Daniel J. Hulme

Daniel J. Hulme

Daniel Hulme (born 21 February 1980) is a British businessman, investor, academic and commentator, working in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), applied technology and ethics. He is the CEO and founder of Satalia that exited to WPP plc in 2021 for a rumoured $100M where he is also Chief AI Officer. Hulme is also an angel investor in emerging technology companies. In 2024 Hulme co-founded Conscium, an AI Safety company which tests AI Agents and verifies that they do what they are supposed to do. It is also investigating whether AIs will soon become conscious, and how to test for that, and developing more efficient approaches to AI development using neuromorphic computing. Alongside building and scaling Satalia, Hulme was also a Co-Founding Director of Faculty (company) AI - previously ASI Data-Science. In 2026, Accenture announced it had agreed to acquire Faculty for $1bn. Hulme founded Satalia in 2008, a company that provides AI products and consultancy for governments and companies such as Tesco,DFS Furniture,PwC and the BBC. He received a masters and doctorate in AI from University College London (UCL), and is now their Computer Science Entrepreneur in residence, where he teaches how AI can be applied to solve business and social problems. After exiting Satalia to WPP plc Hulme took the dual role of Chief AI Officer at WPP where he is responsible for informing and coordinating AI across the group. In 2026 Hulme was elected as a Founding Fellow of the Academy for the Mathematical Sciences, in recognition of his contributions at the intersection of AI and applied mathematics. Hulme is an angel investor and also a frequent public speaker and writer on the topics of AI, ethics, technology, innovation, decentralization and organisational design. == Early life and education == Hulme was born in 1980. He grew up in the seaside town of Morecambe in north west England. After completing secondary school, Hulme moved to London to study at University College London. On completing his under graduate degree, Hulme stayed at UCL to complete a master's degree and then an EngD. All three degrees were in subjects related to AI. In 2009 Hulme was awarded a Kauffman Global Entrepreneur Scholarship, which saw him visit institutes in the United States to better understand their culture of innovation, and what UK business people could learn from it. This included a tour of Stanford, MIT, Berkeley and Harvard, along with a placement at Cisco Systems HQ in Silicon Valley. == Career == === Satalia === Hulme founded NPComplete Limited in 2007, and incorporated it in 2008, a few months before completing his PhD. NPComplete Limited trades as Satalia. The London-based company provides full-stack AI consultancy and products, helping organisations harness data science, machine learning and AI to solve complex problems, including real-time optimisation. NPComplete refers to mathematical NP-completeness, which describes a class of exponential problems in the field of computational complexity theory. The trading name of NPComplete, Satalia, is a portmanteau of SAT (Short for satisfiability, as in the Boolean satisfiability problem) and the Latin phrase Et alia. Satalia seeks to solve hard problems, in particular the class of exponentially hard problems found in academia and industry known as NP-hardness. In 2016, Satalia was the only UK company to appear in the Gartner Cool Vendors list for data science. In November 2019, City A.M. reported that Satalia was the 39th fastest growing tech firm in the UK, with three year growth at 886%. Satalia was acquired by WPP plc in August 2021 for a rumored $100,000,000, where Hulme was the majority shareholder. === Conscium === Conscium is the World's first commercial organisation dedicated to the understanding, verification and validation of conscious AI and its implications for developing safe, efficient neuromorphic models. Conscium is an AI safety company with three workstreams: AI agent verification. Verification of AI agents developed by third parties to ensure they are beneficial and not harmful. Development of neuromorphic systems. Neuromorphic computing refers to technologies that can process information more like a biological brain compared to existing approaches, making them far more adaptive, scalable and efficient than current AI. Research into artificial consciousness. This workstream is led by Mark Solms, Chair of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town. This research aims to better understand what consciousness in AI systems and machines would look like, and, if and when machines do reach consciousness, what the moral and ethical implications would be. Conscium was founded in 2024 in London by a team including Hulme, Ed Charvet, Calum Chace, Ted Lappas, and Panagiotis Repoussis. Conscium has recruited some of the world’s leading neuroscientists and computer scientists to its advisory board, including Anil Seth, Mark Solms, Karl J. Friston, Anthony Finkelstein, Benjamin Rosman, David Wood, Jonathan Shock, Megan Peters, Moran Cerf, Nicholas Humphrey, Nicky Clayton, Nikola Kasabov, Steve Furber, and Suzanne Livingston. Supported by these world-leading experts, Conscium is creating a neuromorphic computing lab to research and validate the capacity of machines to acquire consciousness, making them safer for humanity. Conscium has published an open letter warning of the risks of AI suffering if care is not taken to mitigate against that possibility when and if AI becomes conscious. Signatories of the letter included Stephen Fry, Karl Friston and Anthony Finkelstein. === The Partnership for Research Into Sentient Machines (PRISM) === Hulme is one of the founding partners of PRISM - The Partnership for Research Into Sentient Machines, a non-profit set up to help prepare society for a future with conscious, or seemingly conscious, artificial intelligence. === Academia === Hulme's master's degree topic was on simulating artificial life, where he used Evolutionary algorithm's to generate emergent intelligence in AI agent's with Artificial Neural Network brains. His PhD spanned modelling bumblebee brains and mathematical optimization. Hulme maintained his connection with UCL after completing his doctorate, staying on in various teaching positions. From 2014 to Oct 2019 he was the Director of UCL's Business analytics MSc, which dealt with the application of AI to government, social, and business problems. As of 2020, Hulme is UCL's (University College London) Entrepreneur-in-Residence. He is also a faculty member and lecturer at Singularity University, and a visiting lecturer at London School of Economics's Marshall Institute. === Public engagement === Hulme frequently speaks for TEDx, Google and at various other events. He specialises in Artificial Intelligence, Decentralization, Organisational Design, and Innovation. He has written numerous articles and contributed to several books, largely concerning AI, as well as applied technology and related ethical issues. In 2017, along with Elon Musk, Stuart J. Russell, Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis, Hulme was one of the 116 founders of robotics and AI companies to sign an open letter to the United Nations, warning against the use of AI in autonomous weapons. Hulme also consults with various companies, governments and other organisations, independently of Satalia.

