It is crucial to regulate artificial intelligence within the multi-trillion dollar API economy

Application programming interface (APIs) power the modern Internet, including most websites, mobile apps, and IoT devices we use. And thanks to the Internet’s ubiquity in nearly every corner of the planet, APIs have allowed people to connect to almost any functionality they desire. This phenomenon is often referred to as “.API economy“teeth, Market value to reach $14.2 trillion by 2027.

The increasing relevance of APIs in our daily lives has attracted the attention of several authorities who are introducing major regulations. The first level is defined by organizations such as IEEE and W3C and is intended to establish standards for the technical capabilities and limitations that define technology across the Internet.

Security and data privacy aspects are covered by internationally recognized requirements such as ISO27001, GDPR, etc. Their main goal is to provide a domain framework backed by an API.

But now, with the advent of AI, regulations are becoming even more complex.

How AI integration is changing the API landscape

Different types of AI have been around for a while, but it is generative AI (and LLM) that has completely changed the risk landscape.

Many AI companies are leveraging the benefits of API technology to bring their products into every home and workplace. The most notable example here is OpenAI’s early public release of its API. This combination would not have been possible just 20 years ago. At that time, neither API nor AI had reached the level of maturity that we started observing in 2022.

When writing code or collaborating with AI, Rapidly becoming the standard in software development, especially in the complex process of creating and deploying APIs. Tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT can write code that integrates with any API, and will soon define specific methods and patterns that most software engineers use to create APIs. In some cases, even if you don’t fully understand it.

We’ll also discuss how companies like Superface and Blobr are innovating in the API integration space, using AI to enable you to connect to the APIs you need in a way that would interact with a chatbot.

One type of AI that has been around for a while is generative AI (and large-scale language models). [LLMs]) completely changed the risk landscape. GenAI has the ability to create things in infinite ways, and this creativity will either be controlled by humans or, in the case of artificial general intelligence (AGI), will exceed current control capabilities.

Source: techcrunch.com

YC-Powered Voice API Platform Empowers Productivity App Bots with Super-Powerful Pivot

Calendar apps are essential to productivity, but it’s difficult to differentiate them enough from their core use cases to sustain growth. Powered by Y Combinator super powerfulan AI-powered meeting note-taking tool that does not require bot recording, has overcome this obstacle and is currently Vapian API provider, makes it easy for anyone to create natural, voice-based, AI-powered assistants.

Superpowered was founded in 2020 by Jordan Deersley and Nikhil Gupta. But Dearsley said after three years of work, the team wanted to work on a more challenging product. Superpowered is profitable, the startup said, and the company has no intention of shutting down its first product and is in the process of hiring someone to run it. Y Combinator announced in June that more than 10,000 people use the product each week, but the company did not provide updated numbers.

Image credits: Vapi

To date, Superpowered/Vapi has raised $2.1 in seed money from investors including Kleiner Perkins and Abstract Ventures.

Pivot to Vapi

The company offers Vapi as an API that allows developers to create bots using only a prompt and putting it behind a phone number. Additionally, SDK integration is also provided, allowing developers to embed bots on their websites and mobile apps.

Dearsley told TechCrunch via email that the idea to build Vapi stemmed from a personal problem. He moved to San Francisco and began to miss his friends and family in different time zones. He built his AI bot that connects to the other party’s phone number to have a conversation with someone to organize their thoughts.

“I liked it, but I was constantly annoyed by how unnatural it was. It didn’t feel like talking to a person. The audio cut out, it took a long time to respond, and when I was talking it would interrupt me. ” he said.

“So I kept working on it and went for walks with it. Eventually, we fell in love with this conversation problem. It’s really hard to make something feel human. Voice assistants. today It’s clunky and turn-based, so I wanted to create something with a human touch. ”

Technically, Vapi is currently integrating a number of third-party APIs to build a robust voice conversation platform. For example, we use solutions from Twilio for phone calls, Deepgram for transcription, Daily for audio streaming, and OpenAI for responses. PlayHT For text reading.

ScaleConvo, a 2024 YC Winter Batch startup, is already using Vapi to launch conversational bots for sales teams and property management companies. However, Vapi did not reveal other customers.The company publishes his API Current Vapi Phone and Vapi Web products.

Vapi challenges

According to Magnus Revan, former Gartner analyst and chief product officer at multimodal conversation startup Openstream.ai, one of the startup’s biggest challenges is reducing latency.

“OpenAI models take between 2 and 10 seconds to generate a response. On the phone, the gold standard is 700 milliseconds between when the user finishes speaking and when the ‘bot’ begins speaking. And with capable models (high parameter count open source models like LLaMA2 70B) it is very difficult to achieve sub-second latencies,” he says.

Currently, Vapi’s latency is between 1.2 and 2 seconds depending on various factors. Dearsley expects that Vapi’s own efforts and improvements to his OpenAI will bring latency down to below a second for him in the next month.

Mohamed Musbah, an angel investor at Vapi, also said that the startup’s solution will be improved by overall advances in APIs.

“As OpenAI and other companies improve their models, Vapi’s platform will become more powerful, with a better knowledge base, code execution capabilities, and a larger context window. “As demand grows, Vapi’s focus on solving the biggest friction areas in voice communications will be a strength for the company,” he said.

However, this puts the responsibility on improving other solutions, not Vapi itself. Dearsley said the reliance on other APIs will make Vapi less defensive if large companies start moving into the space. But the team said it has an advantage in that it has built the infrastructure to handle thousands of calls simultaneously. Dearsley emphasized that with the general availability of Vapi’s web and phone APIs, the team will also look to build proprietary models for his audio-to-audio solutions.

Source: techcrunch.com

Instagram’s CEO confirms that development of Threads API is underway

Instagram head Adam Mosseri said today that the Threads API is in development. This gives developers the opportunity to create different apps and experiences around threads.

Mosseri responded to journalist Casey Newton, who was talking to users about Threads’ TweetDeck-like experience. The head of Instagram expressed concern that publishers are posting so much content that it overshadows the content of creators.

“We’re working on it. My concern is that it means more publisher content rather than creator content, but it still seems like something that needs to be resolved,” Mosseri said. said. post.

Thread takes the position that while the news content is not “anti-news,” it “does not actively amplify the news.” Until now, news publications have relied on third-party tools and integration with various social networks to automatically post to platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Newer platforms like Threads don’t have APIs available, so publishers have to submit content manually, which isn’t ideal for news organizations that submit a large number of articles per day.

Mosseri is concerned that publishers are pushing an overwhelming amount of content through API integrations, but creators also need different tools to post content in different formats. API integration makes it easy for developers to create platform-appropriate functionality.

Social networks like Twitter (now X) and Reddit make it difficult for third-party developers to write clients, allowing Threads to expose APIs for a healthy app ecosystem. Developers have written several clients for competing networks such as Bluesky and Mastodon. However, both networks have a relatively smaller user base than Threads.

Earlier this week, Meta announced that Threads has just under 100 million monthly active users. The API and third-party app ecosystem won’t necessarily drive this number higher, but it will give people a different way to explore the network. The Threads team has released a number of features in the past few months since release. However, with an ecosystem of third-party apps in place, developers can use a variety of ship features that users are looking for.

Additionally, Meta and Mosseri talk about integrating Threads with Fedisverse. Therefore, an open ecosystem with well-managed APIs would be a good step toward achieving that goal.

Source: techcrunch.com