FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.

Philosopher Nick Bostrom is surprisingly cheerful for someone who has spent so much time worrying about ways that humanity might destroy itself. In photographs he often looks deadly serious, perhaps appropriately haunted by the existential dangers roaming around his brain. When we talk over Zoom, he looks relaxed and is smiling.

However, that amount includes massive funding from corporate backers, like Microsofts infusion of capital into OpenAI and Amazons funding of Anthropic. Stripped down to conventional VC investments, funding in 2023 for AI startups was much smaller, and only on pace to match the total amount raised in 2021. PitchBook senior analyst Brendan Burke noted in a report that venture capital funding was increasingly being funneled towards underlying core AI technologies and their ultimate vertical applications, instead of general-purpose middleware across audio, language, images, and video

The US could lose out on valuable AI and tech talent if some of its immigration policies are not modernized, Google says in a letter sent to the Department of Labor. Google says policies like Schedule A, a list of occupations the government pre-certified as not having enough American workers, have to be more flexible and move faster to meet demand in technologies like AI and cybersecurity. The company says the government must update Schedule A to include AI and cybersecurity and do so more regularly.