After witnessing the 2022 baby formula crisis, founder and CEO Annie Lu joined her brother in starting their Physical AI company, Laminar.

Startups are building innovative new services with AI, but lawmakers can only take into account the potential impacts on services they know about.

The good news is, startups can help inform AI policymaking by sharing their perspectives with policymakers.

Many of those proposals have been developed with the largest companies in mind, but overinclusive frameworks mean the burdens are likely to fall hardest upon startups.

Policymakers need to recognize startup realities, or we’ll end up with policies that devour innovation.

On the regulatory front, the environment has only fractured and grown, threatening a burdensome patchwork for startups to navigate.

It will add costs and steer their limited resources away from innovation and toward (likely duplicate) compliance activities.

Most AI startups are building on others’ foundation models, leveraging them for uses that look nothing like the underlying training data.

But an adverse ruling in the cases could lead to exorbitant licensing fees, chasing startups out of the innovation ecosystem.

AI systems ingest vast training data to learn about the world and establish predictive relationships, creating a general purpose tool capable of generating new material.

But there’s a scary number of copyright lawsuits ongoing right now parsing whether AI training is fair use.

Startups want to “chomp” away at creating novel products with AI, but navigating the maze of innovation increasingly involves dodging “ghosts” of legal threats, an ever-growing pile of regulatory proposals, and practical challenges. 🎃🧵

What if licensing copyrighted material to train AI models came with a $10 trillion price tag?

That's the scale of potential licensing costs for data needed to train a model at or near today's frontier, as we explore in a new report we’re publishing today.

More than 140 AI copyright cases have been filed in the U.S., and many center on the key question: Is training AI models on copyrighted material fair use?

Most of the litigation is still ongoing and courts have yet to reach a universally instructive ruling.

What does copyright law have to do with the future of AI?

Quite a bit, actually.

With AI companies facing a growing number of copyright lawsuits, courts are being asked to determine how longstanding copyright protections and the fair use doctrine apply to AI development.

Deepak Arora, MBA founded Wearable Technologies Inc. (Wear-Tech) in the wake of a family tragedy.

In researching prevention, he learned that certain age groups are underserved by current life-sign monitoring infrastructure.

DraftyAI builds research and drafting software for immigration attorneys, turning their evidence and case information into complete legal briefs, including exhibit lists.

Santa Clara-based startup Xscape Photonics is revolutionizing AI data center connectivity by developing multicolor silicon photonic lasers that drastically improve data center transmission efficiency.

Heather Nelson is a professor of management and entrepreneurship at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Seattle-area startup Sound Games is building a distribution platform like Shopify for games, streamlining indie developers’ simultaneous launches across various storefronts.

RelateXR is an addiction recovery software that has been making waves at Indiana University since it was founded three years ago.

After pioneering commercial in-space manufacturing and leading the team that designed the cameras for the Artemis II mission, Andrew Rush set out to solve the need for magnitudes more power for satellites in low Earth orbit.

Alehra, an Atlanta-based startup co-founded by Ayobami "Ayo" Adewole and Adekunle "Ade" Oyaniyi, is a purpose-built "operating system" for behavioral health created to eliminate the administrative burnout caused by fragmented software systems.

After an idea conceived and prototyped in business school went viral, founder and CEO Chris Lucas raised a $2 million pre-seed round for his company Secondsense.

Offleash’d, a Los Angeles, CA area-based startup, is building a social ecosystem to bridge the gap between digital connection and physical community for pet parents. Since its launch in 2022, Offleash’d has rolled out its proprietary AI companion and added hyper-local features.

Barnwell Bio is modernizing disease analysis in the poultry industry without compromising the efficiency and biosecurity that farmers depend on.

StartupsEverywhere: Austin, Texas. EcoPulse, an Austin-based startup, uses AI to help large manufacturers manage complex supply chain risks related to Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS), or “forever chemicals,” and compliance.

Drawing on dozens of interviews with founders, investors, and support organizations in New Orleans, Indianapolis, and Buffalo, the report lays out four critical factors for ecosystem success: connective tissue, ecosystem alignment, timing, and center of gravity.

