Welcome to 240Tech - our weekly round up of technology news we found interesting and occasionally, something #completelydifferent.

#FoodTech

‍+ Copenhagen based startup Reshape Biotech is automating the 'slow, manual processes' of biological research. Using a combination of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning it is creating tools to help food and biotech companies run hundreds of thousands of lab experiments in days and weeks instead of months or years. This, says CEO Carl-Emil Grøn is not just about efficiency; it's about accelerating [the journey] towards groundbreaking scientific discoveries that can help us tackle some of the biggest global issues we face today." https://lnkd.in/enfFeNmF‍

+ Qatar is emerging as a quiet leader in innovative foodtech with homegrown entrepreneurship and emerging technologies powering a commitment to making preventive healthcare and nutritional support accessible. https://lnkd.in/evPyM262‍‍

#AI‍

+ AI startups backed by trigger-happy investors are rushing to figure out who’s going to make the most money out of AI agents says John Thornhill, founder of Sifted. All business processes are going into the #Agentic grinder: in 2024, 88 European agentic AI companies raised €1.6bn in equity for everything from customer services and onboarding to payments and grant applications. While many are at risk of being outcompeted by newer models or those being built by #BigTech, Mathias Strasser, of WSD fame, thinks they are 'excellently positioned' to drive the AI transformation of European industry in an "environment that offers the ability to run commoditised open-source models at very low cost on desktop computers; strong manufacturing and service companies, and a regulatory environment that should inspire more consumer trust". https://lnkd.in/e4Eb5Ck9‍

+ Russell Brandom of TechCrunch reports on research that shows OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, and DeepSeek AI models "all outperformed human beings on psychometric tests for emotional intelligence. Where humans typically answer 56 percent of questions correctly, the models averaged over 80 percent." Now that is scary. https://lnkd.in/eR8cMMRH

‍🧘♂️ Something completely different

+ The #Meta AI app is a privacy disaster says Amanda Silberling (h/t SEMAFOR tech): people are publicly sharing information that by virtue (or vice) of being intimate, confidential, dangerous or simply 'please, I don't wanna know' should not be shared: https://lnkd.in/e5aqwm4S

‍+ Those wanting to protect their privacy and their identity might have to submit to Mr Altman's #Orb. SEMAFOR reports that Reddit, Inc. "is considering using World ID, the verification system based on iris-scanning Orbs whose parent company was co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman [as a way for Reddit users to verify that they are unique individuals while remaining anonymous on the platform]. That strategy may be contagious. https://lnkd.in/ejWMRhST