Two of the ways DeepMedia makes money: by creating deepfakes and by detecting them.

Rijul Gupta, a former machine learning engineer, co-founded the Bay Area startup in 2017 with Emma Brown as a way to communicate in Hindi with his extended family. The tool they built, DubSync, currently allows someone to appear to be speaking any one of 10 languages, using translation, vocal synthesis, dubbing, and facial animation.

Now, the company claims it’s working with some of the biggest names in streaming, but would not share specific clients or partnerships. According to Gupta, it’s currently on track to generate between $300,000 and $500,000 in revenue this year.

Diving into detection

In the years since DeepMedia’s debut, the team—now a group of about 20—has also begun pursuing its other mission: detecting synthetic audio and video. And they’re doing it via partnerships, including one with the Air Force Research Laboratory, the division’s primary science R&D arm and part of the Department of Defense. Announced in April, the grant involves developing deepfake detectors for faces, voices, and aerial imagery. One of the ways DeepMedia trains these detector tools is by constantly creating datasets of advanced deepfakes, using the company’s own generation tools.

How it works: The company’s AI detection process starts with a lot of pre-processing steps. Say you uploaded a video that seemed to feature President Biden and wanted to check its authenticity: First, the models would need to detect the president’s face in that video, analyze facial landmarks, pick out the voice and extract it from background noise, and more—all before the deepfake detection begins.

• Next, the content is run through a series of detectors, including a binary classifier of real versus fake for both video and audio. Finally, the content is examined by convolutional neural networks, which attempt to pick out which algorithm, or algorithms, were used to create a deepfake.

As of now, Gupta said, the company’s deepfake detectors work at about 95% accuracy across “most deepfake modalities on synthetic faces, voices, and aerial imagery.” He said the company won’t release them until they’re at 99% accuracy.

Read the full story here.—HF

As some analysts fear the “worst semiconductor downturn” in a decade, Synopsys—a leader in chip design and testing software—is trending in a different direction.

The company specializes in electronic design automation (EDA) software, which allows semiconductor engineers to test out chip designs and run through the manufacturing process. For its fiscal Q3 2022, Synopsys reported above-target revenue of $1.25 billion, up 18% year over year—with projections to finish the year with revenue growth of more than 20%.

Serious growth

Cadence, another EDA company based in the San Francisco Bay Area, reported its most recent quarterly earnings in July, with $858 million in revenue—up 17.8% year over year, according to a recent release. And Siemens, the German industrial manufacturing giant, reported “double-digit growth” in its EDA business last quarter, though it did not break out that sector’s revenue under its “digital industries” umbrella.

“Based on this strength and confidence in our business, we are raising guidance for the full year—we expect to…pass the $5 billion milestone,” Aart de Geus, chairman and CEO of Synopsys, said on its latest earnings call.

Big picture: After a period of record-high demand, the sudden semiconductor slump has spread to chipmakers like TSMC, Samsung, Micron, Nvidia, Intel, and AMD, with reports of excess inventory for some products, shortages for others, and an overall decrease or standstill in demand. On ASML’s earnings call, for instance, executives described supply-chain constraints and delayed revenue.

When faced with similar questions on Synopsys’s earnings call, de Geus said chip research and development is especially insulated against market ups and downs.

• “The design activities typically don’t mirror immediately what happens in the market because the market is really a function of the end sales, i.e., the quantity of chips being sold,” he said. “R&D is very stable against that. And more often than not, when there’s a flat period, or even a downturn, people invest in R&D to make sure that they have differentiation coming out of it.”

On Cadence’s most recent earnings call, Anirudh Devgan, president and CEO, seemed to echo the sentiment, emphasizing that despite “macroeconomic uncertainties,” customers are “relentlessly investing in their next-generation innovation.”

Read the full story here.—HF

Last week, our snap poll took inspiration from the scores of LinkedIn-fluencers out there and decided to ask you about your career path.

Specifically…We asked whether you had thought about switching into a role related to the energy transition, or if you already worked in one.

• Precisely one-third (33%) of our nearly 800 respondents said yes, while the remaining 67% said no.
• The question was prompted by the signing of the Inflation Reduction Act, which one estimate found could create up to 1.5 million clean-energy jobs by 2030.

Big picture: Those who are considering switching into a climate-related job are not alone. Tech workers in particular have been keen to switch into the field, motivated by the urgency of the climate crisis.

Since its founding in 2020, climate-job website Climatebase says 600,000 people have used it, CNBC reports, while Work On Climate has grown its Slack channel for climate job-hunters to 10,000 users, up 4x in the last year.—DM

Stat: PepsiCo said it has helped farmers adopt regenerative-agriculture techniques across 345,000 acres of farmland worldwide, with plans to expand to 7 million acres by 2030.

Quote: “I feel like we’re on a roller coaster that’s about to pass the top of the largest hill. Buckle up, everyone, we’re going on a ride to the moon here.” —Jacob Bleacher, chief exploration scientist at NASA, ahead of this week’s Artemis 1 launch

Read: Indiana’s $100 million plan for EV chargers is facing blowback from the NAACP, which says the proposal was formed without consultation from minority communities.

Check out the new agenda for the virtual Emerging Tech Brew Summit! We’ve planned a half-day program full of insights and education on the innovations and implications within the health, energy, and food worlds. Join experts and inspiring speakers including entrepreneur Mark Cuban, futurist Amy Webb, automotive leader Scott Keogh, and more as they share their takes on the world of emerging technologies.

The event is 100% free, so there’s really no reason not to check it out—RSVP today!

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• The US’s biggest residential solar installer has a battery problem
• The VC slowdown is happening faster for AI startups
• Hyundai’s self-steering ship subsidiary says it has made hundreds of sales