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This week brought reassuring signs that dealmaking is still happening on both sides of the table. New unicorns are being minted, and more capital is flowing into AI, but deals are also coming from some unexpected directions.

Most interesting startup stories from the week

AI news was plentiful this week, but also varied, from large and small M&As to new launches.

AI portfolio: Typeface, a generative AI unicorn, purchased two companies to expand its enterprise offering: New York City-based Treat, which uses AI to create personalized photo products, and Narrato, an Australian AI-powered content creation and management platform.

AI again: Global HR company Workday bought AI-powered contract management platform Evisort, adding to its AI-related acquisitions. The companies didn’t disclose the price tag, but Evisort had raised $155.6 million in capital and debt.

FinOps FTW: IBM acquired Kubecost, a Kubernetes cost optimization startup, as its name suggests. This is another sign of the ongoing rise of FinOps, which may also be boosted by the need to lessen the cost and impact of GenAI.

Only you: Recently launched SocialAI is a social network with a big twist — it is filled with bots, and that’s on purpose. Founder Michael Sayman told TechCrunch that his goal was for users to be able to bounce ideas off a diverse community of AIs.

Most interesting fundraises this week

This week was also busy on the dealmaking front, and some of the capital went to sectors and places you might not necessarily expect.

Flying solo: Quick commerce app Flink raised $150 million, including $115 million in equity. The near-unicorn was once an acquisition target of competitors but is now seeking to forge its own path, with a focus on Germany and the Netherlands.

On alert: New York-based startup Intezer raised $33 million to make sure security teams aren’t overwhelmed by alerts. Using AI, the startup helps them with not only triaging, but also with investigation, which it does much faster than a human would, CEO Itai Tevet said.

Getting permits: NYC-based GreenLite raised a $28.5 million Series A round to facilitate construction permitting. Its co-founders don’t come from the construction sector but previously worked at Gopuff, which got its own taste of dealing with permits when it tried to launch a ghost kitchen network across the U.S. 

Tailwinds: Armenian B2B SaaS startup EasyDMARC raised a $20 million Series A round of funding to simplify email security and authentication. The company facilitates the adoption of a technical standard that Google and Yahoo will soon make mandatory for bulk email senders.

Most interesting VC and fund news this week

Accelerating: Salesforce Ventures announced at Dreamforce that its San Francisco-based AI fund would once again double in size and reach $1 billion, a significant acceleration compared to the $5 billion total deployed in its first 15 years.

Decacorn fund: Insights Partners is nearing a whopping $10 billion fundraise for its 13th fund, according to the Financial Times, which also noted the recent sales of two Insight portfolio companies, Own and Recorded Future.

Builders: Proptech venture firm Era Ventures raised $88 million for its first fund, which will be deployed in startups from seed to Series B. Its portfolio includes Honey Homes, a subscription service for handymen that has raised $21.35 million in venture funding to date.

Last but not least

In a recent episode of the Equity podcast, J.P. Morgan’s Head of Startup Banking Ashraf Hebela discussed his recent Startup Insights report and what it might take to create a unicorn in 2024. He also touched on the hot topic of “Founder Mode.”

8BitDo is now selling a set of keycaps featuring the same Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) inspired design as those used on the Retro Mechanical Keyboard it debuted last July. While the keyboard is now available in four styles including Commodore 64 and Famicom designs, only the NES style keycaps are currently available on their own.

The $49.99 8BitDo Retro Keycaps set includes 165 PBT keys with legends printed using dye-sublimation for added durability. The expanded set allows the keys to be used on larger keyboards with a dedicated number pad. 8BitDo’s $99.99 mechanical keyboards are only available in a shorter tenkeyless layout.

The set features alternate designs for some keys like a spacebar with an added health meter in two different lengths, and both the American ANSI and international ISO versions of others, like an Enter key with an inverted L design, and a smaller Shift key. 8BitDo says the set supports 65, 75, 80, 95, and 100-percent layouts, as well as ergonomic split keyboards, but compatibility is limited to MX-style switches.

