Why we founded Verneek
We have been working obsessively towards giving machines the cognitive and motor functions of humans for 18 years now. Although we started our careers in AI with Robotics, we soon realized that the easiest tasks for humans are indeed the hardest ones to crack for machines! So, we switched gears and focused our life’s work on the field of language AI and “commonsense reasoning”, which involves giving machines the most basic cognitive abilities that a 4-year-old child has, touted as the “holy grail of AI”!
We founded Verneek in 2021 when the broader field of AI research had gotten the closest it has ever been to imbuing machines with common sense!
We believe that this breakthrough era in AI makes it possible to fulfill our lifelong dream of making natural language the new machine language, which will transform our everyday experiences anywhere.
—Nasrin & Omid
Why Now?
Our own scientific research had proven that a sustained inflection point in NLP has arrived and is standing the test of time!
In 2020 we realized that …
Transformer technology (powering the likes of ChatGPT) trained on large volumes of curated training data and tested on real-world benchmarks will give rise to a whole suite of category-defining products in everyday life.
Y-axis: The state-of-the-art accuracy on the Story Cloze Test (Mostafazadeh et al., 2016), a challenging language understanding task developed by our team
Nasrin Mostafazadeh
PhD, MS, BS in Computer Science (AI)
18 years of experience in AI , Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Dialogue in particular
Keynote speaker, chair, and published author at major AI venues.
Research experience at big tech companies and two other deep-tech startups: Microsoft, Google, BenevolentAI and Elemental.
for having contributed to the latest advancements in AI and Commonsense Reasoning in particular.
Omid Bakhshandeh
PhD, MS, BS in Computer Science (AI)
18 years of experience in AI, Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Dialogue in particular
Published author as various scientific venues.
Founded and led AI teams to compete in and win major international Robotics competitions.
Research experience at Adobe Inc. and Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC).
