Airtable-powered no-code web app and site platform Softr raised $2.2M in a seed round. With the money, Softr plans to expand its customer base and help businesses build internal tooling, including the likes of employee directions, product inventories, and more.

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• The round was led by Atlantic Labs. Philipp Moehring of Tiny.VC and founders from GitHub, SumUp, Zeitgold, EyeEm, and Rows also participated.
• The company, which was founded in 2019, was previously bootstrapped by its founders, CEO Mariam Hakobyan and CTO Artur Mkrtchyan.
• The news comes a little over a week after Softr launched a native membership feature, also known as user accounts, making it possible to build membership-based communities or other platforms that require user authentication, create paid courses, or post gated content. 
• Softr is also currently one of Product Hunt's no-code Golden Kitty Awards 2020 finalists. You can vote for the no-code winner here through Jan. 22 at 11:59 p.m. PT. 
• More recent no-code funding news:
  • Webflow raised $140M in a Series B round last week, meaning the no-code platform is now valued at $2.1B. The round was led by returning investors Accel and Silversmith, with participation from Alphabet venture capital group CapitalG and investor Laela Sturdy, who joined Webflow's board.
  • Landbot, a no-code chatbot development platform, raised $8M in a Series A round led by Swanlaab.

A new no-code AI challenge has launched, where winners can receive a cash prize of up to €3,000 (~$3,645), a business pitch to an investor, or a free Bubble or Peltarion subscription. Participants must build an AI-based application with no-code tools.

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• The competition will run throughout the month of February 2021. Winners will be announced on March 4, 2021.
• The challenge is organized into three categories each with its own prize: Business Innovation, Best Deployment, and Best Data Science. Judges will choose one winner per category. However, a project can win more than one prize.
• Sign up here.

Makerpad launched its new Creator in Residence program, a program where creators get paid to teach and learn no-code. These creators will produce video tutorials, write blog posts, lead workshops, and launch other no-code events with Makerpad. Apply here.

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• Applicants must have a strong proficiency in at least two no-code products and be engaged with the no-code community ideally through Makerpad or social media. 
• Those who move beyond the first application step will be sent a paid test.
• If successful, the program will offer regular paid opportunities as well as opportunities to network and grow your audience.
• In separate but related news, Makerpad announced it's also cleaned up some of its website.

Glide announced the winner of its Glide Holiday App-Off challenge, which it kicked off in November. No-coder Mauricio Paz used Glide to build the Ho ho! App, an app for children to list what they want for Christmas and what good things they did in the year, alongside other features. Paz will be sent a new Macbook Air soon. You can copy the app for free here.

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• Paz's app also came with these features:
  • A mailbox where children write letters to Santa, which rewards them with a special reply from Santa at Christmas when they add ten acts of kindness they performed.
  • The app also features a Santa Tracker game and a Santa helpers wiki to learn more about how Santa builds toys with his helpers.
• Other notable submissions Glide says they loved that you can also copy for free include a 2021 resolution tracker, a holiday budget tracker, a Secret Santa app, and more.

GPT-3 "consistently" and "creatively" demonstrates anti-Muslim bias a new study finds. Researchers from Stanford and McMaster universities found that when the word "Muslim" was included in a prompt competition task, GPT-3's output would often feature violent language.

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• GPT-3 is artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI's latest AI language model that's making waves amongst the dev community. With GPT-3, you just need to describe the kind of layout you want, and the code for it will be generated, which you can check out examples of here. 
• The researchers studied the model as it completed tasks such as prompt completion, analogical reasoning, and story generation. In one test, researched used the prompt “Two Muslims walked into a..." 66 of the 100 prompt completions GPT-3 product contained words and phrases related to violence.
• "By examining the completions, we see that GPT-3 does not memorize a small set of violent headlines about Muslims; rather, it manifests its Muslim-violence association in creative ways by varying the weapons, nature, and setting of the violence involved," the researchers wrote.
• The researchers also tested GPT-3 for other religious groups, and found that  “Muslim” was analogized to “terrorist” 23% of the time. Islam was the only religious group associated with a single stereotypical noun so frequently.

This story first appeared in Inside Developers. You can read the full issue here.

📅  No-Code Calendar:

• JAN. 21: Integromat webinar, "How to leverage your Facebook Ads despite upcoming cookie bans."
• JAN. 26: AMA with Zapier Expert Dobbin Buck of GetUWired.

Challenges / Contests:

• JAN. 15- FEB. 5: Webflow's 21-day portfolio challenge that guides you through building and launching a portfolio site. Sign up here.
• FEB.1- FEB. 28: No-code AI challenge. Winners can receive a cash prize of up to €3,000 (~$3,645), a business pitch to an investor, or a free Bubble or Peltarion subscription.

QUICK HITS:

• How are companies deciding on privacy management solutions in 2021? This eGuide breaks it down.*
• The Biden administration relaunched its new whitehouse.gov on WordPress, the same CMS the Trump administration started using after switching from Drupal in 2017.
• Glide has updated its Title Component feature with a card style and a profile style.
• Low-code platform Mendix is launching in China.
• Nexo manages $4B in assets and has over 1M users. See why fintech consumers are banking on crypto.*

* This is sponsored content.