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Tag: kite

  • AI Coding Startup Kite Is Shutting Down, Open Sourcing Product

    AI Coding Startup Kite Is Shutting Down, Open Sourcing Product

    Kite, the startup that tried to bring AI-assisted coding to the market, is shutting down and open sourcing the majority of its code.

    Developers have long hoped artificial intelligence would make programming much easier, and Kite was one of the first startups to tackle the challenge. In a post on the company’s website, founder Adam Smith has acknowledged that Kite has missed the mark, thanks to a number of factors.

    “First, we failed to deliver our vision of AI-assisted programming because we were 10+ years too early to market, i.e. the tech is not ready yet,” Smith wrote.

    “We built the most-advanced AI for helping developers at the time, but it fell short of the 10× improvement required to break through because the state of the art for ML on code is not good enough. You can see this in Github Copilot, which is built by Github in collaboration with Open AI. As of late 2022, Copilot shows a lot of promise but still has a long way to go.”

    Even with more recent advances in AI, Smith believes the technology is still not quite there yet.

    “The largest issue is that state-of-the-art models don’t understand the structure of code, such as non-local context,” Smith added. “We made some progress towards better models for code, but the problem is very engineering intensive. It may cost over $100 million to build a production-quality tool capable of synthesizing code reliably, and nobody has tried that quite yet.”

    In addition to the technical challenges, Kite had difficulty monetizing its product, despite having 500,000 monthly active developers.

    “Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools,” Smith added. “Their manager might, but engineering managers only want to pay for discrete new capabilities, i.e. making their developers 18% faster when writing code did not resonate strongly enough.”

    Smith says most of the company’s source code has already been open sourced on Github. Hopefully, other developers will be able to pick up where Kite left off and AI-assisted coding will eventually become a reality.

  • Kite Patch Looks to Make You Invisible to Mosquitos with Wildly Successful Crowdfunding Campaign

    When it comes to defending yourself against one of life’s greatest nuisances, mosquitos, you’re pretty much limited to a few unappealing options. You can just stay inside – that usually helps. But what’s the fun in that? You can light citronella candles and torches – but does anyone really think that works? Of course, you can spray yourself with deet – that works pretty well, but yeah, I’d prefer not to do that all the time.

    A new project claim to be a breakthrough in mosquito protection – one that could change the way the world fights malaria.

    It’s called Kite, and it’s a patch that its creators claim can make you virtually invisible to mosquitos for a prolonged period of time.

    Here’s how the Kite patch works:

    Kite Mosquito Patch is the world’s first product containing our breakthrough scientific discovery of non-toxic compounds scientifically proven to disrupt the mosquito’s carbon dioxide neurons. Kite’s compounds act as a non-topical, spatial repellent, blocking mosquitoes’ ability to detect carbon dioxide – their primary method of tracking human blood meals. Kite is designed to last at least 48 hours.

    Basically, you can stick in on your shirt and expect to be invisible to mosquitos for up to two days. That’s just incredible.

    Kite Patch from SPARKHOUSE on Vimeo.

    The Kite patch is currently a little over halfway through a campaign on crowdfunding site Indiegogo. Originally, it set out to raise $75,000 to send 20,000 patches to Uganda – but in just a month the project has raised so much money that its creators have had to set new goals.

    As of today, the Kite patch campaign has raised over $480,000 in pledges. With that kind of money, Kite says that they can expand their field test and provide nearly 100,000 patches in its first production (the product is still just in its prototype stage). They’ve just launched a new goal – $600,000.

    Kite is looking to partner with various agencies to make their large-scale test a reality.

    “Our team has been working with or meeting a range of organizations, including Malaria No More, Rollback Malaria, the Malaria Consortium, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID, USDA, the U.S. military – all in an effort to incorporate their expertise in large-scale field tests and expertise in vector and disease control. Many will be helping us guide the study and/or expand our options for data collection,” says Grey Frandsen.

    Of course, the main goal here is to battle the spread of disease with these convenient little patches. But this kind of tech would no doubt see massive interest from your average, everyday outdoor enthusiast. Hell, I host enough cookouts to justify a significant investment in a set of patches myself.