Chinese manufacturer Beelink has earned a reputation for producing quality mini PCs across a range of price points. The Beelink U59 is a definite standout for those looking for a budget option – in our four and a half star review we said it offered a “good feature set that might appeal to many different customers.”

Beelink also offers higher-end products like the GTi Ultra, which features Intel‘s 12th to 14th Gen Core CPUs, with support for Beelink’s exclusive eGPU solution for users requiring extra graphics power. Beelink has been developing its SER series for some time. Its most recent release was the SER8 model powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS Hawk Point processor, 32GB of DDR5 memory, and 1TB of storage. Priced around $650, the SER8 delivered strong performance in a compact design.

This time of the year always excites us: it brings a look at what’s new in iPhone photography. First up is our brief look at the technical specifications of the new iPhone 14 Pro cameras. Our next post field tests the new cameras and their output. Whether you are a first-time reader or a long time listener, we promise an exciting few weeks.

iPhone 13 Pro vs. iPhone 14 Pro

We expect the iPhone 14 to have the same camera system as the iPhone 13 Pro, minus its telephoto camera, so we’ll keep this post limited to the iPhone 14’s Pro version, which has the most major camera changes. Fortunately, the the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max have the same camera array, which keeps things simple. With the help of a Halide Technical Readout sent to us, it’s straightforward to analyze the year over year hardware changes. But first, a disclaimer…

Huge breakthroughs today are just as much about software as hardware. Sure, software can’t replace a giant large telephoto zoom lens (yet), but it allows for breakthroughs in dynamic range, exposure, night photography, adding nice blurred backgrounds, and much more. When it comes to computational photography, the quality of your software and processing power plays as important a role as the physical camera itself. It’s silly to judge the new iPhone entirely on sensor specs, and we can’t wait to run full package through its paces as soon as it arrives at Halide HQ.

iPhone 14 Pro Technical Readout Comparison

Without further ado, here’s a side by side comparison with the iPhone 13 Pro to iPhone 14 Pro. Specs changes are marked in bold:

Wide

The Wide camera sees the greatest changes. The lens gets a bit wider, a 2mm focal length difference. The aperture is smaller (‘slower’), means the lens collects less light. This was probably necessary to work with a larger sensor. We calculate that the Wide camera is able to collect 20% more light compared to last year’s camera, even with this slightly worse aperture, thanks to its larger size.

We’re astonished by the improvement in the camera sensor’s ISO range. It goes far beyond previous iPhone cameras. Given high ISO values are accompanied by more noise, it’s highly likely this ISO range is made possible by how its higher resolution sensor combines 4 pixels into one, vastly reducing noise.

Apple refers to this as ‘quad-pixel’, and for almost all apps, it is how the camera will operate. By default, camera apps will ‘see’ the new Wide camera as if it were a 12 megapixel camera. Behind the scenes, iOS will downsize those 48 megapixels, combining four pixels into one, reducing noise. This will avoid breaking third-party apps, which probably aren’t ready for those larger images that require 4x the memory.

It does mean that if you were hoping to shoot 48 megapixel JPGs, you are likely out of luck without a third party camera app. With the first-party camera app, you can only capture 48 megapixel images by shooting in ProRAW. We hope this was a product choice as opposed to a technical limitation, and they leave more options available to third-party developers.

We look forward to testing the sensor in low-light: its high ISO range, quad-pixel shooting and claimed ‘second generation’ sensor-shift stabilization, we are expecting a big leap in image quality in at night.

Finally, we noticed that minimum focus distance — which is the closest the camera will focus on objects — has taken a step back, going from 150mm (5.9 inches) to 200mm (7.8 inches). While two inches doesn’t seem like much, if you were frustrated by your iPhone 13 switching between the ultra-wide (‘macro’) lens and regular camera, it’s possible this could happen a little more often new iPhone. The new lens design just can’t focus as close as the 13 Pro’s. We’ll be interested in seeing how much they’ve mitigated this in software.

