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Kite, a San Francisco-based startup that uses machine learning to build what is essentially a very smart code-completion tool, today announced that it has raised a $17 million funding round. The round was led by Trinity Ventures, with personal participation from now-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. In addition to the funding, Kite also today announced that its tools are now significantly smarter and that developers can run them locally on their machines, even if they don’t have an internet connection.

As Kite founder and CEO Adam Smith told me, the idea for Kite is based on the simple fact that a lot of programming is repetitive. “That’s why [developers] spend so much time on Stack Overflow. That’s why they spend so much time debugging really basic errors and looking up documentation, but not so much time looking at how the solution should work,” he said. “We thought we can use machine learning to fix that.”

Standard code completion tools often still use alphabetical sorting while Kite uses AI to infer what a developer is likely trying to do (though to be fair, the likes of IntelliSense and others are also starting to get smarter). In its first iteration, Kite, which sadly still only works for Python code right now, sorted its hints by popularity. Unsurprisingly, that was already more useful than alphabetical sorting and the right answer appeared in the top three results 37 percent of the time.

What’s interesting here is that if you can predict the next part of a line of code with high accuracy, you can start predicting a few more words ahead, too. And that’s exactly what Kite is starting to do now.

To do this, the team had to build its own machine learning models that worked well for code. As Smith told me, Kite first looked at using standard natural language processing (NLP) models, but it turns out that those don’t really work well for code, which has a different structure. As training data, Kite fed the system all the Python code on GitHub .

Looking ahead, what Smith really wants to achieve is what he calls ‘fully automated programming.’ “It’s that Star Trek vision of where you tell computers in a high-level language what to do,” he said. “If it’s ambiguous, the computer will ask questions.”

It’ll take a few more breakthroughs in AI to realize that vision, but for the time being, Kite’s tools are freely available and come with editor plugins for Atom, Sublime Text3, VS Code, Vim, PyCharm and IntelliJ. Currently, about 30,000 Python developers use its tools.

With today’s release, developers can also use these models locally, without the need for an Internet connection. That’s a sign of how efficient the models are, but as Smith also acknowledged, running the model locally means his company doesn’t have to manage a complex cloud infrastructure either. This should also make the tool more appealing to more developers — especially in larger corporations — given that the original tool would send all of your code to Kite’s servers (and in that context, it’s worth noting the company managed to create its own little scandal around some open source contributions that favored its auto-completion engine).

The company plans to use the new funding to build out the team, which mostly consists of engineers. It’ll also build out its product, with a special focus on supporting more languages.

As for its business model, it’s worth noting that Kite did test a subscription service last year, but as Smith argues, that was mostly to test if the company could monetize the service. “Now we want to optimize for growth,” he said and noted that the focus of the company’s monetization strategy will be on enterprise users. Indeed, that’s a common refrain I hear from startups that focus on developers. It’s very hard to sell subscriptions to individual developers, it seems, so most start to focus on enterprises sooner or later.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2DE6sHX

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For the past few years, China has been rolling out a Black Mirror / Harry Potter-esque social rating policy known as the Social Credit System (SCS). Far from just a credit score in the financial sense, an SCS score can determine whether a person can buy business class tickets on trains (or take the train at all) or have access to flights. Apps are rumored to exist that would tell users whether they are standing near someone with a debt listed in the system, so … they can walk away I guess.

This is a massive undertaking, and researchers are finally starting to collect good data on the system’s operation, such as a MERICS report looking at the implementation of this complex system, which involves companies and all levels of the Chinese government. Westerners have also increasingly explored the generally positive reception of the system by Chinese citizens, which would seem at odds with typical desires for privacy.

Yet, one of the biggest and most obvious open questions is what exactly will get you rewarded or punished by the SCS? Now, we are finally starting to get answers.

In a new paper that will be presented this week at the ACM FAT* Conference on algorithmic transparency, a group of researchers investigated how positive and negative points were assessed by downloading a large corpus of hundreds of thousands of entries from the Beijing SCS website and analyzing it with content analysis machine learning tools.

They found that Beijing was remarkably clear about what will get you punished, but vague about what will get you positive points. For instance, the vast majority of the blacklist was made up by people who had failed to pay their debts, or who had committed a traffic violation. Meanwhile, the people on the redlist (the positive list) were there because they were, say, great volunteers, but with no criteria on how to get that status or why they were listed at all.

“It’s very difficult to pinpoint the exact degree of transparency,” of SCS said Severin Engelmann, one of the lead researchers based at the Technical University of Munich. Far from being just an experimental startup, SCS is already quite advanced. “Blacklisting and redlisting are already in place, and they clearly indicate what behavior is bad … but not what behavior is actually good,” he said.

Even more interesting, there are more companies on the blacklist and redlist than there are individuals within the Beijing corpus, indicating that while the government is certainly concerned about citizens, it’s bringing its social control mechanism onto companies perhaps more aggressively.

