Lifeboat Foundation

Most chat bots are dumb. No one wants to message a soulless stack of if-then statements just to order a pizza when a half-decent app or website interface can do the same job in half the time.

Chat assistants are a different matter. Rather than actively bugging you for information in a back-and-forth no one enjoys having, chat assistants lurk in the background of the conversations you’re already having and glean little details that might help later. It’s the approach Google is taking with their aptly named Assistant.

Niles, a company in Y Combinator’s Winter 2017 batch, wants to be your company’s chat assistant — an alternative to that internal wiki that every company has and no one uses. It sits in Slack and tries to learn the answers to the questions that your team is tired of hearing for the billionth time.

Continue reading “Niles is a Slack bot that learns your team’s questions and answers them so you don’t have to” »

This robot is unstoppable. And pretty cute, too.

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Will vegetarians start eating meat if this works out?

Lab-grown meat is a not a new concept. We’ve had the meatball, the world’s most expensive beefburger, and possibly shrimp. Now it’s the turn of chicken and duck.

San Francisco-based startup, Memphis Meats, has produced the very first “clean meat” poultry grown from cells in a lab, serving them up in a taste test that included classic southern fried chicken and decidedly fancy duck a l’orange.

Continue reading “World’s First Lab-Grown Chicken Has Been Tasted And Apparently It’s Delicious” »

An audacious deal hatched on Twitter may start a new wave of electricity storage for cities, regions, and nations.

The latest machine-learning techniques are essentially black boxes. DARPA is funding a number of efforts to open them up.

61 points and so far on reddit.

A giant planet 1,300 light years away is scorchingly close to its star and isn’t likely to survive much longer.

It’s not practical to test drive autonomous vehicles enough to prove that they are safe, says RAND’s Nidhi Kalra. What barriers must be overcome to get self-driving cars safely on the streets? r.rand.org/3umk