Laplace Intelligence red-teams robots and self-driving cars in simulation
Stress-testing physical AI before it ships, from researchers whose method made the cover of Nature.
Ann Arbor startup Laplace Intelligence, founded a year ago by Howie Sun and his former University of Michigan PhD adviser Henry Liu, builds high-fidelity simulations reconstructed from the real world plus an AI agent that hunts for failure points in robots and autonomous vehicles. Their 2023 paper on the approach was a Nature cover story. The company says it already earns revenue, mostly from autonomous driving customers such as trucking firm Bot Auto and a major Japanese carmaker, and is running a smart-city traffic pilot in San Jose with Nvidia and T-Mobile.
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Laplace's demon
After exploring Laplace Intelligence red-teams robots and self-driving cars before they hit the real world, the thought experiment the company is named for is Laplace's demon.
Pierre-Simon Laplace's 1814 statement of determinism: someone who knew the position and momentum of every particle could calculate the past and future.
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