Segment Anything Model and the Hard Problems of Computer Vision — with Joseph Nelson of Roboflow

2023 is the year of Multimodal AI, and Latent Space is going multimodal too!

* This podcast comes with a video demo at the 1hr mark and it’s a good excuse to launch our YouTube - please subscribe!

* We are also holding two events in San Francisco — the first AI | UX meetup next week (already full; we’ll send a recap here on the newsletter) and Latent Space Liftoff Day on May 4th (signup here; but get in touch if you have a high profile launch you’d like to make).

* We also joined the Chroma/OpenAI ChatGPT Plugins Hackathon last week where we won the Turing and Replit awards and met some of you in person!

This post featured on Hacker News.

Out of the five senses of the human body, I’d put sight at the very top. But weirdly when it comes to AI, Computer Vision has felt left out of the recent wave compared to image generation, text reasoning, and even audio transcription. We got our first taste of it with the OCR capabilities demo in the GPT-4 Developer Livestream, but to date GPT-4’s vision capability has not yet been released.

Meta AI leapfrogged OpenAI and everyone else by fully open sourcing their Segment Anything Model (SAM) last week, complete with paper, model, weights, data (6x more images and 400x more masks than OpenImages), and a very slick demo website. This is a marked change to their previous LLaMA release, which was not commercially licensed. The response has been ecstatic:

SAM was the talk of the town at the ChatGPT Plugins Hackathon and I was fortunate enough to book Joseph Nelson who was frantically integrating SAM into Roboflow this past weekend. As a passionate instructor, hacker, and founder, Joseph is possibly the single best person in the world to bring the rest of us up to speed on the state of Computer Vision and the implications of SAM. I was already a fan of him from his previous pod with (hopefully future guest) Beyang Liu of Sourcegraph, so this served as a personal catchup as well.

Enjoy! and let us know what other news/models/guests you’d like to have us discuss!

- swyx

Recorded in-person at the beautiful StudioPod studios in San Francisco.

Full transcript is below the fold.

Show Notes

* Joseph’s links: Twitter, Linkedin, Personal

* Sourcegraph Podcast and Game Theory Story

* Represently

* Roboflow at Pioneer and YCombinator

* Udacity Self Driving Car dataset story

* Computer Vision Annotation Formats

* SAM recap - top things to know for those living in a cave

* https://segment-anything.com/

* https://segment-anything.com/demo

* https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.02643.pdf 

* https://ai.facebook.com/blog/segment-anything-foundation-model-image-segmentation/

* https://blog.roboflow.com/segment-anything-breakdown/

* https://ai.facebook.com/datasets/segment-anything/

* Ask Roboflow https://ask.roboflow.ai/

* GPT-4 Multimodal https://blog.roboflow.com/gpt-4-impact-speculation/

Cut for time:

* WSJ mention

* Des Moines Register story

* All In Pod: timestamped mention

* In Forbes: underrepresented investors in Series A

* Roboflow greatest hits

* https://blog.roboflow.com/mountain-dew-contest-computer-vision/

* https://blog.roboflow.com/self-driving-car-dataset-missing-pedestrians/

* https://blog.roboflow.com/nerualhash-collision/ and Apple CSAM issue 

* https://www.rf100.org/

Timestamps

* [00:00:19] Introducing Joseph

* [00:02:28] Why Iowa

* [00:05:52] Origin of Roboflow

* [00:16:12] Why Computer Vision

* [00:17:50] Computer Vision Use Cases

* [00:26:15] The Economics of Annotation/Segmentation

* [00:32:17] Computer Vision Annotation Formats

* [00:36:41] Intro to Computer Vision & Segmentation

* [00:39:08] YOLO

* [00:44:44] World Knowledge of Foundation Models

* [00:46:21] Segment Anything Model

* [00:51:29] SAM: Zero Shot Transfer

* [00:51:53] SAM: Promptability

* [00:53:24] SAM: Model Assisted Labeling

* [00:56:03] SAM doesn't have labels

* [00:59:23] Labeling on the Browser

* [01:00:28] Roboflow + SAM Video Demo

* [01:07:27] Future Predictions

* [01:08:04] GPT4 Multimodality

* [01:09:27] Remaining Hard Problems

* [01:13:57] Ask Roboflow (2019)

* [01:15:26] How to keep up in AI

Transcripts

[00:00:00] Hello everyone. It is me swyx and I'm here with Joseph Nelson. Hey, welcome to the studio. It's nice. Thanks so much having me. We, uh, have a professional setup in here.

