British-Canadian computer scientist, Geoffrey Hinton, who is known as the ‘Godfather of AI’ has joined the advisory board of robotics startup, Vayu Robotics. Hinton, who worked part-time with Google Brain as a VP and Engineering Fellow for over a decade quit the tech giant early in May, so that he can freely speak about the dangers of the fast-paced developments in AI.
Hinton is seen as a pioneer in deep learning, which is currently the dominant branch of artificial intelligence due to his seminal work around neural networks.
Vayu Robotics co-founder and CTO, Nitish Srivastava was a doctoral student of Hinton’s at the University of Toronto and have stayed close since which motivated him to make the jump.
“Since leaving Google, I have received many requests to join the advisory boards of start-ups and, until now, I have declined them all,” said Dr. Hinton. “I have decided to join the advisory board of Vayu Robotics as I see great potential in their use of AI for robotics utilizing a co-engineered approach with machine learning and vision sensors. I am looking forward to once again working with Nitish Srivastava and guiding the Vayu team’s growth. I believe that Vayu’s technology will enable safe and eco-friendly solutions with far fewer ethical problems than many other AI applications.”
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The Palo Alto-based startup claims to be building “high-quality, low-cost robotics solutions.” Just last week, the AI company announced they had closed $12.7 million in seed financing led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Lockheed Martin and ReMY Investors, among others.
Company CEO, Anand Gopalan noted in a statement then, “Vayu is poised to disrupt the market by creating the lowest-cost ownership for robots with the best operational economics.” Vayu said it would use the funding to scale product development that use low-cost sensing technology instead of lidar. The products aim to find usage across markets, like last-mile delivery, factory automation and automotive.
Gopalan is the former CEO of one of the biggest lidar technology designer, Velodyne.
