Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Trump AI framework excludes open AI models
The AI framework reviewed on Tuesday defines a covered frontier model as closed-source with state-of-the-art capabilities and national security risks, multiple sources briefed on meetings held at the White House said.
Mathematicians are grappling with the possibility that AI might eclipse them
“I feel quite confident that very shortly AI will become robustly superhuman at what professional mathematicians currently do,” he told me. “I mostly want people to grapple with that reality.”
Silicon Valley sees AI as the solution – for everyone
This is an ideology that recasts complex social phenomena such as politics, public health, education and law enforcement as “neatly defined problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimised – if only the right algorithms are in place!”
Oregon’s Grasshopper fire sends smoke across Portland through Wednesday before conditions are expected to improve Thursday – oregonlive.com
Wind blowing from the east pushed central Oregon wildfire smoke into the Portland area on Monday and Tuesday, covering the city as temperatures reached the mid-80s. That smoke is expected to continue through Wednesday, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Noah Alviz.
New Polling Shows Most Oregonians Wary of AI and Data Centers
As politicians struggle to grasp new dividing lines, fresh polling shows a majority of Oregonians across the political spectrum hold negative views on artificial intelligence and data centers and support restrictive policies to regulate them.
Democratic lawmakers propose three-year moratorium on new large data centers in Oregon • Oregon Capital Chronicle
The call to slow data center growth in the state follows growing public backlash against the server farms. Oregon would join 15 other states that have proposed moratoriums in the last year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Just one has passed so far: a one-year moratorium on new data centers in New York that consume 20 or more megawatts of electricity.
Cascadia Builders Club (Aug Demo night) · Luma
Cascadia Builders Club is a Pacific Northwest community for people building hardware and software. This is show-and-tell for builders: In this meetup, a handful of local builders take the floor for short, hands-on demos of what they’re actually making (startups, apps, hardware, side projects, tools), and then we hang out and meet the people behind the work. No pitch, no hype reels, just real things and the people making them.
Changes at the Bend Venture Conference – Portland Business Journal
Understanding that Oregon startups are not Silicon Valley startups is an important part of this event revamp, said Morgan.
To Attract Tenants, Desperate Downtown Building Owners Roll Out Rich Broker Incentives
“Unfortunately, the bonus isn’t a significant needle-mover when you consider that the property’s still vacant, and at other properties, we offer bigger bonuses than that,” Sasaki tells WW. “In Portland, we have some of the best buildings in the world, and we’re giving some very, very attractive bonuses. And our market is so anemic we can’t even lease them.”
Climate change may be making us lonelier: How heat waves and extreme weather disrupt social connections everyone relies on
As extreme weather becomes more common and disruptive, the effects can impair relationships, interrupt routines and communication, and damage gathering places and the foundations of community traditions.
What Do VCs Talk About When Nobody’s Listening? — Chris Neumann
Last week, I hosted an emerging manager summit in San Francisco with more than two dozen early-stage VCs from across North America. GPs from Austin, Toronto, Seattle, Vancouver, Montreal, Missouri, Los Angeles, Halifax and more joined San Francisco and Silicon Valley colleagues for a day of sessions on the changing startup and VC landscapes.
The Physics of Enterprise Sales – by Rob Snyder
Here’s what you should know about enterprise sales. This has led, as a particularly fun example, to two ~20-year-old college dropouts selling a $100k+ contract to a massive publicly-listed media company as their first customer, from cold LinkedIn outbound, before they built a product or even had a product idea.
Anyone can generate a blog post. Making it publishable is the work. — WorkOS
The pattern holds across all of it: the parts of this system that earn trust are the parts that decline. It won’t claim what it can’t cite. It won’t rewrite what it was handed to carry. It won’t overwrite an edit a human just made, and it won’t publish until someone says yes. What’s left after all that refusing is a draft worth reading.
From discovery to industry: Oregon State spinouts are building the future of semiconductors | OSU Today | Oregon State University
What sets the OSU Advantage apart, Mundorff said, is structured mentoring and pathways for researchers turned entrepreneurs, a broad network of startup resources, and perhaps most importantly, connections to funding sources. OSU is a regional hub for the U.S. National Science Foundation I-Corps program, and the NSF Translation to Practice program offers subsequent bridge funding for I-Corps graduates to build, scale and transition their research into real-world products. There are also federal small business innovation grants, state programs and university matching funds.