[00:00:19] Introducing Joseph

[00:00:19] Joseph, you and I have known each other online for a little bit. I first heard about you on the Source Graph podcast with bian and I highly, highly recommend that there's a really good game theory story that is the best YC application story I've ever heard and I won't tease further cuz they should go listen to that.

[00:00:36] What do you think? It's a good story. It's a good story. It's a good story. So you got your Bachelor of Economics from George Washington, by the way. Fun fact. I'm also an econ major as well. You are very politically active, I guess you, you did a lot of, um, interning in political offices and you were responding to, um, the, the, the sheer amount of load that the Congress people have in terms of the, the support.

[00:01:00] So you built, representing, which is Zendesk for Congress. And, uh, I liked in your source guide podcast how you talked about how being more responsive to, to constituents is always a good thing no matter what side of the aisle you're on. You also had a sideline as a data science instructor at General Assembly.

[00:01:18] As a consultant in your own consultancy, and you also did a bunch of hackathon stuff with Magic Sudoku, which is your transition from N L P into computer vision. And apparently at TechCrunch Disrupt, disrupt in 2019, you tried to add chess and that was your whole villain origin story for, Hey, computer vision's too hard.

[00:01:36] That's full, the platform to do that. Uh, and now you're co-founder c e o of RoboFlow. So that's your bio. Um, what's not in there that

[00:01:43] people should know about you? One key thing that people realize within maybe five minutes of meeting me, uh, I'm from Iowa. Yes. And it's like a funnily novel thing. I mean, you know, growing up in Iowa, it's like everyone you know is from Iowa.

[00:01:56] But then when I left to go to school, there was not that many Iowans at gw and people were like, oh, like you're, you're Iowa Joe. Like, you know, how'd you find out about this school out here? I was like, oh, well the Pony Express was running that day, so I was able to send. So I really like to lean into it.

[00:02:11] And so you kind of become a default ambassador for places that. People don't meet a lot of other people from, so I've kind of taken that upon myself to just make it be a, a part of my identity. So, you know, my handle everywhere Joseph of Iowa, like I I, you can probably find my social security number just from knowing that that's my handle.

[00:02:25] Cuz I put it plastered everywhere. So that's, that's probably like one thing.

[00:02:28] Why Iowa

[00:02:28] What's your best pitch for Iowa? Like why is

[00:02:30] Iowa awesome? The people Iowa's filled with people that genuinely care. You know, if you're waiting a long line, someone's gonna strike up a conversation, kinda ask how you were Devrel and it's just like a really genuine place.

[00:02:40] It was a wonderful place to grow up too at the time, you know, I thought it was like, uh, yeah, I was kind of embarrassed and then be from there. And then I actually kinda looking back it's like, wow, you know, there's good schools, smart people friendly. The, uh, high school that I went to actually Ben Silverman, the CEO and, or I guess former CEO and co-founder of Pinterest and I have the same teachers in high school at different.

[00:03:01] The co-founder, or excuse me, the creator of crispr, the gene editing technique, Dr. Jennifer. Doudna. Oh, so that's the patent debate. There's Doudna. Oh, and then there's Fang Zang. Uh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. So Dr. Fang Zang, who I think ultimately won the patent war, uh, but is also from the same high school.

[00:03:18] Well, she won the patent, but Jennifer won the

[00:03:20] prize.

[00:03:21] I think that's probably, I think that's probably, I, I mean I looked into it a little closely. I think it was something like she won the patent for CRISPR first existing and then Feng got it for, uh, first use on humans, which I guess for commercial reasons is the, perhaps more, more interesting one. But I dunno, biolife Sciences, is that my area of expertise?

[00:03:38] Yep. Knowing people that came from Iowa that do cool things, certainly is. Yes. So I'll claim it. Um, but yeah, I, I, we, um, at Roble actually, we're, we're bringing the full team to Iowa for the very first time this last week of, of April. And, well, folks from like Scotland all over, that's your company

[00:03:54] retreat.

[00:03:54] The Iowa,

[00:03:55] yeah. Nice. Well, so we do two a year. You know, we've done Miami, we've done. Some of the smaller teams have done like Nashville or Austin or these sorts of places, but we said, you know, let's bring it back to kinda the origin and the roots. Uh, and we'll, we'll bring the full team to, to Des Moines, Iowa.

