Until a year ago, Archetype’s team all worked together at ATAP, an R&D lab inside Google, embedded within the Motorola division acquired in 2011. Its DNA was a strange mixture of mobile-directed research, the values of the US – Suggested Online site – Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Project Agency, and Google’s own fixation on making bets on exotic breakthroughs. Windy Day came from Motorola’s in-house moonshot division, Advanced Technology and Products (ATAP). I talked about ATAP in 2013 when writing about an underappreciated, and sadly discontinued, animation project called Spotlight Stories, and its first sensor-driven mini-movie called Windy Day.
Archetype is also exploring the health care market. Newton might help him in his quest for a single metric, perhaps drawn from multiple sensors, that “can literally measure the impact of any intervention in health care,” he says. Stefano Bini, a professor at UC San Francisco’s Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, has been working with sensors that can assess the recovery progress after a person has knee replacement surgery. Surprisingly, these don’t involve autonomous driving, though Archetype very much wants its technology to be used for that. Another early Archetype client is Volkswagen, which is running some early tests of Archetype’s model.
“We were excited to see how they can work with real-time data from the physical world,” he says.
The demos were impressive, but that approach had limits. “Analyzing sensors was really hard. Instead of a large language model it would be a large behavior model. You had read them by hand,” he says. “We were excited to see how they can work with real-time data from the physical world,” he says. When LLMs appeared, Poupyrev and colleagues realized that with modifications they could make sensor data more powerful by providing a way for humans to easily explore and monitor data collected across vast swaths of time and space. They were particularly excited to do it outside of Google, free of the constraints of working within a giant organization. In March last year, Poupyrev and eventually four others left to start Archetype, now funded by a $13 million seed round of investment funding.
Nick Gillian, Brandon Barbello, Ivan Poupyrev, Jaime Lien, and Leonardo Giusti left Google’s ATAP R&D group last year to cofound startup Archetype AI. Beeper Took On Apple’s iMessage Dominance. “We put sensors in all kinds of things to help us, but sensor data is too difficult to interpret. “The physical world is where we have most of our problems, because it is so complex and fast moving that things are beyond our perception to fully understand,” says Brandon Barbello, a cofounder who is also Archetype’s COO.
