Cluep CEO Karan Walia Shares How AI Is Shaping Our World

We are in the middle of an AI revolution — one that’s transforming computers into intelligent machines that drive our cars, spot diseases, and automatically assemble playlists of music we love. With recent advancements in machine learning, the age of AI is now finally upon us; in many ways, it's engulfing us. According to Cluep CEO Karan Walia, “We're getting closer and closer to AI systems reaching human capabilities. Take artificial neural networks for instance, they've been around since the 1940s but gradual improvements like the introduction of backpropagation, gradient descent and access to more and cheaper computation, helped enable projects like self-driving cars, auto complete when composing emails and dozens of other features now touching the lives of billions of people.”

Karan is not just the brains behind one of the leading AI mobile advertising company in Canada, but a hardcore consumer of the technology himself. Talking about the applications of AI, Karan shares, “One of my favourite examples is the convolutional neural network in Tesla’s Autopilot. It mimics your biological visual system and is capable of identifying objects on the road as good as a human while driving you around. I helped write a similar neural network at Cluep to identify products in the images you publicly share on social media. Let's say you take a picture with your friends and you're wearing Adidas running shoes, our CNN is able to recognize the brand and type of shoe you're wearing and then target you with an ad from Nike. I know it’s not as sexy as the neural network in your Tesla car that can drive you around but still quite powerful for brands looking to engage with you based on what you're interested in.”

Sharing real life examples of some of the ways AI is already making an impact, Karan says, “In manufacturing, we’re starting to see predictive maintenance on factory equipment in a manufacturing facility. In insurance, automation of consumer car insurance filing claims. In financial services, automated customer interactions with retail banking chatbots in natural language. Entrepreneurs and companies can now build systems of intelligence that use AI to enable business process transformation.” 

Karan believes that within the next two decades we will be able to mimic the brain using computer software and hardware. According to him, “Many of the most ground-breaking ideas in history have been a result of boiling things down to the first principles and then substituting a more effective solution for one of the key parts. Artificial intelligence i.e., natural language understanding, computer vision and speech recognition is the new shiny tool in our toolbox to help us develop more effective solutions. I believe it’s going to end up becoming the most important tool of the next century. AI is going to make technology fade into the background and weave itself into the fabric of everyday life until it’s indistinguishable,” he concludes.