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Happy new year and welcome back to The Prompt,

Earlier today, Meta announced that it plans to “restore free speech” on its platforms by gutting independent fact checkers, who have been responsible for moderating content and reviewing misinformation, and replacing them with an X-style community notes model, where users provide additional context on misleading posts. The social media giant is also leaning on AI to provide a “second opinion” on its decisions regarding removing and restoring content.

This comes just days after Meta faced backlash for AI-generated accounts on Instagram and Facebook that were sloppy and lied to human users (It quickly took down the AI profiles). The company has also started showing users AI-generated versions of themselves in different scenarios, 404 Media reported.

Now let’s get into the headlines.

BIG PLAYS

AI agents —software that can carry out entire tasks on behalf of users— might be just what voice assistants like Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa need to become actually useful beyond setting timers and controlling the lights. Agents would allow assistants to do more things, such as booking meetings, finding information and making reservations. This growing space has amassed about $8 billion in investment, and investors and startups think the technology could help improve clunky hardware products such as Google’s glasses.

PEAK PERFORMANCE

AI content detection platform GPTZero is launching a new feature that aims to fact check claims made in a block of text, by detecting whether they are supported or contradicted by sources across the web. “Low quality AI slop is on the rise, putting at risk the reliability of the internet.” CEO Edward Tian said. The early stage startup has some 10 million monthly active users and about 250 million documents were scanned through the platform in 2024.

SHOW ME THE MONEY

Billionaire Jeff Bezos doubled down on the bets he placed on AI startups last year, including an investment in buzzy AI search startup Perplexity. Most of the companies Bezos focused on were robotics AI companies like Skild AI, which is building a one-size-fits-all brain for robots and humanoid robot manufacturer Figure AI.

AI DEAL OF THE WEEK

AI startup Anthropic is in talks to raise $2 billion in funding at a $60 billion valuation, the Wall Street Journalreported, ranking it fifth most valuable AI startup. Lightspeed Venture Partners is leading the round.

Also notable: in 2024 investors plowed more than $20 billion into “neoclouds,” a clutch of cloud computing startups that rent access to powerful processing chips called GPUs to AI companies. While $23 billion-valued CoreWeave is the most notable among them, smaller companies with strange backstories have capitalized on the AI arms race.

DEEP DIVE

Before allowing his more than 13,000 Pentagon employees to look up a piece of information about an American citizen, Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) Director David Cattler has them ask themselves a question: does my mom know that the government can do this?

“The mom test,” as Cattler calls it, is a common-sense check on how DCSA — a sprawling agency that grants and denies U.S. security clearances to millions of workers — does its job. And it’s also the way Cattler thinks about his agency’s use of AI.

DCSA is the agency in charge of investigating and approving 95% of the federal government employees’ security clearances, which requires it to complete millions of investigations each year. This gives the agency access to a huge trove of private information, and in 2024, DCSA turned to AI tools to organize and interpret that data.

That doesn’t include ChatGPT, Bard, Claude, or other flashy generative AI models. Instead, it’s mining and organizing data in ways that Silicon Valley tech companies have done for years, using systems that show their work more clearly than most large language models do. For instance, Cattler said the agency’s most promising use case for these tools is prioritizing existing threats.

Read the full story on Forbes.

AI INDEX

$100 billion

Funding AI startups have raised in 2024, according to a Crunchbase report, up 80% from 2023.

QUIZ

This trading bot was able to get a 500% return on a $3200 investment in one week.

1. Galileo FX
2. Composer
3. 3Commas
4. Algobot

Check if you got it right here.

MODEL BEHAVIOR

Fable, a social app where people discuss books, used AI to generate end-of-year summaries about its users’ reading habits. But some recaps featured “anti-woke” commentary instead, pointing out that readers’ choices were too diverse, Wired reported. “Don’t forget to surface for the occasional white author, okay?” one summary read.