Jens Grossklags, another of the researchers, noted that this level of transparency — while inconsistent — was unusual in the West. “It is really fascinating from a data science perspective to see how much information is being made available not just to individuals but to the general public,” he said. He noted that public shaming has been common with the Chinese system, while Western consumers have a hard time accessing their own scores let alone the scores of others.

The study is one of the first to look at the actual implementation of SCS and reverse engineer its algorithm, and the researchers are potentially following up by investigating regional variations and further changes to the system.

TechCrunch is experimenting with new content forms. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the author (Danny at danny@techcrunch.com) if you like or hate something here.

Share your feedback on your startup’s attorney

My colleague Eric Eldon and I are reaching out to startup founders and execs about their experiences with their attorneys. Our goal is to identify the leading lights of the industry and help spark discussions around best practices. If you have an attorney you thought did a fantastic job for your startup, let us know using this short Google Forms survey and also spread the word. We will share the results and more in the coming weeks.

Stray Thoughts (aka, what I am reading)

Short summaries and analysis of important news stories

Hustling to nothing

Erin Griffith has a great piece on the increasing pervasiveness of hustle culture. This is part of a long-running debate in Silicon Valley between the work-your-ass-off crowd and the productivity-peaks-at-35-hours crowd. The answer in my mind is that we should see work in phases — running at 100 MPH all the time is most definitely not sustainable, but neither frankly is working a very stable number of hours per week. The vagaries of life and work mean that we need to surge and recede our efforts as dictated, and always track our own health.

Nvidia’s troubles continue

We’ve talked a lot about Nvidia over the past few months (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Well, the bad news train just continues. As my colleague Romain Dillet reports, Nvidia is cutting its revenue outlook, and now the stock is falling again (another 14% as I write this). It cites lowered demand particularly from China, which is experiencing a major slowdown in its economy.

Can Chinese startups subsidize customers forever?

The Financial Times asks an important question about the “China model” of startups: should founders heavily subsidize customers in order to buy market share and fight competitors? They point to bike sharing startup Ofo’s collapse, although I would point to the expensive rise of Luckin Coffee as perhaps the latest example. It’s a lesson that Munchery’s investors also have had to learn: at the end of the day, those unit economics better turn positive if a company is to survive.

What’s next

• More work on societal resilience

This newsletter is written with the assistance of Arman Tabatabai from New York

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2SboKIB

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Are more Theranos -style scandals looming for investors in healthcare startups?

A team of researchers associated with the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford thinks so. They’ve published a paper warning investors in life sciences startups that a systemic lack of transparency exists in their portfolio companies — creating the possibility for more multi-billion-dollar implosions and scandals like the one that toppled Theranos and its charismatic founder, Elizabeth Holmes.

Indeed, one of the study’s authors, Dr. John Ioannidis, the co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford and director of the University’s PhD program in Epidemiology and Clinical Research, was  among the first people to identify the risks associated with Theranos and its “stealth research.”

Now Dr. Ioannidis and his co-authors, Ioana A. Cristea and Eli M. Cahan, have published a study surveying the publicly available research from the largest privately held companies in the healthcare space, and found them lacking. 

Most of the highest-valued startups in healthcare have not published any significant scientific literature, the study found. Nearly half of the publications from companies worth more than $1 billion came from only two startups — 23andMe and Adaptive Biotechnologies, according to the paper.

“Many years ago I was the first person to say that Theranos had a problem,” says Ioannidis. “The problem that I had then was that Theranos did not have any peer-reviewed evidence to show.”

In an interview and in their paper, Ioannidis and Cahan warn that investors have overlooked systemic problems created by the lack of transparency among healthcare startups.

They write:

It would be tempting to dismiss the Theranos case as just one rotten apple. However, we worry that the focus on fraud puts aside a more fundamental concern. Fraud is making waves in the news, but stealth research may have a more detrimental impact.

According to the study’s findings, more than half of the healthcare startups that are worth more than $1 billion have published no highly cited papers at all. For companies that were acquired or are publicly traded that number is around 40 percent.

In all, healthcare startups that are currently valued at more than $1 billion published 425 Pubmed papers. And of those papers only 34 (8 percent, including two reviews) were highly cited. For companies with valuations of more than $1 billion that had been acquired or are publicly traded on stock exchanges, the researchers counted 413 papers, of which 47 (11 percent, including nine reviews) were highly cited.

Digging deeper into some of the companies that had high valuations but little or no published research revealed scores of operational and technological issues for the researchers.

For instance, StemCentrx, which was bought for $10.2 billion in 2016 by AbbVie, had published 16 papers — and only one highly cited paper. Since the acquisition, the Food and Drug Administration had imposed a delay on the readout of the company’s phase II trial for its Rova T targeted antibody drug for cancer treatment. In December, a Phase III trial for Rova T as a second-line treatment for patients with advanced small cell lung cancer was halted because the treatment wasn’t working, according to a report in Targeted Oncology.

