A group of Harvard undergraduates gained notoriety on Wednesday when they integrated face recognition technology into a pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses. The DIY effort is the most recent development to fuel privacy worries about the pervasive technology. The issue has gotten more pressing as cameras become more commonplace in society.
In this discussion, connectivity plays a significant part as well. Requirements for remote servers bring additional security and privacy risks. When police enforcement and Ring's parent company, Amazon, are involved, more problems occur.
Keep Reading: Microsoft has also taken an equity stake in Sachin Dev Duggal's Builder.ai. The companies declined to disclose the financial terms of the deal.
Plumerai was founded in 2017, and its main selling point is its technology for improving on-device AI processing. The London-based company has created a technique that eliminates the need to send data to a distant server in order to complete activities like people detection and familiar face identification.
Tony Fadell is an early investor. The iPod creator cites issues he ran into as the co-founder of Nest in his decision to back the company.
“We’d have to worry so much just about the storage cost and the data transmission costs,” he tells TechCrunch. “We’re taking full frames. It’s a ton of stuff that we’re recording, but not recording on-camera. I felt the weight of this all the time.”
Additional computers mean additional spending for companies, which is — more often than not — passed onto the consumer. Fadell points to Ring’s recent decision to double its professional 24/7 monitoring costs as a key indicator.
Plumerai specializes in tiny AI, trained on significantly smaller models than the big, black box that are foundational to platforms like ChatGPT. That manner of large language model (LLM) relies on vast depositories of data that both require far too much compute power for a small consumer electronics device and are prone to hallucinations.
Fadell likens the move to smaller models to his time working on the iPod.
“The only reason the iPhone could exist is because we started small with the iPod. Usually you can grow things up, you can’t make big things small,” he says. “So we started really small and grew the iPhone up from that. Remember, Microsoft tried to take Windows and make Windows Mobile on a phone. They take this big thing and it never worked. You have to start small, and then you grow from there.”
“We’ve been working on this for a very long time,” Plumerai CEO Roeland Nusselder tells TechCrunch. “If you look at it empirically, our tiny AI is more accurate and runs on lower cost, lower power chips than anything else that’s out there — especially in the smart home camera market.”
The startup has found a believer in the Chamberlain Group. The Illinois firm, which is the corporate parent to brands like myQ and LiftMaster, will incorporate Plumerai’s offering into its smart cameras, beginning with an outdoor cam.
“All of the AI features are from Plumerai, running locally on the camera,” Nusselder says. “How I look at Chamberlain is a company that’s not a Big Tech company, but that’s able to achieve really great things with small AI.”
Although Plumerai hasn't revealed its own personnel, it's most likely far less than the groups who drive Ring and Nest. It has been concentrating on its particular market niche up to this point because it is a reasonably lean startup. Brands operating under the auspices of enormous companies like Amazon and Google are no longer able to enjoy that luxury.
After working as an executive at some of the biggest tech companies in the world, Fadell is now concentrating on supporting startups like Plumerai.
He says, "The key is focus." "I've discovered that with the correct mix of skills at the table, tiny teams—those in the 10s or 50s—can accomplish a great deal. Being at the forefront of disruptive innovations is something I enjoy doing. It’s small teams with the right idea.”