Links Justin Sends 1/10

AI Marketers, Grok App, and New AI Guidance for NJ

Author

Justin Trugman
January 10, 2025

đź‘‹ Happy Friday!

Got an interesting Links Justin Sends this week, my cofounder Aaron was featured in Bloomberg about new NJ AI regulation.

Now, here’s the links you’ve came for…

đź“Ł Meet Astral - As an engineer marketing is not something I wake up in the morning excited to do, glad Astral is showing promise to automate it all for me 🙂 

🤖 Grok App is Launched - xAI launched the iOS app for Grok. The Grok family of models is quickly catching up in the benchmarks to OpenAI and Anthropic so super excited to not be able to use it on mobile!

⚖️ NJ AG Guidance on Algorithmic Discrimination - BetterFutureLabs cofounder Aaron Price was featured in Bloomberg discussing this new regulation.

The guidance is to “clarify how the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination (LAD) applies” to AI.

I still need to fully digest the guidance and we will publish a more in depth report about its implications soon, however one line that screams from the page to me is

an entity subject to the LAD’s requirements—that engages in algorithmic discrimination may be held liable for violating the LAD, even if the covered entity uses a tool it did not develop.

Depending on your point of view this could either seem harsh or just. On one hand, if you didn’t develop the AI System yourself, how do you know all the biases baked inside of it? and therefore, how can you assess if there is a risk of discrimination baked into it without hiring AI scientists, researchers, or consultants yourself to do an in depth audit?

While on the other hand, your business is accountable for any decision it ultimately makes and if your business makes a decision that violates laws, well there are repercussions for that.

More to come on this, but one thing is for certain… there already is a lack of truly innovative AI activity going on in NJ compared to other states. Regulators need to be careful to not scare away who’s already here (like us at BetterFutureLabs) and should in fact really be trying to embrace innovation and partner with industry & researchers.

If you’re interested to hear more about this topic, check out an article I published a little while back about How New Jersey Could Become a Safe Haven for Open Source AI.

Have a great weekend!

-Justin

aka the guy with great AI links

Co-founder & Head of Technology @ BetterFutureLabs