Who is Brent Oster?
I am a Canadian farm boy that dreamed of traveling to distant places and having epic adventures. I did a degree in aerospace engineering at U of Toronto, flew jets in the RCAF, co-founded Bioware at age 24, and worked in the tech industry for 30 years with companies like Electronic Arts, Autodesk, Lucasfilm, and NVIDIA, mostly living in California.
What’s the story behind ORBAI?
I worked at NVIDIA 2014-2018 as a Solution Architect in Deep Learning with the FANG companies and others, and consistently found that what we call AI today is so narrow and difficult to train that it is hard to solve real-world problems with it. I knew that there were other technologies like we are using out there, but that there would be an R&D investment required to get them up to speed. That was what we have done to date since incorporating in 2018.
What was the most difficult part of your experience in the early beginnings?
Getting hit with a divorce just as I started ORBAI, being thrown out of my home by some vicious attorneys, and having the funds I had saved to seed the company depleted fighting them, and even having to leave the country and live with my fiancée oversees to escape constant harassment by these attorneys and their associates.
What are you most proud of regarding your business?
Building a prototype legal AI that helped me research, compose, and file a RICO (18 USC 1961) lawsuit in 2021 against those attorneys and their conspirators for crimes of Fraud, Extortion, and Money Laundering in a pattern of Racketeering. We code-named the AI Justine Falcon, and did outreach on her Facebook page to find other victims and bring FBI prosecution against this crime-ring: https://www.facebook.com/JustineFalconLegalAI
What is your vision for the future of ORBAI?
I want to build artificial intelligence that actually can be useful in the real-world – AI that can really talk to us conversationally, and understand what we want from it and what we want it to do. AI that has memory, cognition, planning, and the ability to think and predict. Then I want to put it to work to provide professional services, learning to be on par with the best medical, legal, education, and financial professionals in the developed world, and spreading those services globally, so that everyone can have quality medical advice, legal representation, 1-1 education, and prosper financially. While living in Honduras with my wife, I have seen how these are lacking in so many places- her nieces and nephews had no teachers during COVID, having my wife (a clinical psychologist) be the neighborhood nurse and first aid go-to-person. I have also been approached by hundreds of people wanting Justine Falcon to help them fight really awful injustices done to them – property taken, children taken, lives taken, all without any due process of law because nobody thought they deserved it or would know better. The world needs heroes to fix these problems, cause it is really broken. Only AI can scale and do that worldwide, and the characters are a great focus.
What’s your advice for the businesses that are trying to adapt to this economic climate?
Cut back operations and survive if you have to. We shut ORBAI down into deep-freeze in Dec 2019, and only a few of us worked on R&D and patents, with no pay and with minimal expenses, but we survived, and started up again in 2021 by raising some money, getting some patents based on our R&D, and ramping up a fundraising campaign on StartEngine.
Please name a few technologies which have the greatest impact on your business.
NVIDIA GPUs – we train and evolve 100s of neural nets for 100s of generations to get the one golden neural net that does vision processing or speech, so we need enormous amounts of computing power.
What books do you have on your nightstand?
When Brains Dream – Antonio Zadra & Robert Stickgold – amazing reference for how dreaming shapes our memories, cognition, and planning Connectome – Sebastian Seung SuperIntelligence – Nick Bostrom Calvin and Hobbes – Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons.
Because of the current economic climate our publication has started a series of discussions with professional individuals meant to engage our readers with relevant companies and their representatives in order to discuss their involvement, what challenges they have had in the past and what they are looking forward to in the future. This sequence aims to present a series of experiences, recent developments, changes and downsides in terms of their business areas, as well as their goals, values, career history, the high-impact success outcomes and achievements.