Zolostays

Zolostays is a real-tech co-living focused startup that provides ready-to-move rooms/beds. It was founded in 2015 by Nikhil Sikri, Akhil Sikri and Sneha Choudhry. == Overview == During the pandemic, Zolo provided 75 of rent-free accommodation to those who lost their jobs. Zolo uses bulk inventory in usually residential township and ties up with real estate companies to make the rooms/beds available. Zolostays has both revenue sharing and leased model. == History == Zolostays was founded in 2015 to solve the problem of students and young professionals who would move to temporarily go to other cities to study and work and look for affordable housing. In 2020, it was operating in 10 Indian cities. It has four round of funding, with total $98 million.

Computer vision dazzle

Computer vision dazzle, also known as CV dazzle, dazzle makeup, or anti-surveillance makeup, is a type of camouflage used to hamper facial recognition software, inspired by dazzle camouflage used by vehicles such as ships and planes. == Methods == CV dazzle combines stylized makeup, asymmetric hair, and sometimes infrared lights built in to glasses or clothing to break up detectable facial patterns recognized by computer vision algorithms in much the same way that warships contrasted color and used sloping lines and curves to distort the structure of a vessel. It has been shown to be somewhat successful at defeating face detection software in common use, including that employed by Facebook. CV dazzle attempts to block detection by facial recognition technologies such as DeepFace "by creating an 'anti-face'". It uses occlusion, covering certain facial features; transformation, altering the shape or colour of parts of the face; and a combination of the two. Prominent artists employing this technique include Adam Harvey and Jillian Mayer. == Use in protests == Computer vision dazzle makeup has been used by protestors in several different protest movements. Its use as a protesting aid has often been found ineffective. It may be effective to thwart computer technology, but draws human attention, is easy for human monitors to spot on security cameras, and makes it hard for protestors to blend in within a crowd. Advances in facial recognition technology make dazzle makeup increasingly ineffective.