Acerta Pharma, another healthcare-focused startup focused on cancer treatments, was bought by AstraZeneca for $7.3 billion. That company published nine articles and had one highly cited paper for a very early study of a potential treatment for relapsed chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Acerta received accelerated approval for a drug called acalabrutinib, which treats a rare form of lymphoma called mantle cell lymphoma. Two years ago, AstraZeneca had to retract data and admit that Acerta falsified preclinical data for its drug.

Then there’s Intarcia, the developer of a device for diabetes treatment that’s worth $5.5 billion. That company had its device rejected by the FDA and was forced to lay off staff and halt a couple of later-stage trials. It had only published six papers — none of them very highly cited.

Ultimately, the researchers concluded that highly valued healthcare startups don’t contribute to published research and that the valuation of these companies by investors is divorced from any externally validated data.

For the researchers (and for investors) this should present a problem.

“Many unicorns may be overvalued [21] and subject to unrealistic scientific expectations,” the study’s authors write. And they reject the argument that simply applying for — and receiving — patents is enough to prove that a technology in the healthcare space has been thoroughly vetted. “[Patents] do not offer the same level of documentation as peer-reviewed articles. For example, Theranos had over 100 patents [1], but these were unable to supplant the vacuum in their evidence,” the researchers wrote. 

Even if companies want to protect their technology, there are still ways for them to be more transparent about the results or benefits of their technology. The authors acknowledge that publishing isn’t the primary mission of startups. They can, however publish a few high-value articles, secure their technology through patents and then work with researchers, universities or hospitals to validate the technology and have those organizations publish results of the tests, the authors argue.

As the authors conclude:

Start-ups are key purveyors of innovation and disruption. Consequently, holding them to a minimal standard of evaluation from the scientific community is crucial. Participation in peer review, with all its limitations, is the best way we have to uphold this standard. We are not arguing that start-ups should divert excessive resources to having peer-reviewed papers. However, when their products are destined to affect patient health, they should neither be solely doing marketing. Confidential data sharing with potential investors or regulators cannot replace more open scrutiny by the scientific community.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2TjoHIe

//

For the past few years, China has been rolling out a Black Mirror / Harry Potter-esque social rating policy known as the Social Credit System (SCS). Far from just a credit score in the financial sense, an SCS score can determine whether a person can buy business class tickets on trains (or take the train at all) or have access to flights. Apps are rumored to exist that would tell users whether they are standing near someone with a debt listed in the system, so … they can walk away I guess.

This is a massive undertaking, and researchers are finally starting to collect good data on the system’s operation, such as a MERICS report looking at the implementation of this complex system, which involves companies and all levels of the Chinese government. Westerners have also increasingly explored the generally positive reception of the system by Chinese citizens, which would seem at odds with typical desires for privacy.

Yet, one of the biggest and most obvious open questions is what exactly will get you rewarded or punished by the SCS? Now, we are finally starting to get answers.

In a new paper that will be presented this week at the ACM FAT* Conference on algorithmic transparency, a group of researchers investigated how positive and negative points were assessed by downloading a large corpus of hundreds of thousands of entries from the Beijing SCS website and analyzing it with content analysis machine learning tools.

They found that Beijing was remarkably clear about what will get you punished, but vague about what will get you positive points. For instance, the vast majority of the blacklist was made up by people who had failed to pay their debts, or who had committed a traffic violation. Meanwhile, the people on the redlist (the positive list) were there because they were, say, great volunteers, but with no criteria on how to get that status or why they were listed at all.

“It’s very difficult to pinpoint the exact degree of transparency,” of SCS said Severin Engelmann, one of the lead researchers based at the Technical University of Munich. Far from being just an experimental startup, SCS is already quite advanced. “Blacklisting and redlisting are already in place, and they clearly indicate what behavior is bad … but not what behavior is actually good,” he said.

Even more interesting, there are more companies on the blacklist and redlist than there are individuals within the Beijing corpus, indicating that while the government is certainly concerned about citizens, it’s bringing its social control mechanism onto companies perhaps more aggressively.

Jens Grossklags, another of the researchers, noted that this level of transparency — while inconsistent — was unusual in the West. “It is really fascinating from a data science perspective to see how much information is being made available not just to individuals but to the general public,” he said. He noted that public shaming has been common with the Chinese system, while Western consumers have a hard time accessing their own scores let alone the scores of others.

The study is one of the first to look at the actual implementation of SCS and reverse engineer its algorithm, and the researchers are potentially following up by investigating regional variations and further changes to the system.

TechCrunch is experimenting with new content forms. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the author (Danny at danny@techcrunch.com) if you like or hate something here.

