Meet Anna
Anna Patterson heads Ceramic.ai and is an accomplished leader in artificial intelligence authoring articles on LLMs and a serial entrepreneur with two exits to Google. Prior to starting Gradient Ventures, Anna was Vice President of Engineering in Google Research - integrating AI into products.
Previously, she also helped launch Google Play and scale Android to over a billion phones. She was the principal architect and inventor of TeraGoogle - one of Google’s search serving systems, which increased the index size over 10X at the time of launch. She also was a leader in search ranking efforts through Google’s IPO to determine the top ten search results.
Anna received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. Then she became a Research Scientist at Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence, where she worked with one of the founders of AI, John McCarthy and for his wife Carolyn Talcott. Anna was awarded the Technical Leadership ABIE Award.
Meet Tom
Tom Costello is Chief Scientist of Ceramic.ai and received his Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from Stanford University where he was advised by John McCarthy, the founder of the field. He worked as a Research Scientist at Stanford until he founded Xift, a web search company. Xift was most notable for its radically new search architecture, as it was the first phrase-based search engine. Xift was the first search engine to use Vector-based ranking, which is now commonly used in retrieval.
Tom also founded Narrowband Audio and developed its wavelet compression of Audio signals which enabled stereo FM quality audio music over 8k baud 2G wireless phones. This required an entirely new compression technique and also a custom TCP stack for streaming over noisy low bandwidth links.
He later joined IBM where he led the product side of WebFountain. This offered companies infrastructure to extract actionable intelligence from a large web corpus. Tom founded Cuil, then the largest search engine on the web. This was the first search engine to represent documents and queries in a vector space. Cuil also launched Cpedia, a Generative AI model that re-presented Web data as text. This hopefully was the inspiration for Word2Vec and subsequent Language Modeling. Cuil was acquired by Google.