from AI chats. It’s important to remember that AI models can produce inaccurate outcomes due to societal biases or other factors. In the long-term, users should strive to maintain independence to prevent potential mental health issues arising from unethical AI tools.

What is the best way to responsibility build AI?

This is an interesting topic. I have been working with the High Panel on Emerging Technologies of the African Union as an AI expert consultant, focusing on drafting the AU-AI continental strategy with stakeholders from various backgrounds and countries involved. The goal of this strategy is to guide AU member states to recognize the value of AI for economic growth and develop a framework that supports the development of AI solutions while protecting Africans. Some key principles I always advise considering when building responsible AI for the African market are as follows:

Context matters: Ensure your models are diverse and inclusive to address societal discrimination based on gender, regions, race, age, etc. Accessibility: Is your solution accessible by your users? For instance, how to ensure that a person living in a remote area benefits from your solution.Accountability: Articulate who is responsible when model results are biased or potentially harmful.Explainability: Ensure that your AI model results are comprehensible to stakeholders.Data privacy and safety: Ensure you have a data privacy and safety policy in place to protect your users and you comply with existing laws where you operate.

How can investors better push for responsible AI? 

Ideally, any AI company should have an ethical framework as a mandatory requirement to be considered for investment. However, one of the challenges is that many investors may lack knowledge and understanding about AI technology. What I have learned is that AI-driven products don’t undergo the same investment risk assessment as other technological products on the market.

To address this challenge, investors should look beyond trends and deeply evaluate the solution at both the technical and impact levels. This could involve working with industry experts to gain a better understanding of the technical aspects of the AI solution and its potential impact at the short- and long-term.