EP 512: Inception Games Final - Who's the Top NVIDIA Inception Startup?
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Eight AI startups entered. There's two left and only one will be victorious. All right. We are finally here with our championship round of the Inception Games. So in partnership with NVIDIA at their GTC conference, we brought you an awesome AIM.

eight group of AI startups. We heard from you all on who your favorite was, on how they're using AI to help everyday business leaders grow their companies and careers. And today we are here with the final round. All right. I'm excited for this. And welcome to Everyday AI.

AI. What's going on, y'all? My name is Jordan Wilson. I'm the host of Everyday AI, and this is your daily live stream podcast and free daily newsletter, helping us all not just learn AI, but how we can leverage it to get ahead, grow our companies and our careers. If that sounds like what you're trying to do, you're in the right place. It starts here with the live stream and the podcast where you can learn the latest, but to leverage it, you need to go to our website, youreverydayai.com. There, you

You can not only listen to more than 500 episodes from some of the world's leading experts in AI across all categories, but you should also, while you're there, sign up for our free daily newsletter. We're going to be recapping today's show with some of the most important highlights, as well as keeping you up to date and ahead with everything that's happening in the world of AI.

So speaking of what's happening in the world of AI, let's quickly, before we get started, go over what is happening in the world of AI news.

So first, Chinese AI startup Manus has raised $75 million in new funding led by U.S. venture firm Benchmark, boosting its valuation to nearly $500 million. So this new funding round saw participation from several existing investors and marks a significant increase in the company's market value, roughly quintupled from previous levels.

So the capital will be used to develop and expand Manus' AI technology, which focuses on artificial intelligence agents designed to automate everyday tasks.

The parent company called Butterfly Effect plans to broaden its service reach beyond China to key international markets, including the United States, Japan, and the Middle East. So yeah, if you haven't seen or heard of Manus, it is essentially very much like OpenAI's operator. It is an autonomous agent. You can give it a tagline.

And it'll kind of go out and, you know, figure things out on its own. So right now it's, you know, it uses, I think last I saw it has like 26 different tools that it can use under its belt. And it was running on Claude's large language model.

All right. Next piece of AI news. U.S. President Trump has signed a sweeping executive order to make AI literacy and workforce skills a national priority, establishing a White House task force on artificial intelligence education.

So this new order launches that presidential AI challenge, a public-private partnership to develop K-12 AI resources and new funding priorities aimed at expanding AI coursework and certification for students and teachers nationwide. So federal agencies, including the Department of Labor, Education, and Agriculture, are directed to prioritize AI-related teacher training, youth apprenticeship programs, and financial

funding for AI skill development across all education levels. So this move is set to impact how Americans learn, teach and work with AI, potentially reshaping classroom learning and career paths for students, educators and workers in the US.

All right, our last piece of AI news today, OpenAI has launched a new lightweight version of its very popular deep research tool inside of ChatGPT and has expanded usage limits. So OpenAI has rolled out a new lightweight version of its ChatGPT deep research tool powered by the 04 mini model versus the 03 version.

model to provide faster, more cost effective research responses for users. So this version is now available to free chat GPT users. Yeah, that's a big one. And also to paid subscribers after they've hit their limits.

So the lightweight deep research delivers shorter responses while preserving the overall depth and quality, allowing OpenAI to increase usage limits across paid tiers without overloading their infrastructure. So paid users on ChatGPT+, Teams, and Pro plans will benefit from higher usage limits thanks to this cheaper and lighter weight option.

So once the original deep research limits are reached on a paid plan, queries will then be automatically switched to this lightweight version. So if you have a free plan, you get free

five queries a month. If you are on a paid, a normal paid plan, so that is including ChatGPT Plus, Teams and Enterprise, as well as EDU, that's 25 queries a month. And pro users on that $200 a month plan get 250 of the more powerful deep research queries. All right. We have more on those stories and a ton more in our newsletter. So make sure you go to youreverydayai.com.

dot com. All right. I'm excited for today's show. What's up, y'all? To all the live stream crew in the house. Love to see it. Brian tuning in from Minnesota. Renee joining us from Tampa Bay. Michelle on the YouTube machine. Graham holding it down from Ireland. Love to see it. Fred in my backyard here in Australia. Nathan, it's already nighttime there in Australia.

