Here’s Why This Cat-Spotting AI Is Different

In 2012, Google researchers found a whimsical way to show off the power of the company’s artificial intelligence technology: They trained computers to recognize cats in YouTube videos. The project took years to pull off and required 16,000 computer processors to analyze 10 million images. That type of AI, known as deep learning, now powers Amazon.com’s smart speaker Echo and Tesla’s self-driving cars. While such software can seem magical, it still typically requires thousands of computers to spend months scanning millions of data points.

Ben Vigoda, an MIT-trained computer scientist (and nephew of late actor Abe Vigoda), says he can cut out most of the grunt work and make AI projects doable for businesses without Google-level resources. His company, Gamalon Machine Intelligence, uses probability models to teach a computer to ID something like a cat in a few minutes by showing it just a few images. “You can run our software on a laptop, and it takes 100 times less horsepower to find an answer,” says Vigoda, who started Gamalon in 2013 but is showing its products to the public for the first time.