Some Harvard students made news on Wednesday when they added facial recognition to a pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses. The do-it-yourself project is the newest story to make people worry about their privacy when it comes to technology that is everywhere. As more and more people have cams, the problem has become more important.
How we connect is also very important to this conversation. The need for a remote computer raises its own security and privacy issues. When Amazon, Ring’s parent company, and the police get involved, things get even worse.
Plumerai has been around since 2017 and its main selling point is technology that improves AI processing on devices. The London-based company has come up with a way to do things like finding people and recognising known faces without having to send data to a remote server.
Tony Fadell puts money into people early on. The person who made the iPod says that problems he had as a co-founder of Nest made him decide to back the company.
He tells TechCrunch, “We’d have to worry so much about just the costs of storage and bandwidth.” “Full frames are being taken.” We’re recording a lot of things, but not on camera. This weighed on me all the time.
Companies have to spend more money on computers, and most of the time, they pass that cost on to the customer. Fadell says that the fact that Ring recently decided to double the cost of its professional 24/7 tracking is a key sign.
Plumerai focusses on tiny AI that is trained on models that are much smaller than the big, black boxes that systems like ChatGPT are built on. This type of large language model (LLM) depends on very large data sets that are hard to understand and need a lot of computing power for a small consumer electronics device.
Fadell says that the switch to smaller models is like when he worked on the iPod.
“We could only make the iPhone because we started out small with the iPod.” “Things can get bigger, but not smaller,” he says. “So we began very small and built the iPhone from there.” Don’t forget that Microsoft tried to make Windows Mobile for phones. It never worked when they took this big thing. It’s important to begin small and then grow.
Plumerai CEO Roeland Nusselder tells TechCrunch, “We’ve been working on this for a very long time.” “Our tiny AI is more accurate and runs on cheaper, lower-power chips than anything else out there, especially in the market for smart home cameras,” the company said.
The Chamberlain Group is one of the people who believes in the new business. The Illinois company is the parent company of brands like myQ and LiftMaster. It will start with an outdoor camera and add Plumerai’s technology to its own smart cameras.
“All of the AI features come from Plumerai and run on the camera itself,” Nusselder says. “I see Chamberlain as a company that isn’t Big Tech but can do great things with small AI.”
Plumerai hasn’t said how many people work for it, but it’s probably a lot less than the teams that run Ring and Nest. Since it is a fairly small company, it has been focussing on a small part of the market so far. That’s not something brands can do when they’re part of big companies like Amazon and Google.
Though Fadell has been a manager at some of the biggest tech companies in the world, his main goal now is to help startups like Plumerai.
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He says, “Focus is the key.” When the right people with the right skills are on a small team (tens or fiftys), they can really get things done. I like being on the cutting edge of technologies that change things. Small groups with good ideas.
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