AI Foundation is an American artificial intelligence company founded by Lars Buttler and Rob Meadows, developing ethical artificial intelligent agents individuals can train. The company has offices in San Francisco and in Las Vegas; it was started in 2017 and has been operating in stealth until it was first publicly reported in September 2018 by Variety and VentureBeat. The publications note the company closed a $10 million funding round to commercialize AI products that benefit humanity. Since its founding, the company has hired many high-profile AI researchers and has partnered with Technical University of Munich.
Company overview
According to the company's overview on Crunchbase, AI Foundation is working on:
"Revolutionary new interfaces between humans and AI open up a whole new universe of AI-powered jobs. Truly personal AI requires deep interactions between users and AI for collaboration and training, which must be natural and more like hobby or play."
AI Foundation has several big name investors from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund venture-capital firm to marketing-tech company You & Mr Jones, as well as Endeavor and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. At the One Young World conference started by David Jones, founder of You & Mr. Jones, Biz Stone and AI Foundation unveiled several prototypes such as a digital clone of Richard Branson. On the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Deepak Chopra showed off his digital AI version of himself which took Jimmy Fallon and the audience through a guided meditation. Deepak's AI is aptly called Digital Deepak and "will offer you advice whenever you need it" according to CNBC. Many media sites are discussing where the future lies with technology like this from customer service to personal assistants. While others are questioning the potential of living forever via your digital avatar. USA Today wrote an optimistic viewpoint of how this tech can improve lives via a digital replica of your aging parent or yourself and many other examples. From a competitor perspective, Samsung backed NEON revealed their digital human prototypes at CES 2020 which gained a huge amount of press and mixed reviews. Additionally, New Zealand based company Soul Machines, raised US$40 million in January 2020 to help further their digital human avatars.
Responsibility
The first product AI Foundation released is called Reality Defender. According to the Verge, Reality Defender will, "...alert users to misinformation by scanning images and videos on the webpages they’re looking at and flagging any doctored content." However, researchers think this may not be enough and the technology and techniques needs to expand further. With organizations like Facebook and Twitter trying to tackle these misinformation challenges in various ways, it may still not be enough before the next major election. Fake news and deepfakes when used malignantly, is an issue facing everyone that can change our perceptions to the whims of the manipulators. As these types of synthetic media edited with AI continue to grow, peoples perceptions of reality may become altered indefinitely and it is important to ethically monitor synthetic media with technology to combat this.
