Interest and adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the enterprise is growing stronger than ever. As larger companies begin to take advantage of AI and machine learning, smaller businesses are also realizing that in order to keep up, they must explore innovative ways to incorporate AI in their processes. Gartner predicts that the ability to use AI as well as embedding AI in mobile applications and services to create intelligent apps are going to be key strategic technology trends for this year and beyond. These trends, among others, will have broad industry impact and significant potential for disruption.
The use cases and the opportunities for AI in the enterprise are practically limitless, but the question most businesses have is: where do they begin? According to members of the Forbes Technology Council, the first step is to leverage existing platforms. One such platform is Clarifai, an artificial intelligence platform that allows businesses and developers to easily build visual recognition AI into their products and workflows.
SourceForge recently spoke with Rajesh Talpade, VP of Product at Clarifai, to discuss the democratization of AI and the role that Clarifai plays in making AI accessible to everyone.
Q: First and foremost, please share with our readers a brief overview on Clarifai. When was the company established and what types of problems does it seek to address?
Rajesh Talpade, VP of Product at Clarifai
A: Clarifai is a leading artificial intelligence company that excels in visual recognition and solves real-world problems for the enterprise. Our powerful visual recognition technology classifies and predicts more than three billion concepts in photos and videos every month, and provides AI solutions for West Elm, OpenTable, trivago, Vevo and more.
The kinds of challenges we help enterprises solve can include:
- Humans needing to manually sift through large volumes of content, sucking time away from other tasks
- Enterprises needing a moderation tool for user-generated content (like Photobucket)
- Organizing and curating large volumes of visual content for easier search (internally and consumer-facing, like trivago’s hotel search engine)
Q: There’s a lot of talk about democratizing Artificial Intelligence (AI). What exactly does this mean, and why is it important?
A: At Clarifai, our mission is to accelerate the progress of humanity with continually improving AI. We believe it’s important that all individuals have access to safe and secure AI technology so we can view the world from other perspectives. AI is playing an increasingly important role in the future of technology, and it’s important to ensure that everyone has fair and equal access so the playing field is level.
Q: Experts are saying that AI democratization depends on tech giants. What is your take on this? How is Clarifai helping to take AI from the ivory towers and making it accessible for all?
A: At Clarifai, we feel it’s the independent companies who are playing an enormous role in democratizing AI. With just a few lines of code and easy-to-implement platform, we make AI incredibly accessible for both developers or enterprises, particularly with our on-premise solutions. Businesses rely on us, rather than the tech giants, because they know we won’t take ownership of their data – and we’ve built a successful business and large customer base on this premise.
Q: According to Forrester’s TechRadar report, the number of enterprises using AI in 2018 has increased to 62%. How can enterprises be a part of that number? Can you offer some advice on how enterprises and their teams can choose the right technology for integrating AI in their applications?
A: There are lots of opportunities for enterprise companies to implement AI applications, and it comes down to their needs and audience. Does your business need content moderation? Object recognition? Curation? These are all things that AI can tackle today, and it’s easier than ever to get started.
Many platforms like Clarifai will offer specific models for recognizing industry-specific concepts like “dress” or “polka dots” or “pizza.” You can likely find a model that recognizes the concept you need to identify — and if you can’t, our Custom Training empowers you to create an AI model tailored to the needs of your business.
Q: In your opinion, what are the most important things enterprises and developers should consider when developing a mobile app with AI?
A: If you want to provide customized content for your users, AI can be a great medium for automatically and accurately sifting through millions, or even billions, of images and videos.
Keep in mind that the cloud can scale well and process large volumes of data, but isn’t well suited for streaming data – continual processing and low latency are key issues. If you want to implement augmented reality functionality, running on-premise, which offers results in a fraction of a second, can provide opportunity to predict in real time.
Clarifai’s iOS SDK may be a helpful resource for people looking to build their apps with AI solutions as well.
Q: Tell us about Clarifai’s AI solutions. What is Clarifai doing that no one else does?
A: Clarifai’s image recognition platform analyzes and categorizes more than 3 billion photos and videos a month. Our customers can use our General Model, which recognizes more than 11,000 concepts (including objects, themes, moods, and more), or they can use our Custom Training model to teach their systems to recognize the items and products unique to their brand.
Our specific solutions include:
- Organize & Curate
- Visual Search
- Recommendation & Discovery
- Customer Analytics
- Moderation & Security
Q: Earlier this year, Clarifai announced a company-wide rebrand. How has it been so far?
A: It’s been a wildly successful 2018! The visual rebrand spanned our logo to our website, to match our shift in focus toward enterprise customers. Our goal is to solve the real-world problems of enterprise customers with our unique AI solutions, and help them improve profits and deliver a better customer experience through content monitoring and moderation.
Fun fact: The idea behind our new logo is to tell the story of the duality between a neural network and the human brain.
Q: Where do you think is the market headed? What trends or emerging technologies do you think will shape the industry, and how is Clarifai meeting these?
A: We’re excited about new industries that are traditionally slow to innovate beginning to adopt the technology. Aviation and retail are two areas we’re excited about, given the potential for AI to provide customized image recognition solutions and results.
I like to view the ongoing AI revolution as analogous to putting a man on the moon. While that was a goal of NASA during the 1960s, the path to that goal resulted in huge technical and industrial innovation that catapulted U.S. dominance in technology and aerospace. Similarly, the opportunity that AI technology presents is greater than the sum of its parts – AI is helping us forge a new path ahead to create a better humanity.
Q: Are you brewing up any new offerings that your customers should be excited about?
A: Like our mission states, we want to “accelerate the progress of humanity with continually improving AI,” which means we’re always looking at how we can improve our platform, so you can expect more developments to come! Watch our blog for news at www.clarifai.com/blog.
About Clarifai
Headquartered in New York City, Clarifai is an independent artificial intelligence company that seeks to solve real-world problems for the enterprise through its powerful visual recognition technology. The company was founded in 2013 by Matt Zeiler, PhD Machine Learning. Leading brands such as West Elm, BuzzFeed, OpenTable, trivago, Vevo, 9GAG, StyleMePretty, and many more trust in Clarifai’s visual recognition technology and AI solutions to classify and predict more than three billion concepts in photos and videos every month.