Thanks for tuning in, y'all. Yeah, if you didn't know, if you're ever on the podcast, listening on Spotify or Apple, first of all, thank you. But second of all, it's technically a live stream. We do this every day, 7.30 a.m. Central Standard Time. So if you ever want to come in and ask questions of guests that we have on, what better way to learn than to be able to speak with the people building all of the AI systems that we all get to use and just experts in their field. So

Yeah, come hang out sometime on the live stream. All right, let's get into our ding, ding, ding. It is the final round. So real quick, let me first tell you what the NVIDIA Inception program is, you know, as we tell you a little bit more about the final round. And we're going to hear from our final contestants in the Inception games. So NVIDIA Inception is a program that helps startups,

grow and develop their technology. So the program provides free and discounted NVIDIA tools, software, and training. And startups in the NVIDIA Inception program get access to developer forums and technical resources. So startups can connect with also venture capital firms through NVIDIA's network.

Yeah, we had one of the heads of the VC alliance there at NVIDIA on the show as well a couple of weeks ago at the NVIDIA GTC conference. So at that conference where we partnered with NVIDIA, we brought you some of the more promising startups in the NVIDIA Inception program. And we brought to you a group, what we call the Awesome Eight.

All right. And through your voting, we are now down to our final two. I know it's been a week or three since we had our first round. We had to, you know, go through and tally up all the votes and coordinate with our finalists here. And our two finalists are Glea Cloud and DemiLyn.

democratized. All right. So in a couple of minutes here, we're going to be hearing from their teams making their final pitch for our prize. And the prize is going to be a sponsorship here on Everyday AI. So yeah, not just a live stream, but going out to our entire podcast library of 500 episodes and reaching our audience in

As I found out the other day, 22,000 cities or 23,000 cities, which I didn't even know there are that many cities in the world. Anyways, so pretty, pretty cool prize for our winner, either Glia Cloud or Democratize. But

Before we go and we hear the pitches, I want to quickly shout out and recap our other five, or sorry, our other six AI startups that did not make the final cut. So deep checks, all right? I'm going to give you all just the quick bullet points in case you missed that first episode. But if you did want to go back

and kind of hear from all of the founders themselves. I think most of the cases, it was the founders of these companies. You can go back and listen to episode 497 on our website or on Spotify, Apple, wherever you're listening. So

A couple that did not make the final cut, but some great startups. So Deep Checks. So they provide AI-powered platform to test, evaluate, and compare generative AI models. They help companies to measure model quality, detect hallucinations, and choose the best AI version. And what makes them different? They automate evaluations with

what they call LLM judges in agent swarms. And that replaces manual test sets that don't exist right now for generative AI.

All right, so you can go check them out if you want to know more about them. Expander AI, and yeah, DeepChecks and Expander were right on the cusp there. They almost made the final. So what they do, Expander, they offer a platform to build custom AI agents by connecting multiple AI tools and internal systems. They help companies by saving engineering time by eliminating the need to build connectors or fine-tune models individually.

And what makes them different? They support multi-agent workflows, integrating various AI platforms, giving businesses flexibility without locking into a single framework. All right, Beamer, another one of our awesome eight.

So what Beamer does, they use AI to optimize video encoding using NVIDIA GPUs to reduce video file sizes by 30 to 50%. So that helps media companies, autonomous vehicle projects, and content platforms cut storage and bandwidth costs. And what makes them different? They leverage NVIDIA's NVENC hardware acceleration for faster, large-scale video compression with minimal quality loss.

All right, Plyops. So they provide software that maximizes GPU efficiency and reduces operational costs for AI data centers. So how they help, they allow businesses to serve more AI users and applications with the same hardware budget. And what makes them different? Their plug and play solution requires no PhDs and optimizes costs per AI token, improving margins.

All right. And then a big, a big name here. Yeah, we actually had, I would say maybe an underdog or two take out a couple of big names. One of the big names contextual AI. So what they do is they build retrieval augmentative generation or rag platforms that link company data to LLMs for accurate answers.

So how they help, they help enterprises get grounded, up-to-date AI responses across structured and unstructured data sources. And what makes them different? Well, they're founded by a meta RAG co-inventor, right? So someone from meta that co-invented the RAG retrieval augmented generation technology, and they specialize in tuning models based on user feedback for continuous improvement. All right.