[00:04:13] So, yeah, like I was mentioning, folks from California to Scotland and many places in between are all gonna descend upon Des Moines for a week of, uh, learning and working. So maybe you can check in with those folks. If, what do they, what do they decide and interpret about what's cool. Our state. Well, one thing, are you actually headquartered in Des Moines on paper?

[00:04:30] Yes. Yeah.

[00:04:30] Isn't that amazing? That's like everyone's Delaware and you're like,

[00:04:33] so doing research. Well, we're, we're incorporated in Delaware. Okay. We we're Delaware Sea like, uh, most companies, but our headquarters Yeah. Is in Des Moines. And part of that's a few things. One, it's like, you know, there's this nice Iowa pride.

[00:04:43] And second is, uh, Brad and I both grew up in Brad Mc, co-founder and I grew up in, in Des Moines. And we met each other in the year 2000. We looked it up for the, the YC app. So, you know, I think, I guess more of my life I've known Brad than not, uh, which is kind of crazy. Wow. And during yc, we did it during 2020, so it was like the height of Covid.

[00:05:01] And so we actually got a house in Des Moines and lived, worked outta there. I mean, more credit to. So I moved back. I was living in DC at the time, I moved back to to Des Moines. Brad was living in Des Moines, but he moved out of a house with his. To move into what we called our hacker house. And then we had one, uh, member of the team as well, Jacob Sorowitz, who moved from Minneapolis down to Des Moines for the summer.

[00:05:21] And frankly, uh, code was a great time to, to build a YC company cuz there wasn't much else to do. I mean, it's kinda like wash your groceries and code. It's sort of the, that was the routine

[00:05:30] and you can use, uh, computer vision to help with your groceries as well.

[00:05:33] That's exactly right. Tell me what to make.

[00:05:35] What's in my fridge? What should I cook? Oh, we'll, we'll, we'll cover

[00:05:37] that for with the G P T four, uh, stuff. Exactly. Okay. So you have been featured with in a lot of press events. Uh, but maybe we'll just cover the origin story a little bit in a little bit more detail. So we'll, we'll cover robo flow and then we'll cover, we'll go into segment anything.

[00:05:52] Origin of Roboflow

[00:05:52] But, uh, I think it's important for people to understand. Robo just because it gives people context for what you're about to show us at the end of the podcast. So Magic Sudoku tc, uh, techers Disrupt, and then you go, you join Pioneer, which is Dan Gross's, um, YC before yc.

[00:06:07] Yeah. That's how I think about it.

[00:06:08] Yeah, that's a good way. That's a good description of it. Yeah. So I mean, robo flow kind of starts as you mentioned with this magic Sudoku thing. So you mentioned one of my prior business was a company called Represent, and you nailed it. I mean, US Congress gets 80 million messages a year. We built tools that auto sorted them.

[00:06:23] They didn't use any intelligent auto sorting. And this is somewhat a solved problem in natural language processing of doing topic modeling or grouping together similar sentiment and things like this. And as you mentioned, I'd like, I worked in DC for a bit and been exposed to some of these problems and when I was like, oh, you know, with programming you can build solutions.

[00:06:40] And I think the US Congress is, you know, the US kind of United States is a support center, if you will, and the United States is sports center runs on pretty old software, so mm-hmm. We, um, we built a product for that. It was actually at the time when I was working on representing. Brad, his prior business, um, is a social games company called Hatchlings.

[00:07:00] Uh, he phoned me in, in 2017, apple had released augmented reality kit AR kit. And Brad and I are both kind of serial hackers, like I like to go to hackathons, don't really understand new technology until he build something with them type folks. And when AR Kit came out, Brad decided he wanted to build a game with it that would solve Sudoku puzzles.

[00:07:19] And the idea of the game would be you take your phone, you hover hold it over top of a Sudoku puzzle, it recognizes the state of the board where it is, and then it fills it all in just right before your eyes. And he phoned me and I was like, Brad, this sounds awesome and sounds like you kinda got it figured out.

[00:07:34] What, what's, uh, what, what do you think I can do here? It's like, well, the machine learning piece of this is the part that I'm most uncertain about. Uh, doing the digit recognition and, um, filling in some of those results. I was like, well, I mean digit recognition's like the hell of world of, of computer vision.