Share your feedback on your startup’s attorney

My colleague Eric Eldon and I are reaching out to startup founders and execs about their experiences with their attorneys. Our goal is to identify the leading lights of the industry and help spark discussions around best practices. If you have an attorney you thought did a fantastic job for your startup, let us know using this short Google Forms survey and also spread the word. We will share the results and more in the coming weeks.

Stray Thoughts (aka, what I am reading)

Short summaries and analysis of important news stories

Hustling to nothing

Erin Griffith has a great piece on the increasing pervasiveness of hustle culture. This is part of a long-running debate in Silicon Valley between the work-your-ass-off crowd and the productivity-peaks-at-35-hours crowd. The answer in my mind is that we should see work in phases — running at 100 MPH all the time is most definitely not sustainable, but neither frankly is working a very stable number of hours per week. The vagaries of life and work mean that we need to surge and recede our efforts as dictated, and always track our own health.

Nvidia’s troubles continue

We’ve talked a lot about Nvidia over the past few months (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Well, the bad news train just continues. As my colleague Romain Dillet reports, Nvidia is cutting its revenue outlook, and now the stock is falling again (another 14% as I write this). It cites lowered demand particularly from China, which is experiencing a major slowdown in its economy.

Can Chinese startups subsidize customers forever?

The Financial Times asks an important question about the “China model” of startups: should founders heavily subsidize customers in order to buy market share and fight competitors? They point to bike sharing startup Ofo’s collapse, although I would point to the expensive rise of Luckin Coffee as perhaps the latest example. It’s a lesson that Munchery’s investors also have had to learn: at the end of the day, those unit economics better turn positive if a company is to survive.

What’s next

• More work on societal resilience

This newsletter is written with the assistance of Arman Tabatabai from New York

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2SboKIB

//

Parsley Health has just opened up a new, fully redesigned space on Fifth Avenue in New York City, marking the first true Parsley Health Center.

Since launch, the startup has been operating out of clinics in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. But TechCrunch got the chance to check out Parsley’s new Fifth Ave location, which marks the company’s first space designed from the ground up as Parsley Health.

Founded by Dr. Robin Berzin, Parsley Health is a healthcare membership, where customers are offered a holistic approach to their health by a team of doctors and health coaches, complete with 24/7 unlimited messaging.

The idea stemmed from the troublesome reality that the average American spends less than 20 minutes a year with their doctor, who more often than not treat symptoms instead of the root problem.

Parsley members spend around four hours/yr with medical professionals, including five doctor visits a year and five health coach visits. Plus, Parsley offers 24/7 communication with your doctor and health coach. The hope is that Parsley doctors can better diagnose and treat their patients’ issues if they have the time to get the full story. Plus, Parsley doctors have the benefit of advanced biomarker testing alongside their focus on functional medicine, where root issues are prioritized for treatment rather than symptoms.

Part of giving the highest quality treatment is creating an open relationship between doctor and patient. That, in many ways, can be influenced by the physical space.

The new Parsley Health Center takes into account the principles of biophilic design. In other words, the space is designed specifically to make people feel healthier and better. The lighting, for example, is built to mimic natural light by using ribbed glass partition systems in the smaller rooms of the space. The space is also full of plants, as being in connection with nature reduces stress and improves mood.

The company even paid attention to the details of designing a main hallway where the halls that sprawl off of the main corridor are somewhat hidden by overhanging walls. This pattern, of visually implying a mystery waits around the corner, is supposed to provoke a strong pleasure response.

Beyond the design itself, Parsley also took into account the look and feel of the waiting room.

Rather than a sterile room with old magazines and no light, the Parsley waiting room is more of a communal living room, with plenty of couches and a kitchen, complete with draught kombucha and healthy snacks for purchase.

The hope is that Parsley can use this room for community events around learning how to optimize health across all parts of life, including food, sleep, and behavior.

Doctor’s offices and exam rooms are rethought to ensure a more comfortable relationship between doctor and patient. There are no desks that separate patient from doctor, instead featuring a couch with a small side table to write on.

Observation tables have been redesigned to fit in with the room instead of standing out like a giant piece of ‘medical equipment’. Doctors’ instruments all fit into a small set of drawers off to the side.

Even the lab is built adjacent to a restroom where patients can pass their specimen through a small compartment in the wall instead of walking it through the hallways.

In 2017, Parsley raised $10 million led by FirstMark Capital, with participation from Amplo, Trail Mix Ventures, Combine and The Chernin Group. Individual investors such as Dr. Mark Hyman, M.D., director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine; Nat Turner, CEO of Flatiron Health; Neil Parikh, co-founder of Casper; and Dave Gilboa, co-founder of Warby Parker, also invested in the round.

Membership to Parsley costs $150/month.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2CMzCTH