So that is some of our other awesome eight that did not quite make the final. So let's go ahead and we're going to toss it over to our two finalist companies. And the way that you're going to vote, last time we did voting via the live stream comments,

and in the newsletter. So for our final round, it is going to be voting in the newsletter only. Okay. So make sure if you want to vote for Glea cloud or democratize, make sure you go to your everyday AI.com sign up for our free daily newsletter. And in the newsletter today, uh, there will be a poll at the very top of the newsletter that you can vote and then you can

Also, at any time, you know, our newsletter is both an inbox version, right? And there's a web version of it as well. So even if you missed today's newsletter, I think we're going to keep voting open until Tuesday. So it should be about four or five days to go vote. So you can also go to read.com.

dot every day. Sorry, read dot your everyday AI dot com and vote that way. You do have to be signed up to our newsletter to vote.

All right. Enough chit chat, y'all. Livestream audience. Hey, as always, could you give me a little bit of help here? I'd appreciate it. We have our two finalists. I want to know, can you hear the audio? I can obviously hear it. I want to make sure you all can hear it. So here we go with our first finalist.

From Democratize, let's go ahead. There we go. All right. So please, live stream audience, let me know if you can hear our first one here, and we're going to kick it off with Democratize. Here we go. All right.

All right, y'all. Sorry, I'm gonna have to click rewind here. A couple people said we couldn't hear the audio. Apologies. Let me try this. Let me try this one more time, y'all.

We're going to try it a different way. Give me a second. This is one of the fun things. One of the fun things about doing this live. Let's try this. All right. Take two. Take two. Let me know, y'all.

This is always fun. You know, like what's crazy is I'm doing the exact same setup here that I did last time in terms of being able to share the audio. I don't know why. Sometimes and, you know, everyone always says like, hey, Jordan, you should do more live demos. This is this is why I'm not always a fan of doing the live demos, because sometimes, you know, the technology hates you. All right.

Let's try it one more time. Appreciate your patience, y'all, as we give our finalists here some time to shine. All right, let's try this one more time. Let's try it one more time. Let's do this.

All right. So now we'll see if it works. I'm going to be loading it from my Google Drive here. So hopefully this doesn't let me down. All right. Since it wouldn't work the other two ways. All right. Here we go. Let's try.

Let's try this again, y'all. All right. Thank you again, live stream audience. You always save my butt. Appreciate it. All right. So let's try this one more time, shall we? All right. We're going to do it this way. Let's go ahead and open. Here we go. All right. What is this? Take three here. Let's see. Hopefully, hopefully take three works. Let's go ahead. Add it to the stage. This is the equivalent of, you know,

restarting your computer in the middle of it. All right. Demartheis is a remanaged apparel design. My name is Jack. I'm CEO and co-founder of Demartheis. Demartheis is a remanaged apparel design and retail through AI, physics simulation, and body scanning.

We want to deliver perfect fitment made for you. All right, perfect. We confirmed we have audio now. All right, now we're going to kick it all off. So after some audio glitches. All right, here we go. Our two finalists, starting with Jack from Democratize. My name is Jack. I'm CEO and co-founder of Democratize. Democratize is a remanagement apparel design and retail through AI, fit estimation, and body scanning.

We want to deliver perfect fitted, made-for-you clothing that can be produced on demand. With just two photos or a quick body scan, we generate an accurate digital twins of each customer's body. Our AI stylist then recommends the ideal styles, fit and sizes, and shows how the garment will actually look and move in realistic 3D before you purchase. But this is more than shopping assistance.

Behind the scenes, we automatically generate major production patterns, allowing factories to produce truly personalized garments at scale. Demarktize is not just a brand, it's a full-stack personalization platform that connects customers to manufacturers in real time. And what makes us truly defensible is actually our vertically integrated technologies and industry partnerships.

We combine high-precision body scanning, realistic 3D try-on, and fabric simulations into a seamless customer experience. We generate production-ready custom patterns instantly. We work directly with HR's top textile and garment manufacturers, growing access to fabric data, production network, and scalable backend infrastructures.

