Artificial intelligence and wild horses may not appear to have a lot in common. But for Wildlife Protection Management, AI technology has changed how the Albuquerque-based company manages wild horse populations.
Roch Hart, the company's CEO, said running data from a system he created through AI can lead to a better way to identify horses.
It works like this. An alfalfa feeding trough has a mechanism to deliver vaccines and radio frequency identification chips that will track horse populations. Another part of the solar-powered system uses five different cameras, facial recognition software and AI to capture horse profiles and identify them, Hart told Albuquerque Business First.
"That's what I'm hoping AI will do. It'll bridge all those identifiers and help us develop the most humane way to identify horses," said Hart, whose company landed a phase one grant from the National Science Foundation with the help of New Mexico State University's AgSprint business accelerator program.
Hart hopes to earn a phase two grant from the foundation, and to further implement AI technology, he is working with New Mexico A.I. Labs, a Santa Fe-based nonprofit.
New Mexico A.I. Labs' co-founders include Santa Fe-based roboticist Sabri Sansoy and Fred Leveau,senior director of product design for brand and growth at Redfin. The educational nonprofit wants to become New Mexico's go-to resource for AI, Leveau told Business First.
"There are so many people excited about AI right now," Sansoy said in a January call. "I just have a great group of colleagues. And everybody wants to be part of [New Mexico A.I. Labs], which is just boggling my mind."
Aside from Wildlife Protection Management, New Mexico A.I. Labs has also helped an addiction recovery company in Albuquerque implement machine learning to improve its business practices.
James Widner, the CEO of Duke City Recovery Toolbox, told Business First in a Feb. 3 email that his company is "in the process of developing an AI model for predicting an individual's progress in treatment."
Using anonymized patient data, Sansoy — through A.I. Labs — is helping to develop the predictive model to recognize if progress is being made or if it shows a regression."
I'm doing that for free for [Duke City Recovery Toolbox]," he said. "I just want to help them, and I guarantee you there's a lot of other businesses like that, that could leverage AI."
To gauge that demand, and help more businesses access AI resources, a fusion scientist has plans to make New Mexico A.I. Labs part of a Santa Fe-based tech incubator.
Simon Woodruff, Ph.D., wants to launch an energy tech incubator near Santa Fe Community College. He told Business First that the incubator would offer training space for students and lab space for early-stage technology companies that want to scale up.
Woodruff, who met Sansoy at a Santa Fe Innovates business accelerator program, wants New Mexico A.I. Labs to be a core part of that incubator project. He's also currently working with A.I. Labs through two of his own companies, Woodruff Scientific and UHV3D, which are both based in Santa Fe.
Although the incubator is currently in its early stages of development, Woodruff said that he wants it to be complete in 2024.
"It's an existential thing," he said about AI. "What you can say about one business, you can say about the state. If you're not embracing this technology, then you're not competing."
Sansoy and Leveau are in the process of finding potential sources of funding for New Mexico A.I. Labs, which employs three people on a voluntary basis. The co-founders said they're considering grants, such as those through the National Science Foundation, but aren't currently raising any capital.
By the end of the year, Sansoy and Leveau hope that A.I. Labs can start to be a catalyst in making New Mexico a "center of excellence" for artificial intelligence. And, in doing that, they hope the state can attract more tech workers.
"All my colleagues leaving California are going to Arizona, they're going to Colorado or they're going to Texas. They don't want to come here, which is frustrating," Sansoy said about New Mexico. "So I'm trying to help build our tech community here."
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the title of a New Mexico A.I. Labs cofounder. Fred Leveau is senior director of product design for brand and growth at Redfin.
