Clarifai's AI Can Go Toe-to-Toe With Those of Google, IBM and Microsoft

Clarifai’s image-recognition AI can go toe-to-toe with those of Google, IBM and Microsoft. Now the startup must fight to stay competitive

- Aaron Tilley

In the summer of 2013, as Matthew Zeiler was close to finishing a PhD in Artificial Intelligence (AI) at New York University, he seemed to have every tech giant in the palm of his hand. Zeiler had left an internship with a Google AI group a few weeks earlier, when he got a call from an unknown number while he was running along the Hudson River. It was Alan Eustace, then a senior vice president of engineering at Google, who had heard about Zeiler’s AI chops. Eustace wanted Zeiler to join permanently. To entice him, Eustace told him he would make an offer that was among the highest Google had ever made to a new graduate, Zeiler recalls. Zeiler won’t say how much he was offered, and Google declined to comment. But offers for top recruits with specific expertise can add up to several millions of dollars over four years, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Regardless, Google’s offer kicked offa bidding war for Zeiler and his knowhow in deep learning, the vaunted branch of AI that’s driving major breakthroughs in computing.

Within days, Zeiler received a bigger offer from Microsoft, which Google promptly matched. Apple also wanted to chat, and when Zeiler flew out to Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg personally sought to persuade him to join a new AI research group at Facebook. Zeiler respectfully turned them all down, deciding instead to start a company with an audacious goal: To compete with the giants that were courting him. “It was a crazy period,” Zeiler remembers. “I had this low-risk opportunity of joining a tech giant versus doing my own startup.” Zeiler says he knew that some of his algorithms worked better than Google’s on certain AI problems. “I knew I had to follow my gut,” he says.