Institute of AI

Despite huge developments in materials science and metallurgy, today’s electric motors, whether they’re tiny or enormous, share that same exact basic design.  And with that design come limitations.  One of the biggest limitations is the efficiency curve. Every electric motor has a single ideal rotational speed where efficiency is at its peak.  It’s at that speed that the motor puts out the most torque for the energy invested. Spin it faster or slower, and the power-to-energy-invested ratio begins to drop off.  When this drop-off takes place, not only is energy lost to inefficiency but resistance and heat increase as well.  With added heat comes additional wear and tear and a shortened service life.  Engineers have been living with this limitation from the very beginning of the story of the electric motor.  They’ve invented transmissions to minimize the effects, but in the end, more add-ons only complicated the mechanism, adding yet more inefficiency to...

  Murf Topping our list of best AI tools for business is the text speech generator Murf, which is one of the most popular and impressive AI voice generators on the market. Murf enables anyone to convert text to speech, voice-overs, and dictations, and it is used by a wide range of professionals like product developers, podcasters, educators, and business leaders.  Murf offers a lot of customization options to help you create the best natural-sounding voices. It has a variety of voices and dialects that you can choose from, as well as an easy-to-use interface. The text to speech generator provides users with a comprehensive AI voice-over studio that includes a built-in video editor, which enables you to create a video with voiceover. There are over 100 AI voices from 15 languages, and you can select preferences such as Speaker, Accents/Voice Styles, and Tone or Purpose.  Another top feature offered by Murf is the voice changer, which allows you to record without using your...

  Nuro Headquarters:  Mountain View Founders : Jiajun Zhu (CEO), Dave Ferguson Funding:  $1.03 billion Valuation:  $2.7 billion After working for more than five years each on Google’s self-driving project, Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu were done trying to ferry people around in autonomous vehicles. So, they ditched humans for local goods. Nuro’s driverless delivery vehicles have completed thousands of trips to shoppers through a partnership with Kroger in Texas. Shifting from people to pasta and Poptarts eliminates safety and technical constraints. “You can drive more conservatively because you don’t have someone inside the vehicle that’s getting frustrated,” Ferguson says.

  Uptake Headquarters:  Chicago Founders : Brad Keywell Funding:  $258 million Valuation:  $2.3 billion, via Pitchbook Uptake CEO Brad Keywell says his company is in the business of making sure things work, “whether it’s the U.S. Army’s Bradley Fighting Vehicle, or the components that make up Rolls-Royce’s fleet of market-leading engines.” It’s brought in more than 100 industrial customers on its way to a $2.3 billion valuation. With a huge database of machine failures at its disposal, the five-year-old company leverages artificial intelligence to analyze how its customers’ machines can run better and avoid these failures. “There is no more guesswork or operating blindly involved,” says Keywell, who cofounded Groupon before founding Uptake.

  Dataminr Headquarters:  New York City Founders : Ted Bailey (CEO) Funding:  $577 million  Valuation:  $1.59 billion, via Pitchbook Dataminr ingests public internet data, like social media posts, and uses deep learning, natural language processing, and advanced statistical modeling to send users tailored alerts. The company has more than 500 clients paying its subscription fees, including Amazon, CNN, and The United Nations, which uses the system to find early signs of potential humanitarian crises around the world.

  Anduril Industries   Headquarters:  Irvine, CA Founders : Palmer Luckey, Brian Schimpf (CEO), Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm, Joe Chen Funding:  $180 million Valuation:  Just under $1 billion Former Oculus cofounder Palmer Luckey is back after his dramatic exit from Facebook (he  has hinted  that the company fired him from the virtual reality unit for his political views,  which it denies ) with a defense technology startup called Anduril Industries, founded in 2017. The company makes a threat-detection system, using data from sensors mounted on towers, drones, and vehicles to create a real-time, 3D model of an area. It has contracts with the  Marine Corps  and  UK’s Royal Navy , as well as with Customs and Border Protection for what has been described as a  controversial “virtual border wall.”  Following  a report  that it became a unicorn after a recent fundraise, the company confirmed to  Forbes  that i...