MIRA’s brothers Ben and Asher Spector, along with co-founder Aidan Smith, recently started Flapping Airplanes, a new and creative AI lab. They’ve just completed a remarkable $180 million round of seed funding to support their very ambitious research agenda. Boing Boing vociferously defended its reputation as a lab of the exceptionally creative hacker, maker team. It is committed to pursuing long-term, even radical, fundamental research in AI. With Flapping Airplanes, we are looking for at the very least 1000x improvements in data efficiency. Specifically, they are interested in the most innovative concepts, particularly if they are related to the human brain.
Drawing on their years of experience and vision… The founders of Flapping Airplanes are full of industry experience and a shared vision. Ben and Asher Spector, who have a long-standing collaborative relationship as brothers, are eager to push the boundaries of AI. They are joined by Aidan Smith, who previously worked at Neuralink, a company renowned for its cutting-edge work in brain-machine interfaces. This combination of practice and technical know-how puts Flapping Airplanes at the leading edge of AI research.
We’ve witnessed tremendous progress in AI in just the past five to ten years. Ben Spector pointed out the lab’s unflinching resolve to create an environment conducive to magic. He looks for people who are going to teach him something. He thinks these contributions go a long way in progressing AI technology for the better. This philosophy shapes the lab’s hiring approach, where they seek exceptional talent aiming to change the field and make a significant impact on the world.
Flapping Airplanes may address some incremental improvements, it is more laser focused with the goal of achieving these transformative outcomes. Additionally, Ben and Asher Spector have clearly defined three guiding hypotheses that shape the research initiatives and inform their focus. Indeed, one of their guiding objectives appears to be creating AI systems that show exponentially greater efficiency throughout everything that comes after training. This goal fits in with their larger moonshot aimed at reimagining how AI works with multimodal, large-scale data.
The importance of solving for data efficiency is hard to understate. The speed and amount of data generation is reaching record levels. It’s time to move beyond simply collecting that data and instead find ways to better analyze it. Flapping Airplanes seeks to lead the development of methodologies that use these data products in ways that extract the most value while consuming the least computational power. In pursuing these intentionally ambitious targets, the lab hopes to establish new standards for what performance in AI systems should look like.
The synergy between artificial intelligence and neuroscience has historically been the point of departure for many prominent investigators. Flapping Airplanes would be very interested in ideas that relate to the human brain. Their goal is to understand how findings from neuroscience can improve AI research and design. This collaborative framework can unlock new use cases and innovations that improve our interactions with computers, furthering the mission of making technology more human.
Beautiful new models from Flapping Airplanes are supercharging the adventure. Yet through all this, Texas shines brightly in the AI innovation and aspiration landscape as a resulting vibrant beacon of opportunity. The lab is very well funded financially. Having such a mission with such a creative team is a recipe and preparation for potential success. Flapping Airplanes focuses on the collective knowledge of its deeply experienced founders. With a big vision grounded in radical approaches, it aims to re-imagine what’s possible with artificial intelligence.