[00:07:48] That's Yeah, yeah, MNIST, right. So I was like, that that part should be the, the easy part. I was like, ah, I'm, he's like, I'm not so super sure, but. You know, the other parts, the mobile ar game mechanics, I've got pretty well figured out. I was like, I, I think you're wrong. I think you're thinking about the hard part is the easy part.

[00:08:02] And he is like, no, you're wrong. The hard part is the easy part. And so long story short, we built this thing and released Magic Sudoku and it kind of caught the Internet's attention of what you could do with augmented reality and, and with computer vision. It, you know, made it to the front ofer and some subreddits it run Product Hunt Air app of the year.

[00:08:20] And it was really a, a flash in the pan type app, right? Like we were both running separate companies at the time and mostly wanted to toy around with, with new technology. And, um, kind of a fun fact about Magic Sudoku winning product Hunt Air app of the year. That was the same year that I think the model three came out.

[00:08:34] And so Elon Musk won a Golden Kitty who we joked that we share an award with, with Elon Musk. Um, the thinking there was that this is gonna set off a, a revolution of if two random engineers can put together something that makes something, makes a game programmable and at interactive, then surely lots of other engineers will.

[00:08:53] Do similar of adding programmable layers on top of real world objects around us. Earlier we were joking about objects in your fridge, you know, and automatically generating recipes and these sorts of things. And like I said, that was 2017. Roboflow was actually co-found, or I guess like incorporated in, in 2019.

[00:09:09] So we put this out there, nothing really happened. We went back to our day jobs of, of running our respective businesses, I sold Represently and then as you mentioned, kind of did like consulting stuff to figure out the next sort of thing to, to work on, to get exposed to various problems. Brad appointed a new CEO at his prior business and we got together that summer of 2019.

[00:09:27] We said, Hey, you know, maybe we should return to that idea that caught a lot of people's attention and shows what's possible. And you know what, what kind of gives, like the future is here. And we have no one's done anything since. No one's done anything. So why is, why are there not these, these apps proliferated everywhere.

[00:09:42] Yeah. And so we said, you know, what we'll do is, um, to add this software layer to the real world. Will build, um, kinda like a super app where if you pointed it at anything, it will recognize it and then you can interact with it. We'll release a developer platform and allow people to make their own interfaces, interactivity for whatever object they're looking at.

[00:10:04] And we decided to start with board games because one, we had a little bit of history there with, with Sudoku two, there's social by default. So if one person, you know finds it, then they'd probably share it among their friend. Group three. There's actually relatively few barriers to entry aside from like, you know, using someone else's brand name in your, your marketing materials.

[00:10:19] Yeah. But other than that, there's no real, uh, inhibitors to getting things going and, and four, it's, it's just fun. It would be something that'd be bring us enjoyment to work on. So we spent that summer making, uh, boggle the four by four word game provable, where, you know, unlike Magic Sudoku, which to be clear, totally ruins the game, uh, you, you have to solve Sudoku puzzle.

[00:10:40] You don't need to do anything else. But with Boggle, if you and I are playing, we might not find all of the words that adjacent letter tiles. Unveil. So if we have a, an AI tell us, Hey, here's like the best combination of letters that make high scoring words. And so we, we made boggle and released it and that, and that did okay.

[00:10:56] I mean maybe the most interesting story was there's a English as a second language program in, in Canada that picked it up and used it as a part of their curriculum to like build vocabulary, which I thought was kind of inspiring. Example, and what happens just when you put things on the internet and then.

[00:11:09] We wanted to build one for chess. So this is where you mentioned we went to 2019. TechCrunch Disrupt TechCrunch. Disrupt holds a Hackathon. And this is actually, you know, when Brad and I say we really became co-founders, because we fly out to San Francisco, we rent a hotel room in the Tenderloin. We, uh, we, we, uh, have one room and there's like one, there's room for one bed, and then we're like, oh, you said there was a cot, you know, on the, on the listing.

[00:11:32] So they like give us a little, a little cot, the end of the cot, like bled and over into like the bathroom. So like there I am sleeping on the cot with like my head in the bathroom and the Tenderloin, you know, fortunately we're at a hackathon glamorous. Yeah. There wasn't, there wasn't a ton of sleep to be had.

[00:11:46] There is, you know, we're, we're just like making and, and shipping these, these sorts of many

[00:11:50] people with this hack. So I've never been to one of these things, but

[00:11:52] they're huge. Right? Yeah. The Disrupt Hackathon, um, I don't, I don't know numbers, but few hundreds, you know, classically had been a place where it launched a lot of famous Yeah.

