Founded by MIT graduates Karthik Dinakar and Birago Jones, Pienso is a platform that allows non-specialists to build machine-learning models to address societal issues. The idea stemmed from their 2010 study at MIT’s Media Lab, where they developed a content moderation tool for companies like Twitter and YouTube. The innovation got companies excited and the pair were invited to demonstrate their problem-solving model at a White House cyberbullying summit. As they prepared, they found flaws in the machine-learning model triggered by blind spots in youth slang and indirect language. This led them to create point-and-click tools designed for non-experts to manage language data, which would later form the foundation of Pienso.
Pienso uses machine-learning tools to build large language models capable of detecting disinformation, weapons sales, and human trafficking, without requiring coding knowledge. These tools have been used to hone models to handle various societal issues like SkyUK’s customers’ common challenges. Through Pienso, SkyUK’s customer success team was able to process over five hundred thousand customer calls a day, reducing call times and saving more than £7 million. Pienso’s tools were also used to help the US government understand Covid-19 by mining research articles about coronaviruses, contributing to critical drug supply chains.
The Pienso platform is versatile, capable of running on internal servers and cloud facilities. It provides an alternative to organizations that don’t want to give away their data using services provided by other AI companies. Pienso’s interface is described as a “web apps’ assembly, similar to an Adobe Photoshop for large language models.” Users can import and refine data, as well as build machine-learning models in under half an hour, without writing a single line of code.
Dinakar and Jones believe that the most effective AI models are developed by the individuals who best understand the problems. They argue for this approach instead of the standard democratizing AI method. Early in 2022, Pienso announced its partnership with GraphCore. The association aims to lower barriers to leveraging AI by reducing latency, making the platform faster and more responsive. The founders predict a future where the people building these models are those who comprehend the data best, resulting in more effective AI solutions.
