Forevery and the Coming Wave of Ambient Technology
By Zavain Dar
Hello from Machine Learning Conference (NIPS) in Montreal! While I’m lucky to find myself chatting, exploring ideas, and anticipating the future with leading minds in Machine Learning, AI, and Deep Learning — it’s a nice coincidence that today Clarifai, a Deep Learning company in our portfolio, launches its first consumer app: Forevery. The last three years have brought neutral nets — a long forgotten substudy in AI — back to academic and enterprise vogue in the form of Deep Learning. Today Clarifai’s Forevery plays a small role in bringing this growing and expanding new tool kit to consumers.
Unpacking what this means — we’re in early innings of surrounding ourselves with ‘ambient intelligence’. Intelligence subtly ingrained in the technology we interact with. Most of us are familiar with this in some form or another — whether it’s Apple’s siri to look up a basketball score, or a Nest at home to help optimize comfort and energy efficiency. The magical part about AI, is that when it finally works, when it finally does what it’s intended to do, it no longer feels futuristic and abnormal, but rather normal, familiar, and even ambient.
Forevery uses Clarifai’s Deep Learning and Computer Vision technology to reimagine what our smart phone camera rolls could be with knowledge of the imagery, people, places, activities, and contexts involved. Pictures are no longer static 2-dimensional grids; they’re grids with information extracted and indexed made available to users in relevant, searchable manners. The same way we long ago googled for ‘tacos in SF’, we can similarly now search for pictures of that same ‘taco store’ stashed somewhere in photos from prior years.
My expectation is that this is still just the beginning; everything I’ve seen thus far in Montreal gives me reason to strengthen that position. I encourage you to download, play with, and see first hand just how exciting, weirdly normal, and delightful our future world will start to look like with Clarifai’s Forevery.
