AI research startup RealityEngines.AI is in the midst of introducing an AI cloud-based service focused on helping organizations deploy machine learning. The startup stands out for three reasons. First, Eric Schmidt is an investor, along with Ram Shriram (early Google investor) and Paul Buchheit (created Gmail), making them stand out in a growing competitive landscape. Second, the founding team has worked in AI at Google, AWS, and Uber, three juggernauts in AI innovation. Third, this team has already started an AI company called Post Intelligence and sold it to Uber. The startup is targeting the general market, helping companies in different industries.
On the technology front, they’ve come up with a way to deal with noisy datasets. Working with datasets is a part of the data preparation process and feature engineering. The quality of the dataset has a direct impact on the results of an AI model. The AI industry has come to the conclusion that data scientists spend 80%+ of their time on data preparation vs doing real data science work like writing algorithms. Because of this problem, a cluster of startups have emerged to simplify the feature engineering process. Simplifying this process is one of the many services RealityEngines.AI provides.
One of the methods RealityEngines.AI uses to improve the quality of the dataset is to use a GAN (Generative Adversarial Networks). This is an interesting approach because you have machine learning creating a high-quality dataset to be used in machine learning algorithms. GAN, invented by data scientist Ian Goodfellow who now works for Apple, is a machine learning system that pits two neural networks against each other in a contest. As such, the system provides “dataset augmentation” which is a “technique to synthetically expand a training dataset by applying a wide array of domain-specific transformations.” GANs work across different areas including computer vision, forecasting, anomaly detection, and more. The startup is planning to introduce a product later this year / early next year.
Background
- Company: RealityEngines.AI
- Founded: 2019
- HQ: San Francisco
- # of Employees: 15+
- Raised: $5.3M
- Founders: Bindu Reddy (CEO), Arvind Sundararajan (CTO), and Siddartha Naidu (Director of Research)
- Investors: Eric Schmidt, Ram Shriram, Koshla Ventures, and others
- Product: Cloud-based AI services