[00:12:01] Sort of flare. Yeah. And I think it's, you know, kind of slowed down as a place for true company generation. But for us, Brad and I, who likes just doing hackathons, being, making things in compressed time skills, it seemed like a, a fun thing to do. And like I said, we'd been working on things, but it was only there that like, you're, you're stuck in a maybe not so great glamorous situation together and you're just there to make a, a program and you wanna make it be the best and compete against others.

[00:12:26] And so we add support to the app that we were called was called Board Boss. We couldn't call it anything with Boggle cause of IP rights were called. So we called it Board Boss and it supported Boggle and then we were gonna support chess, which, you know, has no IP rights around it. Uh, it's an open game.

[00:12:39] And we did so in 48 hours, we built an app that, or added fit capability to. Point your phone at a chess board. It understands the state of the chess board and converts it to um, a known notation. Then it passes that to stock fish, the open source chess engine for making move recommendations and it makes move recommendations to, to players.

[00:13:00] So you could either play against like an ammunition to AI or improve your own game. We learn that one of the key ways users like to use this was just to record their games. Cuz it's almost like reviewing game film of what you should have done differently. Game. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I guess the highlight of, uh, of chess Boss was, you know, we get to the first round of judging, we get to the second round of judging.

[00:13:16] And during the second round of judging, that's when like, TechCrunch kind of brings around like some like celebs and stuff. They'll come by. Evan Spiegel drops by Ooh. Oh, and he uh, he comes up to our, our, our booth and um, he's like, oh, so what does, what does this all do? And you know, he takes an interest in it cuz the underpinnings of, of AR interacting with the.

[00:13:33] And, uh, he is kinda like, you know, I could use this to like cheat on chess with my friends. And we're like, well, you know, that wasn't exactly the, the thesis of why we made it, but glad that, uh, at least you think it's kind of neat. Um, wait, but he already started Snapchat by then? Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. This, this is 2019, I think.

[00:13:49] Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, he was kind of just checking out things that were new and, and judging didn't end up winning any, um, awards within Disrupt, but I think what we won was actually. Maybe more important maybe like the, the quote, like the co-founders medal along the way. Yep. The friends we made along the way there we go to, to play to the meme.

[00:14:06] I would've preferred to win, to be clear. Yes. You played a win. So you did win, uh,

[00:14:11] $15,000 from some Des Moines, uh, con

[00:14:14] contest. Yeah. Yeah. The, uh, that was nice. Yeah. Slightly after that we did, we did win. Um, some, some grants and some other things for some of the work that we've been doing. John Papa John supporting the, uh, the local tech scene.

[00:14:24] Yeah. Well, so there's not the one you're thinking of. Okay. Uh, there's a guy whose name is Papa John, like that's his, that's his, that's his last name. His first name is John. So it's not the Papa John's you're thinking of that has some problematic undertones. It's like this guy who's totally different. I feel bad for him.

[00:14:38] His press must just be like, oh, uh, all over the place. But yeah, he's this figure in the Iowa entrepreneurial scene who, um, he actually was like doing SPACs before they were cool and these sorts of things, but yeah, he funds like grants that encourage entrepreneurship in the state. And since we'd done YC and in the state, we were eligible for some of the awards that they were providing.

[00:14:56] But yeah, it was disrupt that we realized, you know, um, the tools that we made, you know, it took us better part of a summer to add Boggle support and it took us 48 hours to add chest support. So adding the ability for programmable interfaces for any object, we built a lot of those internal tools and our apps were kind of doing like the very famous shark fin where like it picks up really fast, then it kind of like slowly peters off.

[00:15:20] Mm-hmm. And so we're like, okay, if we're getting these like shark fin graphs, we gotta try something different. Um, there's something different. I remember like the week before Thanksgiving 2019 sitting down and we wrote this Readme for, actually it's still the Readme at the base repo of Robo Flow today has spent relatively unedited of the manifesto.

[00:15:36] Like, we're gonna build tools that enable people to make the world programmable. And there's like six phases and, you know, there's still, uh, many, many, many phases to go into what we wrote even at that time to, to present. But it's largely been, um, right in line with what we thought we would, we would do, which is give engineers the tools to add software to real world objects, which is largely predicated on computer vision. So finding the right images, getting the right sorts of video frames, maybe annotating them, uh, finding the right sort of models to use to do this, monitoring the performance, all these sorts of things. And that from, I mean, we released that in early 2020, and it's kind of, that's what's really started to click.