You.com

You.com is an artificial intelligence search startup that has pivoted away from consumer search engine operations toward business-focused AI tools and APIs. The company was founded in 2020 by Richard Socher, the former chief scientist at Salesforce, and Bryan McCann, a former NLP researcher at Salesforce. == History == Following its 2020 founding, You.com opened its public beta on November 9, 2021, and received $20 million in funding led by Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff. Other investors include Breyer Capital, Sound Ventures, and Day One Ventures. The domain You.com was initially purchased in 1996 by Benioff. Benioff invested in You.com and transferred ownership of the You.com domain name to the company. In July 2022, You.com announced its $25 million Series A funding round led by Radical Ventures with participation from Time Ventures, Breyer Capital, Norwest Venture Partners and Day One Ventures. In September 2024, You.com raised $50 million in Series B funding led by Georgian. In September 2025, You.com raised $100 million in Series C funding led by Cox Enterprises at a $1.5 billion valuation, achieving unicorn status. == Business model == You.com generates revenue primarily through enterprise sales of search APIs and AI tools. The platform provides web search capabilities that can be integrated into enterprise applications and AI agents. == Features == On December 23, 2022, You.com was the first search engine to launch an LLM chatbot with live web results alongside its responses. Initially known as YouChat, the chatbot was primarily based on the GPT-3.5 large language model and could answer questions, suggest ideas, translate text, summarize articles, compose emails, and write code snippets, while staying up-to-date with current events and citing sources. Several further versions of YouChat were released. The second version, called YouChat 2.0, was released on February 7, 2023, incorporated improved conversational AI and community-built applications by blending a large language model named C-A-L (Chat, Apps, and Links). This update enabled YouChat to provide results in various formats, such as charts, photos, videos, tables, graphs, text or code, so users can find answers without leaving the search results page. YouChat 3.0, unveiled on May 4, 2023, combined chat functionality with results from Reddit, TikTok, Stack Overflow and Wikipedia. === YouPro === On June 21, 2023, You.com introduced YouPro, a paid subscription. Both free and paid versions provide access to large language models connected to the internet with citation capabilities. === ARI === In February 2025, You.com launched ARI (Advanced Research and Insights), a deep research agent that scans over 400 sources simultaneously to produce research reports with verified citations and interactive graphs, charts, and visualizations. The platform targets regulated industries where comprehensive source verification is critical, with customers including healthcare publishers and advisory firms. == Reception == You.com was named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2022. You.com's ARI (Advanced Research & Insights) feature was named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2025.

LanguageWare

LanguageWare is a natural language processing (NLP) technology developed by IBM, which allows applications to process natural language text. It comprises a set of Java libraries that provide a range of NLP functions: language identification, text segmentation/tokenization, normalization, entity and relationship extraction, and semantic analysis and disambiguation. The analysis engine uses a finite-state machine approach at multiple levels, which aids its performance characteristics while maintaining a reasonably small footprint. The behaviour of the system is driven by a set of configurable lexico-semantic resources which describe the characteristics and domain of the processed language. A default set of resources comes as part of LanguageWare and these describe the native language characteristics, such as morphology, and the basic vocabulary for the language. Supplemental resources have been created that capture additional vocabularies, terminologies, rules and grammars, which may be generic to the language or specific to one or more domains. A set of Eclipse-based customization tooling, LanguageWare Resource Workbench, is available on IBM's alphaWorks site, and allows domain knowledge to be compiled into these resources and thereby incorporated into the analysis process. LanguageWare can be deployed as a set of UIMA-compliant annotators, Eclipse plug-ins or Web Services.

