Computer programmer William Tunstall-Pedoe helped create Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa.
British AI entrepreneur William Tunstall-Pedoe has always been “motivated by impact”.
He started pushing the boundaries on what’s possible with machines as a 13-year-old schoolboy, while Tunstall-Pedoe secretly helped create and launch Amazon’s (AMZN) Alexa over a decade ago. In between, his anagram technology was used by author Dan Brown for the Da Vinci Code and he even identified the most boring date in history.
The first keyboard seeds were sown at Dundee High School in Scotland where he was able to venture to the technical college next door before classes and during breaks to write computer software on its mainframe.
There were financial rewards, too. His computer science teacher, Michael Ryan, had a software business which sold by mail order. However there was no taking advantage of the pupils, says Tunstall-Pedoe, with very generous royalties and a decent income on offer.
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“I kind of very arrogantly set out to try and solve this problem of using language to control machines,” he tells Yahoo Finance UK, “to automatically answer questions, change the user experience you have when you interact with search engines, when you interact with computer software, and kind of invented some technology to tackle that.”
It is 20 years since he started his search and voice recognition company True Knowledge, later called Evi Technologies. Tunstall-Pedoe charts the company as a “10-year adventure”, seven as a venture-backed independent start-up before being sold to Amazon in 2012 for a reported £21m and its CEO staying on for over three years.
“When we launched, we were trying to solve the problem of basically using computers by speaking to them or with language,” he recalls.
“When you look at science fiction I watched as a child, Star Trek or Blake’s 7, all the computers you just have a chat to. It understands you and is the most natural interface. This is how we interact with people.
The Britsh compuer scientist sold his voice assistant start-up to Amazon in 2012. ·fabioderby via Getty Images
“But when you used a computer back then, you select from a menu, click a button or you guess keywords and browse links that come back from the keyword search. So we were tackling the problem of how to use language to interact with machines, which of course is incredibly topical now because large language models (LLMs) have essentially cracked that. But we were doing this way back.”
In the mid 2000s, Tunstall-Pedoe would demo his software on conversational search and recalls being told by Google (GOOG) that not only was this a worse customer experience but that keyword search was infinitely better.
“That’s definitely not the case now,” says Tunstall-Pedoe, who lives in London and Cambridge, the latter a “crazy converted church” where Spitting Image was also created.
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Evi pivoted several times as a start-up, from a search engine that answered questions to producing a voice assistant, launching at the same time as Apple’s Siri. The 30-strong Cambridge outfit had multiple acquisition offers before working on a secret project for Amazon, now known as Alexa, which went to market in late 2014.
He later spent a period as an angel investor backing over 100 tech start-ups before his latest venture, Unlikely AI, came into focus. The British venture, which raised nearly £15m following a seed round in 2023, is currently developing technology that combines LLMs with symbolic methods to make AI safer for companies in sectors such as healthcare to provide verifiable insights.
“How do you enable systems built with modern AI to be fully explainable, auditable, not get you into trouble with regulators, and not lead you to making business decisions that cost you lots of money?” says Tunstall-Pedoe.
British tech pioneer William Tunstall-Pedoe, left, says Unlikely AI is out to rid hallucinations in AI. ·Noam Galai via Getty Images
“We’re tackling some of the biggest problems in AI, which is how to make it completely trustworthy and how to ensure the answer is always accurate.”
With the advent of ChatGPT, the inventor has admitted that most companies aren’t succeeding when it comes to implementing LLMs, which learns to predict the next word, into workflows.
He says: “If you’re making a business decision based on the result of an LLM and your private data, and it gives you a wrong answer, that can be really expensive financially and to your brand. If you’re in a regulated industry it can get you fined. You can even get the CEO in jail in extreme cases if you break regulation really badly and this is a fundamental problem.”
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Thus Unlikely AI, he adds, was born to not only earn trust but to solve complex issues with its deep learning software.
“That means making it accurate, so when it gives you a result, you can trust it,” says Tunstall-Pedoe.
“Sometimes it may tell you it doesn’t know rather than guess and it also means explainability and auditability, to fully explain in a very clear way how the result was created.
“Ultimately, it’s also about the customer or business being in control and that’s the kind of experience that we’re shooting for. We’re still relatively early, but we’re looking to be very successful and become a very big company.”
How I identified the most boring day
I built this huge database of millions of facts about the world, where the system could make sense and reason with them. I thought it would be interesting to do an analysis of all the facts that the system knew, and in particular with the goal of finding what the least interesting date in history was — 11 April 1954.
The story went so viral that it got told and retold and it’s had new life ever since. There was a play in Germany that was kind of themed on it and all sorts of crazy things that have happened as a result of that.
Entrepreneurship
One of the things I love is that you can have a very significant impact as an individual if you’ve got an idea and you pursue it. If you build a software product that does something valuable and different, it can scale like no other product can.
You can have 100 million users within a couple of months if you create a really successful piece of software, which is kind of almost impossible in almost any other industry. That’s what’s exciting about it, that potential for big impact if you’re developing technology in the software world that really hits home.
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