The AI Foundation raises $17 million to create digital AI-powered personas
The AI Foundation, which ambitiously hopes to develop “ethical” AI agents that can be trained to complete tasks, today closed a $17 million funding round. A spokesperson said the funds will be used to scale the company’s platform, which allows people to create a digital persona that mirrors their own.
Established in 2017, the AI Foundation, which was founded by Rob Meadows and former EA vice president Lars Buttler, is a dual commercial and nonprofit enterprise with the stated mission of bringing “the power and protection of AI to everyone in the world so they can participate fully in the future.” At the center of this mission is the company’s proprietary “human-AI collaboration” platform, which brings together innovations from third-party research partners.
The AI Foundation’s steering committee — the Global AI Council — has a mandate to anticipate the negative effects of AI and figure out how to counteract them. One proposal that reached production is Reality Defender, a free tool that scans images, videos, and other media for known deepfakes and supports the reporting of suspected fakes. Underlining the deepfake threat, Amsterdam-based cybersecurity startup Deeptrace found 14,698 deepfake videos on the internet in June and July, up from 7,964 in December 2019.
It also draws on the AI Foundation’s partnerships with content creators to establish an “honest AI” watermark that clearly identifies AI-generated deepfakes.
To further its research, the AI Foundation recently partnered with a team at the Technical University of Munich’s (TUM) Visual Computing Lab to explore new media forgery detection and flagging techniques,...
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2020/07/30/the-ai-foundation-raises-17-million-to-create-digital-ai-powered-personas/