Telephoto

The telephoto camera might be our team’s favorite, and it sees a fairly small spec bump. Apple has been fairly mum about this camera, only calling it ‘improved’. They might just mean that it benefits from the new Photonic Engine software pipeline, but the improved ISO range gives us hope they upgraded the sensor.

Ultra-Wide

With iPhone 13 Pro, Apple got serious about the image quality on its Ultra-Wide camera. This year, we’re seeing another sensor size bump; its larger pixels and area offset a slightly slower aperture. However, it lost a slight touch of its ultra-wideness, moving to a 14mm focal length (full frame equivalent).

Across the board, we are seeing what should be solid low-light improvements. A larger sensor and higher ISO sensitivity should allow this camera to further mature to be a good option for high-quality images. Apple actually claimed the greatest improvements to this camera in its keynote, claiming ‘up to 3×’ better images. We will have to see what that entails in testing.

Front-facing

Apple made a big change to the front of the iPhone this year. The Dynamic Island features the TrueDepth hardware we’ve come to love; a host of IR projector/sensor hardware to enable Face ID and a regular old front-facing (or ‘selfie’) camera. Despite being shrunk into a little isle, the front-facing camera got an upgrade.

A big change here is the front-facing camera gaining variable focus (and autofocus) for the first time since the very first iPhone. In addition, a nice improvement in aperture should allow a bit more depth of field and light to reach this little camera. We’ll have to see how much of a difference or need there is for autofocus; if the sensor is indeed larger this year, it might allow for sharper shots.

What remained the same

We haven’t been able to confirm many changes in the telephoto and LIDAR systems on the iPhone 14 Pro. Despite this, we are seeing signs that point to an all-new telephoto camera sensor. The LIDAR system has changed slightly, throwing a wider grid of dots that corresponds with the new, wider 24mm focal length of the Wide camera. Otherwise, it appears unchanged, and so does the TrueDepth depth-sensing infrared hardware despite its miniaturization.

Stay tuned

As is tradition, we are going to test the iPhone 14 Pro’s camera system deeply — planning several outings in Mexico and the desert Southwest. We’ll be testing 48 megapixel shooting, RAW performance, quad-pixel ins and outs and extensively inspecting the new Photonic Engine. We will also be checking out the new iPhone 14’s camera. In the mean time, check out Austin Mann’s excellent iPhone 14 Pro camera review.

You can follow us on Twitter or Instagram to read about our findings in the meantime.

What sets humans apart from the rest of life, or indeed inert matter? Many people would respond that it is our intelligence. Yet the rise of seemingly intelligent machines challenges this way of thinking. The companies behind these new artificial intelligence technologies, in the form of ChatGPT and its rivals, speak of achieving artificial general intelligence – machines that have the same level of intelligence as humans across a range of tasks.

Does this meteoric rise in AI make human intelligence, and therefore us, less special? Neil Lawrence, professor of machine learning at the University of Cambridge, doesn’t think so. In fact, he thinks we should throw out the concept of artificial general intelligence altogether.

In his new book The Atomic Human: Understanding ourselves in the age of AI, Lawrence makes the case that it is only by better understanding our own intelligence, and how wildly different it is to its artificial counterpart, that we can make the most of both. Here he tells New Scientist why he thinks both human and artificial intelligence are misunderstood, why it is pointless to compare the two and why, ultimately, we need a more nuanced understanding of intelligence.

Alex Wilkins: What do you make of the trend to compare artificial to human intelligence?

Neil Lawrence: Most of these arguments are pointless, they are irrelevant. Of course, the nature of the intelligence that we’re seeing in AI is extremely different from our own. It’s absurd that people are talking about this intelligence as if it’s anything to do with us.…