You have heard so much about artificial intelligence (shot) that you would understand if you stopped reading right here, because we bring you another expert on the subject. But give it a try, he’s featured on the future leaders list and he’s wearing a Braun analog watch. That is to say, it lets itself be watched by technology, but it is not wearing it.
Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria (Algorta, 1981) is the second of three siblings. His father, a technical mining engineer; his mother, teacher. It is no extravagance for a teenager to be expelled from high school; That 20 years later Josu María Zabaleta, the Claretian friar who threw him out, apologized to him in a newspaper that half of Bilbao reads is something else. “I am not proud at all. He was expelled for those unusual attitudes that a young man with concerns has and that educators sometimes do not know how to value, ”he wrote to the Deia newspaper. “I am hyperactive,” Xabi apologizes, and does not want to dwell on the matter further: “My mother still wears it regularly.”
In 2012 he founded Sherpa.ai, a leading company in artificial intelligence services made in Bilbao that in 2020 the American magazine Datamation included among the 10 most relevant AI companies along with Google, Amazon, IBM or Microsoft. Made in Bilbao is vindicated with three clocks on the wall that mark the time of San Francisco – where they have a headquarters -, New York – there it has investors and collaborators – and Erandio, the Biscayan town of 24,000 inhabitants of which Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria it does not want to move its headquarters.
You have lost count of the companies you have created. Calculate between six and eight. After the episode of the institute, he studied the electronic branch of Industrial Engineering and then a doctorate in Natural Language Processing that did not end to found Anboto, his first start-up, from where “the Siri in Spanish” came out that was installed in the telephones of Samsung. That could be the embryo of Sherpa.aiOr perhaps blessed genetics are more to blame for the inventions and weird interactions. His great-grandfather had contacts with Leonardo Torres Quevedo, inventor of airships and ferries, and also of the telekino, the ancestor of the remote control. His grandfather patented a brick machine, and his father, an engineer and “a linguistic genius”, has created “a kind of Esperanto”. In the same polygon where it is Sherpa.ai his father set up a bookstore and hired a young assistant, Joseba Irazu, whom we all later met by his literary pseudonym: Bernardo Atxaga. In the sixties, the petrochemical company Dow Chemical operated in this area. On the day of the week that waste was disposed of, a siren system warned neighbors not to leave the house. Then a cloud of unknown gases was released, splitting tree branches in half and disintegrating the women’s silk stockings. In that dystopian scenario, we are now working with artificial intelligence. At parking expect a bright red Lexus, popular with Silicon Valley start-up bosses.
Sherpa.ai seems to have achieved the squaring of the circle. Make data privacy and artificial intelligence compatible. Algorithms are trained with data. Uribe-Etxebarria explains what “the key” of the question is: “I am not going to give you my data, but your prediction algorithm will be able to learn from them without the need for me to pass them on to you. For example, if an algorithm has to be trained to diagnose a disease and we need patient data, with our platform it will be possible to learn from that data without leaving the hospital ”. Sherpa.ai is building the first commercial platform that allows learning from different databases without having to share information. It is a service that they will provide to other companies because, says Xavi, it is not “realistic” to think that each company will have experts in artificial intelligence.
“With the privacy boom we have all the wind in our favor, we have been working on the Privacy Preserving platform for years. In Europe there is no commercial platform that allows us to learn from data that is not shared ”, he assures.
In the ethical debate, he is on the side of those who do not want a feral artificial intelligence. “I think privacy should escalate to human rights,” he says. Together with the neurobiologist Rafa Yuste, ideologist of the BRAIN project (whose acronym in English could be translated as “brain research through the acceleration of innovative neurotechnologies”), they promote the technocratic oath, inspired by the Hippocratic of doctors, which defines the commandments ethics of those who work with neurotechnologies and data analysis. Its opening lines read: “My knowledge will not be used to harm people; (…) I will seek consent and respect the will of those who have trusted me; (…) I will not violate the privacy of confidential information of individuals; I will maximize the transparency of the algorithms that I generate and use ”.
In the ambition of a more ethical artificial intelligence, Sherpa.ai is at the level of the greatest. In 2019 it was included in the Fortune AI 100 list as one of the 100 most innovative companies in the world in this field, and in 2018 and 2019 Xabi appeared in the Choiseul 100 list, where the leaders of the future under 42 years old are announced.
He shows his might with the classic Silicon Valley codes: raising millions in funding rounds – in the last one, $ 8.5 million – and signings stars like Tom Gruber, creator of Siri, and Joanna Hoffman, former director of marketing of Apple. , whom he has already brought to the Algorta parties. He also likes to say that when he goes to the United States, he stays in the apartment in New York or in the Palm Beach house of John Sculley, former CEO of Apple.
But the gang is still the gang. And Uribe-Etxebarria has two, the fronton one and the rugby one. They are the ones who see him suffer when they come badly. “The moments that make me happy are all analog, but technology helps me, for example, to organize a dinner at the txoko or to save time to be free and go out to the fronton to see who is out there – here you do not have to meet – to go out to party … street: ‘Formal, ehhh! ”.
– Do you always accept all cookies?
“I’m trying to say no to everyone, but surely something eludes me.”
“What data would you never share?”
“None if I could, but I don’t think it’s possible.”
“And that analog clock?”
—The greatest security is not to share data.
Out in the parkingSomebody pulls out the red Lexus at top speed
“Oh, it’s not yours?”
-Own? -Serie-. I don’t have a car, I spent 16 years with my Ford Focus and it died in 2020.
#man #Bilbao #privacy #artificial #intelligence #compatible