At Databricks’s annual summit in June, the data analytics and machine learning powerhouse touted its recent $1.3 billion acquisition of open-source AI startup MosaicML and showcased its industry impact with a parade of high-profile partners—from Microsoft to Condé Nast—who took the stage to sing Databricks’ praises.

In the lineup of corporate names, one stood out: the Texas Rangers, a (checks notes) professional baseball club from…that’s right, Texas.

We chatted with Alexander Booth, assistant director of research and development for the Rangers, at the summit, where he explained the club’s approach to data.

Baseball’s love affair with data was sparked by Moneyball (the book, authored by Michael Lewis, about Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane, later dramatized in a movie starring Brad Pitt), Booth told Tech Brew.

And AI is enabling a new generation of strategists and coaches to find the next Moneyball, he said.

Keep reading here.—MA

That’s how VenHub rolls.

These fully autonomous, 24/7 smart stores are setting out to transform how people shop entirely. Customers order from an app, then robots fulfill the order. It’s that simple.

And entrepreneurs love the go-anywhere flexibility of these smart stores. VenHub’s robotics and AI can help store owners achieve up to 5x higher margins and open new locations in 98% less time. They’ve racked up over $44m in smart-store preorders already.

With 152k+ convenience stores in the US generating $652b in sales, making convenience even more convenient is a huge market opportunity.

Even better? They want you to ride with them as a shareholder. You can even get a 5% discount on their share price when you invest by today, July 12. Learn more here.

Raffi Krikorian has led the platform team at Twitter, directed Uber’s self-driving efforts, worked as the top tech executive at the Democratic National Committee, and presently serves as the CTO of Emerson Collective. He’s taking that broad expertise and setting his sights on AI ethics.

Krikorian, whose new podcast Technically Optimistic will feature his conversations with everyone from Senator Michael Bennet to former Google ethicist Tristan Harris, sat down with Tech Brew to discuss his take on the often controversial intersection of technology and politics.

Spoiler alert: It’s not all doom and gloom.

Keep reading here.—MA

Sick of interacting with all those humans at work? Meet AIntelligent Studios, an agency operated by AI.

The agency is run by two self-described “AI entities,” Aiden and Aiko, that Marketing Brew wrote about earlier this year while they were “interning” at the tech marketing agency Codeword. In early June, though, the two AIs struck out on their own.

“They put out a press release that they wrote themselves, they made a website that they created themselves, and now they’re off in the world advising every brand, and agency, and Hollywood studio on how to write bland things using AI,” Kyle Monson, a founding partner at Codeword, told Marketing Brew.

If Monson’s use of “bland” wasn’t a clear indicator, he’s joking…sort of. Confused? Here’s the full scoop on AIntelligent Studios.

Keep reading here.—AM

Embrace the Smartocalypse: Ideas vs. Reality. Join us for a virtual event, sponsored by NI, on July 25 when we sit down with Raffi Krikorian, CTO of Emerson Collective. He’ll tackle the most important items on today’s tech checklist, including stakeholders, resources, opportunities, and limitations. We have a seat saved just for you!*

*This editorial content is supported by NI.

Stat: 75%. That’s how much of generative AI’s value will come from four applications: customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering, and R&D, according to a McKinsey report.

Quote: “Large language models, although they are astoundingly virtuosic and mind-bogglingly impressive in many ways, do not think up original ideas; rather, they glibly and slickly rehash words and phrases ‘ingested’ by them in their training phase, which draws on untold millions of websites, books, articles, etc. At first glance, the products of today’s LLMs may appear convincing and true, but one often finds, on careful analysis, that they fall apart at the seams.”—Douglas Hofstadter, in The Atlantic, after being sent an AI-produced “statement written in the first person” about why he wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

Read: American companies held hostage by the whims of TikTok (the Wall Street Journal)