continue to get the tools they need to build a future of unlimited possibilities. this week, we go back to berkeley skoi deck to see the latest cohorts of young startups. that's this week on "press here." good morning, everyone. i was a little disheartened to learn that the latest attempt to block spam cell phone calls, a program called stir shaken, really doesn't work. but i kind of already knew that based on the number of phones i

get on my cell phone trying to sell me health care or car warranties. my first guest, alex, is an expert in spam. spam calls and spam mail as the ceo of you mail, which makes robocalling blocking software. alex, no offense, i don't want to use your software. explain to me what stir shaken was and why it didn't work. >> it was an attempt to make sure there was no more call swooping. that's when a bad guy that makes up a phone number. stir shaken was to make sure every caller identity was awe can you authenticated. the problem is the bad guys got real phone numbers and still made the call. >> one of your studies showed that something like 144 million robocalls a day, and that had been up, not down, from previous

measurements. >> yeah, it's roughly where it was when stir shaken was deployed, it hasn't made a big difference. but it's made it harder to defect bad activity. we know how to detect spoof calls, and we know that's a bad robocall campaign. it's illegal. now that they're not spoofing, you have to look at the content of the call to understand if that call is illegal or not. so it helps fewer spoofing calls and makes it harder to shut down the bad guys. >> they're getting more targeted, as well. when i'm driving, i'll answer the call for the heck of it. and they'll say your car warranty is expiring. i say oh, is it, i want to renew this, get their hopes up. and i say, remind me, which car are we talking about? they somehow know my car warranty is expiing but they don't know what car i'm driving.

>> they're not targeted. the car warranties are calling everybody and the s.e.c. has taken illegal action to shut down the carriers letting them make those calls. but a lot of the robocallers are getting targeted, calling people over 65 with a medicare scam or people in their late 20s and early 30s with student loan scams. so they can targeting to make those cars more effective. >> that's the concern, the ones taking a shot in the dark, hey, your amazon prime prescription is renews. somebody might fall for it. but if they get to the point where they say hey, this is kaiser permanente. oh, i use kaiser. where you could start to fall for this sort of thing. then it gets really dangerous. >> that's to have robocall blocking apps on their phone.

it's hard to make that decision. when someone says they're kaiser or a norton life block, you don't know. you may have a relationship with them and think okay, that's really that business calling me. but robocall blocking will know they're an impostor and can block the call and save you from that decision. >> speaking fairly briefly and simply, how do you know you as you mail trying to block my call, how do you know? >> so what we do is we have a replacement service. we protect your phone number from ringing and protect your message box. so we have access to all of these voice mails so we can see which ones are illegal and fraudulent. once we know a number made a fraudulent call, we can block it for everybody. so that's the secret sauce that enables us to block these calls. >> lastly as an expert, tell me

this, does it actually pay to say please remove me from your call list or is that just signaling that yeah, you have a legitimate phone. >> most of them ignore it when you press nine. some of them say this number is now active. it boils down to what we saw with viruses and other things. you need to have anti-virus software on your program. everybody is going to have to have anti-robocall software on their phone to get this call under control. there's regulation and more technology, but consumers will play an important role to make it hard for the bad guys to get through and mostly they give up and go and sell real estate. >> okay, the man's name is alex quilici. thank you. alex is the ceo of youmail. thank you for being with us this morning. we'll be back.

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success story. sky deck has managed through its early days, through covid, and now perhaps an uncertain economy, and there are new categories that startups can apply for. so i thought i would invite the director back on. good morning. i don't think there are ever times when i can say things are normal. every startup in every era has to deal with something. but these are kind of particularly unusual days. lots of talk of a slowing economy. are you seeing any changes in who is applying or a number of applicants or what kind of problems they're trying to solve? >> that's a great question. yes and no. let me start with the no. at sky deck, we are continuing to operate as we always have. we're now back, hybrid and in person. so we're part in person, part remote. we're actually enjoying some of the programming remote. we have the same number of startups. we take about 20 of our

accelerator tracks. a total of 20 startups with our tracks combined and we take startups from ault over the world and uc berkeley and our great students and faculty and we give them more money. by we, i mean our skydeck fund is investing $200,000 in each of our companies. so the world is a lot more nervous about capital, so investors are nervous. so i would just say we're doing more of what we have done, which is be extremely selective. look for the world's greatest companies and help them grow as fast as possible. >> where does the "more money" come in? is it because of inflation, because of the success of skydeck and it just has bigger funding or something else? >> so it's the success of fund one. so that fund started investing a