[00:16:12] Why Computer Vision

[00:16:12] Awesome. I think we should just kind

[00:16:13] of

[00:16:14] go right into where you are today and like the, the products that you offer, just just to give people an overview and then we can go into the, the SAM stuff. So what is the clear, concise elevator pitch? I think you mentioned a bunch of things like make the world programmable so you don't ha like computer vision is a means to an end.

[00:16:30] Like there's, there's something beyond that. Yeah.

[00:16:32] I mean, the, the big picture mission for the business and the company and what we're working on is, is making the world programmable, making it read and write and interactive, kind of more entertaining, more e. More fun and computer vision is the technology by which we can achieve that pretty quickly.

[00:16:48] So like the one liner for the, the product in, in the company is providing engineers with the tools for data and models to build programmable interfaces. Um, and that can be workflows, that could be the, uh, data processing, it could be the actual model training. But yeah, Rob helps you use production ready computer vision workflows fast.

[00:17:10] And I like that.

[00:17:11] In part of your other pitch that I've heard, uh, is that you basically scale from the very smallest scales to the very largest scales, right? Like the sort of microbiology use case all the way to

[00:17:20] astronomy. Yeah. Yeah. The, the joke that I like to make is like anything, um, underneath a microscope and, and through a telescope and everything in between needs to, needs to be seen.

[00:17:27] I mean, we have people that run models in outer space, uh, underwater remote places under supervision and, and known places. The crazy thing is that like, All parts of, of not just the world, but the universe need to be observed and understood and acted upon. So vision is gonna be, I dunno, I feel like we're in the very, very, very beginnings of all the ways we're gonna see it.

[00:17:50] Computer Vision Use Cases

[00:17:50] Awesome. Let's go into a lo a few like top use cases, cuz I think that really helps to like highlight the big names that you've, big logos that you've already got. I've got Walmart and Cardinal Health, but I don't, I don't know if you wanna pull out any other names, like, just to illustrate, because the reason by the way, the reason I think that a lot of developers don't get into computer vision is because they think they don't need it.

[00:18:11] Um, or they think like, oh, like when I do robotics, I'll do it. But I think if, if you see like the breadth of use cases, then you get a little bit more inspiration as to like, oh, I can use

[00:18:19] CVS lfa. Yeah. It's kind of like, um, you know, by giving, by making it be so straightforward to use vision, it becomes almost like a given that it's a set of features that you could power on top of it.

[00:18:32] And like you mentioned, there's, yeah, there's Fortune One there over half the Fortune 100. I've used the, the tools that Robel provides just as much as 250,000 developers. And so over a quarter million engineers finding and developing and creating various apps, and I mean, those apps are, are, are far and wide.

[00:18:49] Just as you mentioned. I mean everything from say, like, one I like to talk about was like sushi detection of like finding the like right sorts of fish and ingredients that are in a given piece of, of sushi that you're looking at to say like roof estimation of like finding. If there's like, uh, hail damage on, on a given roof, of course, self-driving cars and understanding the scenes around us is sort of the, you know, very early computer vision everywhere.

[00:19:13] Use case hardhat detection, like finding out if like a given workplace is, is, is safe, uh, disseminate, have the right p p p on or p p e on, are there the right distance from various machines? A huge place that vision has been used is environmental monitoring. Uh, what's the count of species? Can we verify that the environment's not changing in unexpected ways or like river banks are become, uh, becoming recessed in ways that we anticipate from satellite imagery, plant phenotyping.

[00:19:37] I mean, people have used these apps for like understanding their plants and identifying them. And that dataset that's actually largely open, which is what's given a proliferation to the iNaturalist, is, is that whole, uh, hub of, of products. Lots of, um, people that do manufacturing. So, like Rivian for example, is a Rubal customer, and you know, they're trying to scale from 1000 cars to 25,000 cars to a hundred thousand cars in very short order.

[00:20:00] And that relies on having the. Ability to visually ensure that every part that they're making is produced correctly and right in time. Medical use cases. You know, there's actually, this morning I was emailing with a user who's accelerating early cancer detection through breaking apart various parts of cells and doing counts of those cells.

