science

Sentient Technologies

Sentient Technologies is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Sentient Technologies rather than just read about it. In short: Sentient Technologies was an American artificial intelligence technology company based in San Francisco. Sentient was founded in 2007 and received over $143 million in funding at different points after its inception.

Sentient Technologies — illustration

Key takeaways

Sentient Technologies belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Sentient Technologies to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Sentient Technologies from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Sentient Technologies was an American artificial intelligence technology company based in San Francisco. Sentient was founded in 2007 and received over $143 million in funding at different points after its inception. As of 2016, Sentient was the world's most well-funded AI company. It focused on e-commerce, online content and trading. The company was dissolved in 2019.

History Sentient originally operated in stealth mode as Genetic Finance Holding Ltd. The company was founded in 2007 by Antoine Blondeau, Babak Hodjat and Adam Cheyer who created the natural language technology that led to Siri, Apple's voice recognition software. Sentient raised a $2 million Series A round of funding, and $38 million in a Series B round led by Horizons Ventures. Sentient emerged from stealth mode in November 2014 with $103.5 million in Series C funding. Sentient worked with Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to analyze blood pressure to predict the likelihood of sepsis in ICU patients. The technology was researched in association with Saint Michael's Hospital at the University of Toronto. The platform was also used to successfully automate financial services for Sentient's subsidiary, Sentient Investment Management. In 2015, Sentient launched an AI powered visual intelligence and personalization platform leveraging deep learning and online learning. Shoes.com, a Vancouver-based online shoe retailer, was Sentient's first retail customer for this service. Since its launch, Sentient had other retailer customers. Sentient Ascend was launched in September 2016 as a SaaS AI based conversion rate optimization platform, largely based on the same AI methods used in its financial technology IP. In 2019, Sentient Technologies was dissolved, selling off Sentient Ascend to Evolv and much of its AI intellectual property to Cognizant.

Technology Sentient's platform combined evolutionary computation, which mimics biological evolution, and deep learning, which is based on the structure of nervous systems. Sentient's algorithms worked across as many as two million CPU cores and 5000 GPU cards across 4,000 physical sites around the world, making it one of the largest known systems dedicated to AI.

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Sentient Technologies

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Sentient Technologies claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Sentient Technologies before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Sentient Technologies ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Sentient Technologies

In research: Sentient Technologies appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Sentient Technologies in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Sentient Technologies is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2007 establishments in California, 2019 disestablishments in California, Artificial intelligence industry in the United States, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Sentient Technologies outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Sentient Technologies in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Sentient Technologies means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Sentient Technologies out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Sentient Technologies in simple terms?

Why does Sentient Technologies matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Sentient Technologies?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Sentient Technologies.