few years ago. fund one did very well with performance metrics that investors like to see. so we were actually given a nod to luck and timing in terms of the timing of when we started raising fund two. so fund two, the berkeley skydeck fund two just closed its $60 million. it's three times as big as fund one. and this is where luck comes in, it closed just before the economy started to get a little rattly. so the fund has fresh capital, it has $60 million, and we're deploying twice as much capital in each startup. it went from $100,000 to $200,000. inflation is nipping at their heels. >> every venture capitalist will show off not only will we give you money for being -- to help your startup grow, but we'll give you tremendous advice. and they certainly can. just randomly over at light speed ventures, they have the

former chairman of the board of microsoft. so they're able to do that. when it comes to cal berkeley, you know, it is one of the institutions in this world in which you can find an expert to help a start-up in just about any time. >> exactly. and that's what i would call our super power. so we're an unusual institution in that we look like a start-up accelerator. we act like one, we bring in companies, we give them funding and push them hard to demo day. that looks like a private accelerator. but we're not. we're a uc berkeley program, part of campus. so we're mission driven. we're here to support entrepreneurs and bring great technology to solve world problems. because of that, because we're berkeley, we have this huge community of people that want to come and join our cause and join the university in our efforts.

so there's 500,000 of us berkeley alums around the world, and we call on them to help our startups. they usually want to help, they're excited to help uc berkeley and all of the startups. for example, one of the alums and active advisers is mark, who is the co-founder of tesla. it wasn't founded by elon musk. it was co-founded by mark, and a friend of his. so mark is active, and he knows a little bit about starting a company. and we call on many people like mark, and they come and help our startups, and it's an absolute superpower to help our young company. >> you have experts in a variety of new categories where you are accepting new categories of start-up. there's a block chain, which makes a lot of sense. the one i was interested in is the chip track. you know, there's a lot of talk about silicone valley getting back to building software -- or

hardware again. >> exactly. and hardware is an important focus of what we do. and we're lucky because of berkeley. we need an adviser who has the most niche expertise in silicone or sensors or chip design. we can find them, and these companies require special expertise. they're not going to launch as quickly as a software company for example. but we can help them, and we have had several companies come through our chip track that were excited or building, companies that could change the face of how chips are designed and deployed. >> once the software or the startups have gone through this program and culminates in investor day, which i highly recommend. it is very interesting to watch these young start-ups pitch to investors. have you given thought or anticipated what higher interest

rates may do to your investor day, perhaps investors are looking for less risk? have you given that any thought? >> yes. we give that a lot of thought, because it's critical that we understand what are the trends and needs of the consumers. and they're more collective for sure. but as we all know, the last two years was one of the biggest deployments of venture capital, the biggest ever. and the capital is still out there looking for interesting young companies. and so our job is to make sure the investors get a good look at our companies. they understand the value of our program, and we support them, not just when they're at skydeck, but afterwards. so we're very strong with our alumni network, and we continue to support those companies after they graduate from skydeck and go on to raise later rounds like an a or b-round. >> skydeck is full of

interesting young companies. caroline, appreciate you being with us this morning. the executive director at berkeley skydeck. thank you for being with us. applications for the next batch of skydeck open until the end of the month. now, about one in every 100 applicants are accepted. we go into greater detail about the selection process on our podcast sand hill road. that episode is subtitled "the advantage to being a fair investor." you can find sand hill road on apple podcast and google play. we'll be right back.

welcome back. i know you can't read this, and i'm not going to read it this you, but this article was written entirely by computer. not on a computer, by a computer. artificial intelligence by a company called article forge. the ceo says he's been writing ai programs since he was a kid. welcome to the show. you know, i guess i want to start out with what kind of programs does a kid want an ai system to do? >> well, first off, scott, pleasure to be on here. thanks for having me.

i think that really since i can remember, artificial intelligence has been fascination and a passion of mine. just seeing the idea of like humans and all the intelligence that we have behind us, all the incredible things we're able to do. the idea that you can create something that is capable of doing those same things, like truly unbelievable. like something we've never seen before in our past. like even a lot of people can relate to the idea of raising a kid and seeing like the kind of excitement at seeing the kid learn to do new things to go out on their own. a lot of that was that same impulse, that same drive. a lot of entrepreneurs talk about a startup being their kid or their baby. so it can be like a fun chat pod you show to your friends, but over time you see the incredible ways that you can do things that -- like curing cancer.

