172: Greybeards talk domain specific AI with Dr. Arun Subramaniyan, Founder & CEO, Articul8 AI

Keith and I attended AIFD7 a couple of weeks back and Articul8 AI presented at one session (see videos of their session here). Given all the press on LLMs and GenAI, there are only a few non-GenAI solutions in the market today. Articul8 is one of these and represents a different way of deploying AI for industry. Dr. Arun Subramaniyan, Founder and CEO of Articul8 (LinkedIn), discussed their approach on AI for industries at their session.

With all the press on GenAI, agentic AI and LLMs, it’s hard to remember that AI has had a long history in helping various verticals address their challenges. Articul8 AI was founded only 2 years ago, but already has significant footprints in a number of industry sectors, such as aerospace, telecom, (electrical) energy, etc. Articul8 AI is all about deploying domain specific models trained to focus on select industry challenges. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

Articul8 AI can operate on prem, in your VPC or in their own cloud . The solution is deployed on infrastructure sized to your organizations specific requirements and starts (processing) ingesting corporate data the moment it’s enabled. It can run on something as small as an 8GPU server to large clusters with many (1000s of) GPUs.

Articul8 doesn’t host or store any corporate data on this infrastructure, just metadata describing data and relationships between them. Arun said that within 24 hours, Articul8 AI has enough of an organizations knowledge map, what they call the shape of data, to process up to 95% of an organizations requests.

Their AIFD7 demo shows a sort of 3D visual of a knowledge map. And it’s interesting that every query or request changes the knowledge map in subtle ways.

For the industries it supports, Articul8 AI is typically embedded into “systems of record”. There are very few AI solutions today like this. perhaps coding agents for software development firms and recommendation engines for online retailers, but that’s about it.

For Articul8 AI to support a new domain or vertical, takes significant domain expertise and data. In some cases, they have partnered with industry associations to gain expertise and data. For those organizations that have contributed data or IP to support a new domain, Articul8 AI can share revenue from other organizations that adopt their solutions.

One can see the current verticals Articul8 AI supports. One item of interest is their cross domain models. They have one cross-domain model trained to interpret and understand tables/spreadsheets/”structured image data”, another to understand logs or time series data and a third focused on converting text to database queries. Most GenAI/LLMs struggle to understand tables and spreadsheet data well.

The other thing about tables and spreadsheets is that most corporations could not exist without them. By providing a cross domain table understanding model they have opened up vast troves of corp data which was just too inscrutable for LLM AI to understand and process before.

Finally, Artucul8 AI has two offerings currently available on AWS Marketplace one of which is a LLM evaluation tool and the other a network topology log analyzer tool. The LLM evaluator, when provided a prompt, will return which current LLM could handle that prompt best and is callable via API. The topology service can analyze time series logs from networking and other gear and show network topology from logs alone.

Dr. Arun Subramaniyan, Founder & CEO Articul8 AI

Arun Subramaniyan is the founder & CEO of Articul8, where he is building a domain-specific GenAI Platform. Previously, he led the Cloud & AI Strategy team at Intel where he was responsible for establishing and driving the overall AI strategy globally, and was focused on democratizing AI in a sustainable fashion.

Arun joined Intel from Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he led the Extreme-scale computing solution team spanning Machine Learning, Quantum Computing, High Performance Computing (HPC), Autonomous Vehicles, and Autonomous Computing. His team was responsible for developing solutions across all areas of HPC, quantum computing and large-scale machine learning applications, spanning a $1B+ portfolio, and he grew the businesses 2-3x over two years.

Arun’s primary areas of research focus are Bayesian methods, global optimization, probabilistic deep learning for large scale applications, and distributed computing. He is an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on Generative AI for Business Leaders. He enjoys working at the intersection of massively parallel computing and modeling large-scale systems.

Arun is a prolific researcher with a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Purdue University with 34 granted patents (60+ filed), 50+ international publications that have been cited more than 1600 times with a h-index of 16. He is also a recipient of the Hull Award from GE, which honors technologists for their outstanding technical impact.