ZygoteBody

ZygoteBody, formerly Google Body, is a web application by Zygote Media Group that renders manipulable 3D anatomical models of the human body. Several layers, from muscle tissues down to blood vessels, can be removed or made transparent to allow better study of individual body parts. Most of the body parts are labelled and are searchable. == Technology == The human models are based on data from the Zygote Media Group. The website uses JavaScript and WebGL technology to display 3D images inside the web browser without requiring the installation of external browser plug-ins. == History == ZygoteBody was launched as Google Body on December 15, 2010. On April Fools' Day 2011, users were greeted with the anatomy of a cow on the home page. The cow model is still available as part of the open-3d-viewer open source project. As part of the wind down on Google Labs, it was announced that Google Body will be shut down but will continue to be maintained by Zygote as ZygoteBody. On October 13, 2011, the Google Body site was shut down. Then, on January 9, 2012, ZygoteBody was launched and core code base (with the Google Cow model as a demo) was made available as an open source project called open-3d-viewer.

Vision transformer

A vision transformer (ViT) is a transformer designed for computer vision. A ViT decomposes an input image into a series of patches (rather than text into tokens), serializes each patch into a vector, and maps it to a smaller dimension with a single matrix multiplication. These vector embeddings are then processed by a transformer encoder as if they were token embeddings. ViTs were designed as alternatives to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in computer vision applications. They have different inductive biases, training stability, and data efficiency. Compared to CNNs, ViTs are less data efficient, but have higher capacity. Some of the largest modern computer vision models are ViTs, such as one with 22B parameters. Subsequent to its publication, many variants were proposed, with hybrid architectures with both features of ViTs and CNNs. ViTs have found application in image recognition, image segmentation, weather prediction, and autonomous driving. == History == Transformers were introduced in Attention Is All You Need (2017), and have found widespread use in natural language processing. A 2019 paper applied ideas from the Transformer to computer vision. Specifically, they started with a ResNet, a standard convolutional neural network used for computer vision, and replaced all convolutional kernels by the self-attention mechanism found in a Transformer. It resulted in superior performance. However, it is not a Vision Transformer. In 2020, an encoder-only Transformer was adapted for computer vision, yielding the ViT, which reached state of the art in image classification, overcoming the previous dominance of CNN. The masked autoencoder (2022) extended ViT to work with unsupervised training. The vision transformer and the masked autoencoder, in turn, stimulated new developments in convolutional neural networks. Subsequently, there was cross-fertilization between the previous CNN approach and the ViT approach. In 2021, some important variants of the Vision Transformers were proposed. These variants are mainly intended to be more efficient, more accurate or better suited to a specific domain. Two studies improved efficiency and robustness of ViT by adding a CNN as a preprocessor. The Swin Transformer achieved state-of-the-art results on some object detection datasets such as COCO, by using convolution-like sliding windows of attention mechanism, and the pyramid process in classical computer vision. == Overview == The basic architecture, used by the original 2020 paper, is as follows. In summary, it is a BERT-like encoder-only Transformer. The input image is of type R H × W × C {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{H\times W\times C}} , where H , W , C {\displaystyle H,W,C} are height, width, channel (RGB). It is then split into square-shaped patches of type R P × P × C {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{P\times P\times C}} . For each patch, the patch is pushed through a linear operator, to obtain a vector ("patch embedding"). The position of the patch is also transformed into a vector by "position encoding" (the paper tried no embedding, 1D embedding, 2D embedding, and relative embedding: 1D was adopted). The two vectors are added, then pushed through several Transformer encoders. The attention mechanism in a ViT repeatedly transforms representation vectors of image patches, incorporating more and more semantic relations between image patches in an image. This is analogous to how in natural language processing, as representation vectors flow through a transformer, they incorporate more and more semantic relations between words, from syntax to semantics. The above architecture turns an image into a sequence of vector representations. To use these for downstream applications, an additional head needs to be trained to interpret them. For example, to use it for classification, one can add a