The Rundown

The election is three weeks away, and Nate Silver’s models show a 50/50 split. While the betting markets may be favoring Trump, that most likely is a sign of momentum and the kind of people who like online gambling: young men.

For this week I want to congratulate Rich Pleeth who raised $7M for his US expansion. As a Day Zero backer, I am particularly proud of Fin Mile and its transformation of last-mile delivery.

At the same time, I want to congratulate Ben Haber, who raised $2.2M for his initial seed round. Monark Markets, is a service that helps businesses integrate private securities into their platforms. It allows companies to do this quickly and easily using API endpoints.

Events

• October 23: An Apptoberfest of 3rd Party Apps | Atlassian Community Events

• October 24th: NYC Tech Mixer

• October 30th: NY Enterprise Tech Meetup: How Ramp & Figma Built World-Class Products 

• October 30th: Investor-Founder Mixer

• November 6th: Enterprise Masterclass: How to Structure a Post-Sales Process

News

• The election may depend on whether a little-known PAC can use the Internet to boost mail-in voting. Read in The Information.

• Insights and lessons from Rick Zullo about the challenges and experiences of being an emerging manager in venture capital. Read in Equal Ventures.

• Dario Modei CEO of Anthropic discusses the potential positive transformations that AI could bring to various aspects of human life, while also addressing the risks associated with powerful AI. Read in Anthropic.

• Harry Stebbings’ success with his podcast '20VC'. has led to his $400M fund. Read in The Information.

Research

Exploring methods to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) with factual data by integrating them with Data Commons. Read in LLM Watch.

This paper introduces LegiLM, a legal language model designed for data compliance assessment It is optimized with a pre-trained GDPR Fines dataset and specialized in detecting data regulation breaches. Read in arXiv.

This paper proposes StructRAG, which identifies optimal structures for tasks, reconstructs documents, and infers answers based on those structures Using this method user can achieve state-of-the-art performance in knowledge-intensive tasks. Read in arXiv.

Nested Contract Knowledge Graph (NCKG) is introduced to enhance automated contract management using large language models. Read in Journal of Construction Engineering and Management.

Legal-LM, an advanced Large Language Model (LLM) with a Knowledge Graph for legal consulting, shows superior performance in various legal tasks. Read in Advanced Intelligent Computing Technology and Applications.

LLMXplorer reviews over 205 large language models (LLMs) with knowledge graphs for trustworthy conversational AI. Read in Big Data Cogn. Computers.

The augmentation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) through Knowledge Graphs is proposed to enhance NLP tasks. Read in Advanced Intelligent Computing Technology and Applications.

Tweets

• Grim news for those who raised at too high a valuation:

• The series A to B Chasm:

Podcast Episodes, Deep Dives and Projects

• Listen to my Podcast with Eidolon AI’s founder Ravi Ramachadran and Dave Brewster. Eidolon is a Kubernetes-like open-source platform for AI agents.

• Read my new thesis on AI-enabled services business and why AI is changing how venture-backed companies are built.

Final Thoughts

Please contact my email, [email protected], since I have more time to speak with people and help where possible. I am still actively angel investing.