5YF Episode #10: Ambient AI CEO and co-founder Shikhar Shrestha

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There are over 70M security cameras in the US, and over 1 billion globally. What if they could understand what they’re observing and react? The rise of Large Vision Models and multi-modal AI is fast making this a reality and ushering in a new era of security. Data-feeds are mined for the earliest signature of a potential threat giving us the ability to predict crime and do it at scale. Welcome to minority report.

Our environments are going to be intrinsically safer. Security is going to be built into the environment itself.

What you’ll hear:‍

🦸Predicting crime like minority report

🚨 Embedding security into our surrounding environments

🙈 Weeding out bias in our models

🪬 Multi-modal and multi-sensory AI

👁️ The rise of Large Vision Models

♾️ And plenty more!

A drastic reduction in physical crime as security becomes automated, proactive, and actually effective

Our guest:

Shikhar Shrestha is co-founder and CEO of Ambient AI, the silicon valley startup that rocketed out of stealth in 2022 with over $50M in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, adding a further $20M in 2023, and who boasts a list of fortune 500 as customers. Ambient equips security cameras with computer vision technology that enables them to see and understand the world around them. Shikhar, a true expect in computer vision technology, spans a technical career from DARPA to Apple and Google, earning a Masters in Mechatronics, Robotics and Smart Imaging Systems from Stanford University.

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My takeaway:

Humans process most of the world through the richness of visual information. Enabling AI to do the same — be it in security settings benefiting already from a massive install base of cameras or others such as factories, transport, construction, and agriculture — will put our physical world on an incredible trajectory of innovation. Feeding immense quantities of contextual data to hungry AI models and opening up a plethora of use cases for application. The promise of multi-sensory AI brings unrivaled context and completeness of understanding, bringing AI from our screens out into the real world.

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- Daniel Darling