there's so many things that if an ai has the power and intelligence of a human, the sky is the limit. that's like such an incredible thing. >> i was really impressed with the article that it wrote me. now, the prompt i gave it was how to conduct an effective interview. i knew it was going to interpret that as a job interview, and it did. it even added cartoon art that fit quite well. i think of interviews what i do for a living. so using the word "interview" in a different context. but that said, it wrote a readable article. what is happening when i ask the machine, the article forge to write an article? the computer goes out and researches the topic, right? >> yeah, definitely. so a lot of people think of artificial intelligence, they kind of imagine like this infinite knowledge source that writes stilted like a robot

speaks. in practice, it's often been quite the opposite. where it's been a lot easier to get ai to write in a way that seems like a human, but then the accuracy and the research part has been the really difficult part. so what we have done is, we have built what i call a knowledge search engine, where, as article forge is writing the article, it constantly is searching on this mall ware search engine to know what the facts are that is relevant. similar to if you were a human and asked to wright about abraham lincoln, maybe off the top of your head you can write a little bit. but if you wanted to write about what specific legal cases was he part of, you would need external information for that. if you wanted to write about the invasion of ukraine, what might be the invasion of ukraine eight years ago versus now is very, very different. so being able to constantly research as you're writing live is really important to write

something that is intelligent, that is worth reading. so that knowledge search engine is a huge part of that, where we -- the key word you enter in, as the article is being written, it will be updating it where okay, maybe there's this specific part of a job interview that we need more information about. so let's search that. same way a human would use a group of friends. >> how do you give credit? there is a fine line between researching something and plagiarism. >> yes, definitely. that's something we have put lots of focus on. it's okay to learn from the outside world, and to take that information to synthesize it as your own, or seeing how similar is it capturing the factual information and also -- and trying to make that as high as possible, while lowering as much

as possible of coping and paste. it probably wouldn't look like a good article any ways, it would look like eight different articles jammed together. so having that as a core part of the learning is very important to make sure it's giving something that is unique for you. >> ever tried give it is computer -- assigned it something that's just completely nonfactual, evidence that big foot exists or something in which basically it can't find the information it would need in the first place the >> so we have tried that a lot. we wanted to make sure if you were to say, like something maybe that is racist or misinformation, like talking about the covid vaccine for instance. you don't want to spew like inaccurate information. so we have tried lots of times where you ask it leading questions, where the key word itself is like the vaccine doesn't work or the vaccine is like a secret microchip.

and because the knowledge search engine only has that facts that are well vetted or well sourced, it will write an article that is talking about the conspiracy of that. so instead of saying well, the vaccine is a microchip, it might write about it's a common, unfortunate conspiracy theory that the vaccine is a microchip. >> what sort of company is using this? what is a case use in this? >> it's largely small businesses, where i like pickles. so maybe you're a local pickle manufacturer and you're competing against big pickle, where a mom and pop might have $50,000 a month budget and they might write, what are the best spices or the best sandwiches that use tickles? as a small business owner, maybe you're a one-person shop, you probably don't have the time or money to do that. so this will get you 90% of the

way there, where you can enter those key words, you can get back those articles and spend a couple of hours on your own, just adding your own flare to your business. and it allows the davids of the world to compete with the goliaths of the world. artificial intelligence is a good equalizer where you don't need huge budgets, because a machine is doing it in the end. >> we're already reading some machine created content, particularly when you research stocks online, i know. and sports scores are another one. anything with numbers is pretty easy to artificially write. there are columns -- not columns but articles like stocks that are written by a computer. >> yeah, definitely. those are often the best articles to automate, because they have like the least creativity involved. if you are writing this long, heavily researched piece where you are putting forward a novel idea, that's going to be in the realm of humans, possibly

forever. the information is out there, you have to compile it and organize it properly and get it on paper. that's where artificial intelligence excels. even for the type of text that we're writing, you probably don't want to have a pickle company like your secret recipe being writ, but what are some good sandwiches. >> that's just really interesting. alex cardinell, ceo of article forge, thank you for being with us this morning. we'll be right back.

californians have a choice between two initiatives on sports betting. prop 27 generates hundreds of millions every year to permanently fund getting people off the streets a prop 26? not a dime to solve homelessness prop 27 has strong protections to prevent minors from betting. prop 26? no protections for minors. prop 27 helps every tribe, including disadvantaged tribes. prop 26? nothing for disadvantaged tribes vote yes on 27. that's our show for this week. we have a sister podcast called sand hill road, all about venture capital. find that wherever you find your quality pod cast and google play. our thanks to my guests and thank you for making us part of

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