PolarGrid CEO Rade Kovacevic believes GenAI video and voice will be killer apps once they can function in real-time.
It seems like every day a mindblowing new AI feature is released. And in that newness, it’s easy to overlook that a lot of AI features are kind of slow.
Maybe you haven’t experienced that slowness, or perhaps you’re simply too enamoured with talking to AI to notice. I suggest switching over to a voice conversation with Alexa, Siri, or even ChatGPT, to see what I mean. We should never take the frontier tech for granted, but nor can we ignore that it is not (yet) a real-time replacement for human conversation.
“How do I create the ‘wow’ moment for my end user? And slowness never creates the wow moment.”
Rade Kovacevic
It’s not just voice: there are a whole bunch of new products and features constrained by the current infrastructure powering AI tech. Because AI has a latency problem.
But that’s OK. Thirty years ago, we were excited to load a photo on a website, or download an MP3, and then tech built the infrastructure for near real-time everything.
This week on The BetaKit Podcast, we’re joined by Rade Kovacevic, founder and CEO of Ottawa-based company PolarGrid, which builds edge computing solutions for real-time AI applications. He explains AI’s latency problem, why it happens, and the tools needed to solve it, along with the new experiences that might come once AI can move in milliseconds around the world.
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This isn’t an ad for PolarGrid’s services, either. Kovacevic explains how his company’s solutions will sit alongside new advancements in local compute, and hyperscalers like AWS, which are too busy… hyperscaling to build this particular piece of necessary infrastructure for the future of the internet.
According to Kovacevic, GenAI is in its GeoCities moment: a brief novelty quickly outpaced by what comes next.
So what comes next? Let’s dig in.
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The BetaKit Podcast is presented by Fasken Emerging Tech: Supporting trailblazing startups, venture capital funds, and acquirers of high-growth tech companies for over 30 years.
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Recorded and edited by Toronto Podcasts.