Synthetaic

Last updated

RAIC Labs
Founded2019
Headquarters
Delafield, WI
,
United States
Key people
Corey Jaskolski
Founder
CEO
Websiteraiclabs.com

RAIC Labs, formerly Synthetaic, is an American artificial intelligence (AI) company founded in 2019 and headquartered in Delafield, Wisconsin. [1]

Contents

History

RAIC Labs, formerly Synthetaic, was founded in 2019 by Corey Jasksolski, a National Geographic explorer and fellow. After creating a 3D digitization of a living Sumatran Rhino using a custom imaging system he built, Jaskolski wondered whether synthetic data could be used to train AI. [1] While RAIC Labs doesn't sell synthetic data, its software uses generative capabilities associated with synthetic data. [2]

In 2021, RAIC Labs developed Rapid Automatic Image Categorization, or RAIC, a computer vision software which performs classification and detection on photography, video, and satellite imagery without data labeling. [3]

RAIC is notable for its use of human collaboration with an unsupervised AI model, which allows for iteration upon the algorithm in real-time. [4] RAIC has been described as "ChatGPT for satellite imagery," since it uses transformers to understand imagery in a way somewhat similar to how ChatGPT understands human language. [3]

In May 2023, satellite imaging company Planet Labs announced an official partnership with RAIC Labs, formerly Synthetaic, through which they would sell RAIC insights for defined areas of interest within Planet data. [5] [6]

RAIC Labs, formerly Synthetaic, announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft in August 2023. Elements of the partnership included selection for Microsoft's Pegasus Program and access to one million hours of GPU cloud computing via Microsoft Azure. [7]

2023 Tracking the Chinese balloon

RAIC searched 18 trillion pixels of geospatial data, successfully detecting the Chinese Spy Balloon and tracking its path back to the launch site. RAIC-Labs-Chinese-Balloon-map-branded.webp
RAIC searched 18 trillion pixels of geospatial data, successfully detecting the Chinese Spy Balloon and tracking its path back to the launch site.

On 11 February 2023, RAIC Labs, formerly Synthetaic, used its RAIC product to detect a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon in archival Planet Labs data. [8] RAIC's demonstrated ability to quickly analyze Earth observation imagery at scale was deemed novel and a potential "game-changer" by experts including Arthur Holland Michel and Hamed Alemohammad. [9] [10]

RAIC Labs / Synthetaic's work tracking the balloon formed the basis for a New York Times visual investigation, which credited RAIC for providing the precise coordinates of the balloon at twelve different points during its journey. [10] [4]

Balloons over East Asia

Later that year, BBC news magazine program Panorama reported additional Chinese surveillance balloons detected over Japan and Taiwan. Security correspondent Gordon Corera cited Synthetaic's RAIC as a tool in their investigation and interviewed Jaskolski. [11]


2023 Mapping the Israel–Hamas war

RAIC Labs worked closely with CNN to provide detections of craters in geospatial data to map the war. Working with the American and International teams, RAIC was able to detect more than 500 impact craters over 123 meters in diameter, for their report: ‘Not seen since Vietnam’: Israel dropped hundreds of 2,000-pound bombs on Gaza, analysis shows [12] [13]

Funding

In February 2024, Synthetaic raised $15 million in Series B funding. [6]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Bing</span> Web search engine developed by Microsoft

Microsoft Bing, commonly referred to as Bing, is a search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. The service traces its roots back to Microsoft's earlier search engines, including MSN Search, Windows Live Search, and Live Search. Bing offers a broad spectrum of search services, encompassing web, video, image, and map search products, all developed using ASP.NET.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sam Altman</span> American entrepreneur and investor (born 1985)

Samuel Harris Altman is an American entrepreneur and investor best known as the CEO of OpenAI since 2019. He is also the chairman of clean energy companies Oklo Inc. and Helion Energy. Altman is considered to be one of the leading figures of the AI boom. He dropped out of Stanford University after two years and founded Loopt, a mobile social networking service, raising more than $30 million in venture capital. In 2011, Altman joined Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, and was its president from 2014 to 2019.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ServiceNow</span> American technology company

ServiceNow, Inc. is an American software company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops a cloud computing platform to help companies manage digital workflows for enterprise operations. Founded in 2003 by Fred Luddy, ServiceNow is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the Russell 1000 Index and S&P 500 Index. In 2018, Forbes magazine named it number one on its list of the world's most innovative companies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Databricks</span> American software company

Databricks, Inc. is a global data, analytics and artificial intelligence company founded by the original creators of Apache Spark.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenAI</span> Artificial intelligence research organization

OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization founded in December 2015, researching artificial intelligence with the goal of developing "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence, which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." As one of the leading organizations of the AI boom, it has developed several large language models, advanced image generation models, and previously, released open-source models. Its release of ChatGPT has been credited with starting the AI boom.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Capella Space</span> American space company

Capella Space is an American space company with satellite and declassified SAR data solutions for government and commercial use. It offers space-based radar Earth observation satellites equipped with synthetic-aperture radar that can collect imagery through clouds and at night. The company is based in San Francisco, California with offices in Washington, D.C., and Louisville, Colorado. It was founded by Payam Banazadeh, a former engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA, and William Walter Woods.

Orbital Insight is a Palo Alto, California-based geospatial analytics company. The company analyzes satellite, drone, balloon and other unmanned aerial vehicle images, including cell phone geolocation data, to study a range of human activity, and provides business and other strategic insights from the data.

Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is a large language model released by OpenAI in 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DALL-E</span> Image-generating deep-learning model

DALL·E, DALL·E 2, and DALL·E 3 are text-to-image models developed by OpenAI using deep learning methodologies to generate digital images from natural language descriptions known as "prompts".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">QANDA</span> AI-based math problem-solving and tutoring platform

QANDA is an AI-based learning platform developed by Mathpresso Inc., a South Korea-based education technology company. Its best known feature is a solution search, which uses optical character recognition technology to scan problems and provide step-by-step solutions and learning content.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ChatGPT</span> Chatbot and virtual assistant developed by OpenAI

ChatGPT is a chatbot and virtual assistant developed by OpenAI and launched on November 30, 2022. Based on large language models (LLMs), it enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language. Successive user prompts and replies are considered at each conversation stage as context.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hallucination (artificial intelligence)</span> Confident unjustified claim by AI

In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a hallucination or artificial hallucination is a response generated by AI which contains false or misleading information presented as fact. This term draws a loose analogy with human psychology, where hallucination typically involves false percepts. However, there is a key difference: AI hallucination is associated with unjustified responses or beliefs rather than perceptual experiences.

Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) is a multimodal large language model created by OpenAI, and the fourth in its series of GPT foundation models. It was launched on March 14, 2023, and made publicly available via the paid chatbot product ChatGPT Plus, via OpenAI's API, and via the free chatbot Microsoft Copilot. As a transformer-based model, GPT-4 uses a paradigm where pre-training using both public data and "data licensed from third-party providers" is used to predict the next token. After this step, the model was then fine-tuned with reinforcement learning feedback from humans and AI for human alignment and policy compliance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Generative artificial intelligence</span> AI system capable of generating content in response to prompts

Generative artificial intelligence is artificial intelligence capable of generating text, images, videos, or other data using generative models, often in response to prompts. Generative AI models learn the patterns and structure of their input training data and then generate new data that has similar characteristics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AI boom</span> Ongoing period of rapid progress in artificial intelligence

The AI boom, or AI spring, is an ongoing period of rapid progress in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Prominent examples include protein folding prediction led by Google DeepMind and generative AI led by OpenAI.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Greg Brockman</span> American entrepreneur, investor and software developer (born 1987)

Greg Brockman is an American entrepreneur, investor and software developer who is a co-founder and currently the president of OpenAI. He began his career at Stripe in 2010, upon leaving MIT, and became their CTO in 2013. He left Stripe in 2015 to co-found OpenAI, where he also assumed the role of CTO.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Copilot</span> Chatbot developed by Microsoft

Microsoft Copilot is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Microsoft. Based on a large language model, it was launched in February 2023. It is Microsoft's primary replacement for the discontinued Cortana.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ChatGPT in education</span> Use of the chatbot in education

Since OpenAI's public release of ChatGPT in November 2022, the use of chatbots has been widely discussed within education. Opinions among educators are divided; some oppose the use of large language models, while others find them beneficial. The use of oral exams have been proposed to assure that such chatbots cannot be used in tests.

Aleph Alpha is an independent German artificial intelligence (AI) startup company in Heidelberg, founded by professionals with experience as employees of Apple, SAP and Deloitte. Aleph Alpha attempts to provide a full-stack sovereign technology stack for generative AI, independent from US companies and comply with European data protection regulations and the AI Act. It built one of the most powerful AI clusters inside its own data centre and develops large language models (LLM), which try to provide transparency of its sources used for the results generated and are intended for enterprises and governmental agencies only. Training of its model has been done in five European languages.

References

  1. 1 2 Wiggers, Kyle (15 March 2022). "Synthetaic secures venture funding to expand its synthetic data platform". VentureBeat. Retrieved 28 April 2023.
  2. Quach, Katyanna. "Fake it until you make it: Can synthetic data help train your AI model?". The Register. Retrieved 15 May 2023.
  3. 1 2 Tucker, Patrick. "A 'ChatGPT' For Satellite Photos Already Exists". DefenseOne. Retrieved 15 May 2023.
  4. 1 2 Ocampo, Josh. "A Bird's Eye View of the Chinese Balloon". New York Times. Retrieved 15 May 2023.
  5. Zaroda, Megan. "Planet Announces AI Partnerships at GEOINT 2023". Planet Labs. Retrieved 22 May 2023.
  6. 1 2 Erwin, Sandra (6 February 2024). "AI startup Synthetaic raises $15 million in Series B funding". SpaceNews. Retrieved 12 February 2024.
  7. Smart, Ashley. "Delafield-based AI startup Synthetaic announces strategic partnership with Microsoft". BizTimes. Retrieved 7 September 2023.
  8. Erwin, Sandra. "AI startup using satellite imagery to trace the path of Chinese balloon". SpaceNews. Retrieved 15 May 2023.
  9. Stokel-Walker, Chris (25 February 2023). "How One Guy's AI Tracked the Chinese Spy Balloon Across the US". Wired. Retrieved 28 April 2023.
  10. 1 2 Xiao, Muyi; Jhaveri, Ishaan; Lutz, Eleanor; Koettl, Christopher; Barnes, Julian (20 March 2023). "Tracking the Chinese Balloon from Space". New York Times. Retrieved 28 April 2023.
  11. Corera, Gordon (26 June 2023). "New images show Chinese spy balloons over Asia". BBC News. Retrieved 5 July 2023.
  12. Qiblawi, Tamara (22 December 2023). "'Not seen since Vietnam': Israel dropped hundreds of 2,000-pound bombs on Gaza, analysis shows". CNN. Retrieved 11 June 2024.
  13. CNN, Tara Subramaniam, Andrew Raine, Lauren Said-Moorhouse, Thom Poole, Sophie Tanno, Adrienne Vog, Matt Meyer (28 October 2023). "October 28, 2023 Israel-Hamas war". CNN. Retrieved 11 June 2024.{{cite web}}: |last= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)