Women-led startups key to bringing diversity to AI

The presence of women-led AI startups is important because bringing diverse perspectives to problem solving can be highly beneficial for the industry as a whole, and because it is particularly important to bring diverse perspectives to the training of foundation models in AI.

Speaking on the ‘CEO & Founders Panel: Women-led generative AI startups reimagining media & entertainment’ at IBC, Soyoung Lee, Co-Founder of AI startup Twelve Labs, said that diversity of perspective and experience is incredibly important. Single perspectives to solve problems are limiting. Twelve Labs has a female lead product manager and lead engineer. Each had the best unique perspective for those roles, she said.

Lee said that it was also important to have an organisation geared to equal opportunities while having the best people for each role.

Also on the panel, Jhanvi Shriram, CEO of startup Krikey, said her company was a customer-first organisation with a diverse customer base. It was important to reflect that back, so having a diverse team is important.

Shanvi’s sister and company CTO Ketaki Shriram said it was also important to the training of AI models that companies had a diverse employee base in order to correct biases that could exist.

For women in tech, Ketaki also said it was important to take part in resource groups and build a strong peer network.

Jhanvi added that more women are entering the industry and there is an opportunity to build that network as never before.

Lee stressed that women need to be bold and not discouraged by setbacks. She recalled the first NAB Show she had attended when a visitor asked to talk to her manager after she performed a demo. It was important to be aware of your own value, she said.

Use cases

Jhanvi said that Krikey was created to power people to create talking 3D avatars.

To create 3D animation today is complex with a big barrier to entry, she said. With Krikey’s tool, a whole raft of people can create avatars, democratising the process.

Ketaki said that the tool would also support people already working in 3D animation and free them up to undertake core creative tasks.

According to Jhanvi, Krikey has already been approached by large studios looking to create 3D animation from live footage for gameplay applications. It also has a voice AI tool to localise content in multiple languages.

She said that many different types of customer were now using the Krikey technology, including universities and game studios. For game studios, the AI-powered tool enabled one company to produce animated characters vastly more efficiently than had previously been the case.

Taking to the stage, Lee explained that Twelve Labs’ technology is designed to enable efficient search of archive data to create new content.

She said that accessing unstructured data is complex and has hitherto involved a lot of time-consuming tagging. Humans understand content holistically without going through a list of object tags. A foundational model can describe any moment of content and identify a scene across an entire catalogue, she said.

According to Lee, one customer undertook a case study where it was able to cut down the time to create sports content highlights with AI understanding content and people using human language to find exact moments in the catalogue.

She said this saved time and enabled people to focus again on creative tasks. People can now also access content they did not know existed, but which had been sitting in their catalogue undiscovered.

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