Most solutions focus on customer-facing personalizations, but we go from scan to simulation to production, building an infrastructure that can transform how fashion is made and sold. We will start with customized apparel for professional sports and performance wear, targeting cyclists, fitness professionals who need clothing that fits, performs, and feels just right.

In 2025, we'll release our first limited production lines in collaboration with athletes, focused on validating fit, function, and desirability. In 2026, we'll expand into large-scale productions and broaden into other active and lifestyle categories. This is how we build a brand that leads the apparel intelligence, helping the industry

shift from guesswork and over-productions and toward data-driven, demand-based design and manufacturing. Demartheis empowers fashion business leaders to operate smarter, leaner, and more customer-centric. No more rely on demand forecasts and overstocking. No more high return rates and fixed issues. No more wasteful inventory cycles.

With Demaritize, brands and manufacturers can transition to a modern agile mode, where every product is driven by real demand, enhanced by data, and delivered with precision. We are not just making apparel. Demaritize is building a future of how apparel is made. Thank you.

Are you still running in circles trying to figure out how to actually grow your business with AI? Maybe your company has been tinkering with large language models for a year or more, but can't really get traction to find ROI on Gen AI. Hey, this is Jordan Wilson, host of this very podcast.

Companies like Adobe, Microsoft, and NVIDIA have partnered with us because they trust our expertise in educating the masses around generative AI to get ahead. And some of the most innovative companies in the country hire us to help with their AI strategy and to train hundreds of their employees on how to use Gen AI. So whether you're looking for chat GPT training for thousands,

or just need help building your front-end AI strategy, you can partner with us too, just like some of the biggest companies in the world do. Go to youreverydayai.com slash partner to get in contact with our team, or you can just click on the partner section of our website. We'll help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and build a straight path to ROI on Gen AI.

All right. So thanks. Thanks for the patience there. Livestream crew. So, yeah, democratize. Pretty cool. Right. I mean, what do you think? So this is different from a lot of the types of things that we talk about using AI for here on the Everyday AI Show. So I have a photo up kind of on my screen.

on the browser here on the live stream. And, you know, the way that they use generative AI technology is pretty cool, right? So you've maybe seen, you know, some of these apps or pieces of software out there that, you know, allow you to kind of try on different clothes, right? But then it's like, okay, well, what happens then?

are those fake clothes? So what democratize is trying to do is to actually put these types of clothes out to production, but using generative AI to help, you know, fit, you know, better fit,

better styles, more personalization, et cetera, but something more than just trying something on on a camera and like, oh, look how cool it is when I can use this AI tool to redress myself or something like that. So a lot of cool use cases that you heard there by starting with professional athletes and getting clothes that they hope will maximize their performance.

So, you know, pretty cool there from our first finalists in Democratize. Okay, so now let's go to our second finalist here and let's hope we still have the audio. All right, so here we go.

Here we go. Yeah, a funny one here from Sandra said, so no more deals at TJ Maxx. Yeah, I don't know if everything's personalized for your exact body type. Yeah, I don't know if that would end up at TJ Maxx, right? All right, here we go. Our second contestant, we have Glea Cloud. All right, I'm going to play this. As long as the audio is good, we're going to let it run. So please, live stream audience, let me know. I didn't change anything. So hopefully we have audio here. Here we go.

All right. This is so fun. All right. So everyone just said no audio on this one, even though I'm bringing it up in the exact same way. All right. Love to see it. All right. Give me one second here, y'all. Take 500 on this one. So let me just go ahead, restart that. Love technology. All right.

Here we go. Let's let's try it again. I forgot what take we're on here. You know, as much as I try to get this correct first time, sometimes it's not that nice. Let's go here. There we go. All right. Take 20. Let me know. Livestream. Are we here in the audio?

I'm Billy and I'm the creative technologist here at GlareCloud. So what is GlareCloud? Well, we're first an AI company here in Taipei. We help marketers automate value by producing high impact videos through a series of AI systems. So think about your product advertisements today. You need like teams of creatives and productions to put together a compelling narrative and you have to execute it, right?

So what we do is we provide this sort of content creation service that helps them to shape off more than half the type at only a fraction of the cost.

