How do you get artificial intelligence to actually understand the real world we humans live in? Tune it into the physical world around us.
That's the approach of a new company launching out of Hypergiant, the AI-based technology consortium that emerged earlier this year in Austin.
The new company, called Hypergiant Sensory Sciences, says it's building AI-powered digital copies of real world scenes. That has applications for other AI-driven technology by adding an awareness of the physical world to the data pipelines it may already be analyzing.
"Whether it’s the security cameras in an office building, hospital, casino or a military base, the truth is the vast majority of video collected by cameras goes unwatched," the company wrote in a Q&A. "This is especially true for large companies with dozens or even hundreds of feeds that are essentially blind to the valuable data left dormant on a hard drive or streamed without capture. Sensory Sciences is making it possible for organizations to search the actual content of a video, surface knowledge and insights, act instantly, and make changes by offering true intelligent video search for the first time ever."
Its early focus is on the oil and gas, health care and defense industries.
Hypergiant Sensory Sciences was developed by Dave Copps, Chris Rohde and Ben Lamm. You may know Lamm from his co-founding role in Hypergiant, as well as Conversable (acquired) and Chaotic Moon Studios (acquired). Copps and Rohde founded Brainspace, which was sold in a $2.8 billion deal with Cyxtera last year.
Hypergiant Sensory Sciences is launching with an undisclosed Series A round that was led by Austin-based Align Capital, Capital Factory and Dallas-based GPG Ventures.
“With new learning methods we saw that we could even create learning networks by connecting multiple environments,” Copps, CEO of Hypergiant Sensory Sciences, said in a news release. “We’ve always had the honor of working with and building incredible teams that play impossible games and this company will be no different. ‘Creating human perception at impossible scale’ is more than a tag line for us – its what we are setting out to create for the world.”
The full team at Hypergiant Space-Age Solutions now numbers 57 spread across Austin, Dallas and Houston, and a few outside of Texas. The company expects to have 100 employees by the end of the year.
The Sensory Sciences team has eight people, and it will likely grow to about 20 next year, a company spokesperson said.
The company says it is largely alone in its mission right now.
"The only other groups that are on a similar path of discovery are AI research labs," the company wrote in a Q&A. "Princeton’s Visual AI Lab and MIT-IBM Watson lab are making exciting progress on select projects."