The report, The Foundations of an Innovation Flywheel, examines the development of Silicon Valley in the second half of the 20th century and compares that model to modern emerging ecosystems across the country.

In a new report, Engine examines how emerging startup ecosystems—in New Orleans, Indianapolis, and Buffalo—are building from scratch, the factors that contribute to their success, and the common obstacles still holding them back.

ALCOVE, a New York City-based startup, designs productivity pods to help professionals find privacy and focus in high-traffic settings, such as hotels.

Scale Social AI, a Raleigh, North Carolina-based startup, helps brands capture authentic UGC by integrating technology into mobile apps or activating via on-site quick response (QR) codes, building a centralized library of real customer moments with full marketing rights.

Brainify.AI is developing a brain data platform that combines portable Electroencephalography (EEG) hardware with AI to help create more effective treatments and diagnostics for neurological conditions.

Whether through direct policy changes, or broader efforts, policymakers should use all of the tools at their disposal to encourage, direct, and amplify the ecosystem-building happening in their cities and states.

Read more: engine.is/news/category/…

Drawing on dozens of interviews with founders, investors, and support organizations in New Orleans, Indianapolis, and Buffalo, the report lays out four critical factors for ecosystem success: connective tissue, ecosystem alignment, timing, and center of gravity.

The report, The Foundations of an Innovation Flywheel, examines the development of Silicon Valley in the second half of the 20th century and compares that model to modern emerging ecosystems across the country.

Kall Morris Inc (KMI) provides a "tow truck" capability for space, designed to grab and secure unprepared, uncontrolled satellites or space debris.

Kunal Chopra is no stranger to the world of innovation. He founded Certivo, a supply chain compliance assistant, after more than two decades in the tech sector and serving as CEO for three separate companies.

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of working on filing paperwork for renovations, you know that seemingly obscure missing paperwork in a first submission can result in months of back and forth between you and your local government.

BestFarewell is a Chicago-based AI-powered platform that helps families navigate the complex logistics of estate planning and bereavement.

Retail workers have long shifts and often little time for feedback.

After a career in corporate sustainability, Alison Cove founded USEFULL, based in Boston, Massachusetts, to tackle the plastic crisis at the source.

Sascha Mayer, Co-founder and Chief Experience Officer of Mamava, is closing the gap in support for breastfeeding parents with freestanding lactation pods.

Tracking water usage is critical in agriculture. Nave Analytics, Inc. provides software utilizing satellite data to help farmers cut down on water costs for irrigation.

That’s why policymakers should be thoughtful about shaping incentives around acquisitions and competition, and avoid proposals that make it harder for startups to get acquired.

In many startup ecosystems, acquisitions create nearly all of the exit value and help fuel new investment in emerging companies.

Exits are a critical moment in the lifecycle of a startup: founders are rewarded, investors earn a return, and talent and capital are recycled back into the ecosystem to support the next generation of innovation.

Acquisitions are the overwhelming majority—and sometimes the only—type of successful exits in startup ecosystems across the country.

Music is for everyone, and should be enjoyed by all who want to. Tactus is developing bluetooth-integrated jackets and vests that translate audio into precise tactile vibrations, allowing the deaf and hard-of-hearing community to experience live musical performances.

After building a small chain of restaurants across the northeastern U.S., Sienam Ahuja created Bryckel AI, a contract analysis platform that saves commercial property owners time and money.

Conserving space in data management is crucial for our modern information age. Lightscline is an AI-based software that helps engineering teams achieve up to 90 percent cost reduction in sensor data pipeline management.

Innovations in the prosthetic limb space compound every year. SweatID develops technologies to assist veterans with prosthetic limbs.

Optimizing nutrition in the dairy industry is critical to selling high quality products. Labby provides diagnostic hardware and software for dairy farmers to improve the quality of their herds’ milk.

This month, founders from across the startup ecosystem will be in Washington, D.C. highlighting why expanding pathways for everyday investors to participate in innovation helps startups access the capital they need to build.

Some policymakers are now proposing changes that would expand the definition of accredited investor so that education, professional experience, and financial knowledge—not just wealth—could qualify someone to invest.