Well, it turns out, YouTube isn’t just another platform where you can just watch funny videos that are supposed to entertain you. If you’re obsessed with artificial intelligence like Karan is, you can pretty much start your own AI company and end up disrupting an entire industry by learning from YouTube videos.
Karan made a breakthrough when he helped write an AI algorithm that can serve ads based on what people publicly say and how they feel on social media. He teamed up with his younger brother Sobi Walia and teen programming whiz Anton Mamonov to start Cluep in 2012.
But writing a machine learning algorithm that can suss out emotions behind millions of words and phrases wasn’t easy. “One of the earliest challenges I faced was learning machine learning. I couldn’t afford to pay high tuition fees, nor get in and attend a university like Stanford. Luckily Andrew Ng, who at the time was a professor in the computer science department at Stanford, made his course for an introduction to machine learning available for free. As long as you had an internet connection, you could watch his lectures for free on YouTube. That’s how Anton and I learnt. By watching his YouTube videos, usually 2x the speed,” Karan chuckles.
Another challenge he and his teenage partners faced was training their novel AI algorithm on endless data sets. “We needed access to a lot of compute, but we really didn’t have any money, and no one wanted to give us any. Like the three of us were literally living off my student loans. So, we broke into a lab at the university I went to and hacked into 24 computers in order to train our neural network on large data sets,” Karan reveals.
Fast forward to today, Cluep’s patented AI technology is now used by thousands of brands which include Amazon, Microsoft, Spotify, BMW, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, Red Bull, Starbucks, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s.
