Even the best artificial intelligence systems don’t always reflect what humans actually want—or need. Rebecca Gorman has made it her mission to better align these two things or rather, to better align A.I. with what humans are actually asking it to do.
Her startup, aptly named Aligned AI, is the culmination of years of research into how to make the underpinnings of A.I. safer and more ethical, including research she conducted at the University of Oxford. She was living in San Francisco when she met a fellow researcher, Stuart Armstrong, who was simultaneously working on ways we could prevent or at least mitigate existential risk from A.I., when Aligned AI was hatched.
“He was giving [a talk] on a controversial subject dear to both our hearts: that A.I. will inaccurately deduce what a human wants if all it has to go on is data about a human’s behavior,” says Gorman. She says that meeting led to “extensive research collaboration, and ultimately founding this company to research, develop, and distribute technology for aligning artificial intelligence with human values.”
Two years in, Gorman and her team are building out an alternative to OpenAI. It’s a model that learns “concepts that correspond to ours,” says Gorman (the “ours” refers to human beings). Basically, the entrepreneur and her cofounder are trying to develop technology that has more safety guardrails in place, which she believes will reduce the cost and time involved with deploying A.I. models, in addition to cutting down on bad or biased information.
“At this very moment, we have more inbound sales inquiries than we can service,” says Gorman. “[It’s] a good problem to have.”
Fun fact: Gorman learned to program at age 8 and made her “first A.I.” 20 years ago.
The Fortune Founders Forum is a community of entrepreneurs chosen by Fortune’s editorial team to participate at the annual Brainstorm Tech conference, which took place in Deer Valley, Utah, in July. Our inaugural cohort was selected based on a variety of factors, including the potential impact of their companies, and reflected a diversity of geographies, sectors, and demographics.