shallow MLP on top of it that outputs a probability distribution over classes. The original paper uses a linear-GeLU-linear-softmax network. == Variants == === Original ViT === The original ViT was an encoder-only Transformer supervise-trained to predict the image label from the patches of the image. As in the case of BERT, it uses a special token in the input side, and the corresponding output vector is used as the only input of the final output MLP head. The special token is an architectural hack to allow the model to compress all information relevant for predicting the image label into one vector. Transformers found their initial applications in natural language processing tasks, as demonstrated by language models such as BERT and GPT-3. By contrast the typical image processing system uses a convolutional neural network (CNN). Well-known projects include Xception, ResNet, EfficientNet, DenseNet, and Inception. Transformers measure the relationships between pairs of input tokens (words in the case of text strings), termed attention. The cost is quadratic in the number of tokens. For images, the basic unit of analysis is the pixel. However, computing relationships for every pixel pair in a typical image is prohibitive in terms of memory and computation. Instead, ViT computes relationships among pixels in various small sections of the image (e.g., 16x16 pixels), at a drastically reduced cost. The sections (with positional embeddings) are placed in a sequence. The embeddings are learnable vectors. Each section is arranged into a linear sequence and multiplied by the embedding matrix. The result, with the position embedding is fed to the transformer. === Architectural improvements === ==== Pooling ==== After the ViT processes an image, it produces some embedding vectors. These must be converted to a single class probability prediction by some kind of network. In the original ViT and Masked Autoencoder, they used a dummy [CLS] token, in emulation of the BERT language model. The output at [CLS] is the classification token, which is then processed by a LayerNorm-feedforward-softmax module into a probability distribution. Global average pooling (GAP) does not use the dummy token, but simply takes the average of all output tokens as the classification token. It was mentioned in the original ViT as being equally good. Multihead attention pooling (MAP) applies a multiheaded attention block to pooling. Specifically, it takes as input a list of vectors x 1 , x 2 , … , x n {\displaystyle x_{1},x_{2},\dots ,x_{n}} , which might be thought of as the output vectors of a layer of a ViT. The output from MAP is M u l t i h e a d e d A t t e n t i o n ( Q , V , V ) {\displaystyle \mathrm {MultiheadedAttention} (Q,V,V)} , where q {\displaystyle q} is a trainable query vector, and V {\displaystyle V} is the matrix with rows being x 1 , x 2 , … , x n {\displaystyle x_{1},x_{2},\dots ,x_{n}} . This was first proposed in the Set Transformer architecture. Later papers demonstrated that GAP and MAP both perform better than BERT-like pooling. A variant of MAP was proposed as class attention, which applies MAP, then feedforward, then MAP again. Re-attention was proposed to allow training deep ViT. It changes the multiheaded attention module. === Masked Autoencoder === The Masked Autoencoder took inspiration from denoising autoencoders and context encoders. It has two ViTs put end-to-end. The first one ("encoder") takes in image patches with positional encoding, and outputs vectors representing each patch. The second one (called "decoder", even though it is still an encoder-only Transformer) takes in vectors with positional encoding and outputs image patches again. ==== Training ==== During training, input images (224px x 224 px in the original implementation) are split along a designated number of lines on each axis, producing image patches. A certain percentage of patches are selected to be masked out by mask tokens, while all others are retained in the image. The network is tasked with reconstructing the image from the remaining unmasked patches. Mask tokens in the original implementation are learnable vector quantities. A linear projection with positional embeddings is then applied to the vector of unmasked patches. Experiments varying mask ratio on networks trained on the ImageNet-1K dataset found 75% mask ratios achieved high performance on both finetuning and linear-probing of the encoder's latent space. The MAE processes only unmasked patches during training, increasing the efficiency of data processing in the encoder and lowering the memory usage of the transformer. A less computationally-intensive ViT is used for the decoder in the original implementation of the MAE. Masked patches are added back to the output of the encoder block as mask tokens and both are fed into the decoder. A reconstruction loss is computed for the masked patches to assess network performance. ==== Prediction ==== In prediction, the decoder architecture is discarded entirely. The input image is split into patches by the same algorithm as in training, but no patches are masked out. A linear projection wi