Artificial-Intelligence Startup MetaMind’s Bright Idea: Give Its Software Away

It may not seem like it, but artificial intelligence is getting closer to making the leap from the laboratory to the marketplace. For years, the big companies at work on A.I. have mostly kept their research to themselves, occasionally going public with a stunt to hint at their progress. IBM famously trained its Watson system to beat Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings, Microsoft showed off a version of Skype that could translate a multilingual conversation in real time, and Google taught a network of 16,000 computers to identify a cat. All were important, if incremental, efforts to develop computer networks that can simulate the brain’s capacity for learning—though not on the level of movie menaces such as HAL or Skynet.

Richard Socher is trying to bring A.I. tools to a larger audience. A Stanford Ph.D., Socher in 2009 helped create ImageNet, a set of benchmarks that A.I. researchers use to compare their image-recognition software in an annual online competition. While finishing his doctorate this summer, Socher and Sven Strohband, the chief technology officer at venture fund Khosla Ventures, co-founded MetaMind, a startup that has created a hybrid of text- and photo-recognition software. The software can teach itself to remember words and images so that it can analyze new data, from medical scans to 10-Q filings. A basic version is available free online, but the company charges clients to customize it, says Strohband, MetaMind’s chief executive officer.