And by high impact videos, we mean actual quantifiable performance metrics like your retention or your CTI rates. We work with over 6,000 customers across various industries like tourism, e-commerce, banking, and media. And we're really grateful to see that many small businesses extending their reach through our collaboration. Our Vertigo AI is built for publishers and marketers

What we're offering here is very importantly not a generic tool. Our AI models are trained on 100 million daily views from real publisher data where it constantly optimizes itself for retention and engagement. This means that every video keeps getting better results.

Our entire pipeline is fully automated by AI where we handle everything from start to finish. Let's say from, that means from script writing to rendering and even to API powered distribution. At this point, I think it's also worth mentioning that we kind of intentionally design our platform with this principle that we think AI should amplify human creativity, not replace it.

So think, let's say, automation that preserves creative agency. Because I guess from my sort of like know-how, that's where precisely the marketers can then leverage. AI also dynamically.

adapts to your brand, tone, and style, and is able to localize whenever necessary without multilingual support. And this means you can add on multiple voiceovers and various languages to reach out to the intended audience. This is also a point where I think traditional agencies aren't able to match the speed and regular tools also still lacks the depth we have.

Lastly, our service is also infinitely scalable and replicable across platforms and verticals. You can achieve 10 times the output with the same resource you have. Regarding the outlook of our future plan, we try to be strategic, targeted, and sustainable as we are deepening our presence in existing markets like Japan and Korea while continuing to expand in Southeast Asia, as well as entering new markets like the Middle East.

Animation in our AI technology is the backbone of our growth strategy. We've been continuously fostering a diverse, open-minded environment, which has been very effective in cultivating creativity going into our next phase of growth.

That will see us entering the world of agentic AI, enabling even more holistic integrations of intelligence within our customer experiences. Finally, at GladCloud, we like to see ourselves as a place that empowers industry by helping them access the

Innovation and transformative powers of AI, either through helping marketers or marketing leaders connecting with their customers, creating scalable and impactful AI-powered videos or content that drives business growth. And I think that's it. Thanks again for giving me the chance to share a bit about Cloud today. I'm excited about where we're headed and I'd love to hear from your thoughts. Cheers.

All right. So thanks for putting up with all of the technical mishaps there to bring you our final two. So Glee of Cloud, I gave you all a quick recap of Democratize. So Glee of Cloud, very impressive as well. Right. And seemingly ahead of the trend, because I think we've seen, especially in the last couple of weeks,

with even GPT-4.0, their new image gen tool, a lot of the tools that we saw from Google that now make kind of what Glia Cloud is doing, right, more accessible to more people. So Glia Cloud, it looks like, was a little bit ahead of this curve in terms of using GCP

generative AI specifically for media companies, creative companies, advertising agencies, et cetera, to help them be able to use generative AI a little faster at scale.

and to personalize content across multiple languages, mediums, et cetera. So two very, very unique finalists. I kind of agree with David here from YouTube who said, this is tough. Both concepts are very good. I agree with that. But

It started with you all. We went from our awesome eight down to our final two for the Inception Games. And that's a wrap. We heard from our two founders. I gave you my quick two cent recap, but ultimately it's up to you. So which company are we going to throw

us even more in the spotlight and give some big reach to. So you are the deciding factor. So if you haven't already, you need to go to youreverydayai.com. Sign up for the free daily newsletter. In today's newsletter, you need to go vote. It's going to be at the top of the newsletter. You have until Tuesday. So whether you check your email inbox, or like I said, you can just go to read.com

youreverydayai.com if you are already signed up for the newsletter and vote there. So make sure you vote. If you really want one of these two to win, share it with your networks. If you're really pulling for one or maybe you're friends with one of the founders, make sure you share this around to really amplify their message. All right.

Thank you all. I hope this was a fun one. Thanks again to the NVIDIA GTC crew and the Inception team at NVIDIA for partnering with us to make this happen. Thank you, live stream audience, for helping me troubleshoot all these fun tech issues. And thank you all listening for helping us do this fun little competition. So that's a wrap. Let us know who is the top NVIDIA Inception startup.

All right. Thank you for tuning in. If you haven't already, go to youreverydayai.com. Sign up for that free daily newsletter. We'll see you back later for more Everyday AI. Thanks, y'all.

And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going. For a little more AI magic, visit youreverydayai.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.