[00:20:23] And actually a lot of wet lab work that folks that are doing their PhDs or have done their PhDs are deeply familiar with that is often required to do very manually of, of counting, uh, micro plasms or, or things like this. There's. All sorts of, um, like traffic counting and smart cities use cases of understanding curb utilization to which sort of vehicles are, are present.

[00:20:44] Uh, ooh. That can be

[00:20:46] really good for city planning actually.

[00:20:47] Yeah. I mean, one of our customers does exactly this. They, they measure and do they call it like smart curb utilization, where uhhuh, they wanna basically make a curb be almost like a dynamic space where like during these amounts of time, it's zoned for this during these amounts of times.

[00:20:59] It's zoned for this based on the flows and e ebbs and flows of traffic throughout the day. So yeah, I mean the, the, the truth is that like, you're right, it's like a developer might be like, oh, how would I use vision? And then all of a sudden it's like, oh man, all these things are at my fingertips. Like I can just, everything you can see.

[00:21:13] Yeah. Right. I can just, I can just add functionality for my app to understand and ingest the way, like, and usually the way that someone gets like almost nerd sniped into this is like, they have like a home automation project, so it's like send Yeah. Give us a few. Yeah. So send me a text when, um, a package shows up so I can like prevent package theft so I can like go down and grab it right away or.

[00:21:29] We had a, uh, this one's pretty, pretty niche, but it's pretty funny. There was this guy who, during the pandemic wa, wanted to make sure his cat had like the proper, uh, workout. And so I've shared the story where he basically decided that. He'd make a cat workout machine with computer vision, you might be alone.

[00:21:43] You're like, what does that look like? Well, what he decided was he would take a robotic arm strap, a laser pointer to it, and then train a machine to recognize his cat and his cat only, and point the laser pointer consistently 10 feet away from the cat. There's actually a video of you if you type an YouTube cat laser turret, you'll find Dave's video.

[00:22:01] Uh, and hopefully Dave's cat has, has lost the weight that it needs to, cuz that's just the, that's an intense workout I have to say. But yeah, so like, that's like a, um, you know, these, uh, home automation projects are pretty common places for people to get into smart bird feeders. I've seen people that like are, are logging and understanding what sort of birds are, uh, in their background.

[00:22:18] There's a member of our team that was working on actually this as, as a whole company and has open sourced a lot of the data for doing bird species identification. And now there's, I think there's even a company that's, uh, founded to create like a smart bird feeder, like captures photos and tells you which ones you've attracted to your yard.

[00:22:32] I met that. Do, you know, get around the, uh, car sharing company that heard it? Them never used them. They did a SPAC last year and they had raised at like, They're unicorn. They raised at like 1.2 billion, I think in the, the prior round and inspected a similar price. I met the CTO of, of Getaround because he was, uh, using Rob Flow to hack into his Tesla cameras to identify other vehicles that are like often nearby him.

[00:22:56] So he's basically building his own custom license plate recognition, and he just wanted like, keep, like, keep tabs of like, when he drives by his friends or when he sees like regular sorts of folks. And so he was doing like automated license plate recognition by tapping into his, uh, camera feeds. And by the way, Elliot's like one of the like OG hackers, he was, I think one of the very first people to like, um, she break iPhones and, and these sorts of things.

[00:23:14] Mm-hmm. So yeah, the project that I want, uh, that I'm gonna work on right now for my new place in San Francisco is. There's two doors. There's like a gate and then the other door. And sometimes we like forget to close, close the gate. So like, basically if it sees that the gate is open, it'll like send us all a text or something like this to make sure that the gate is, is closed at the front of our house.

[00:23:32] That's

[00:23:32] really cool. And I'll, I'll call out one thing that readers and listeners can, uh, read out on, on your history. One of your most popular initial, um, viral blog post was about, um, autonomous vehicle data sets and how, uh, the one that Udacity was using was missing like one third of humans. And, uh, it's not, it's pretty problematic for cars to miss humans.

[00:23:53] Yeah, yeah, actually, so yeah, the Udacity self-driving car data set, which look to their credit, it was just meant to be used for, for academic use. Um, and like as a part of courses on, on Udacity, right? Yeah. But the, the team that released it, kind of hastily labeled and let it go out there to just start to use and train some models.

[00:24:11] I think that likely some, some, uh, maybe commercial use cases maybe may have come and, and used, uh, the dataset, who's to say? But Brad and I discovered this dataset. And when we were working on dataset improvement tools at Rob Flow, we ran through our tools and identified some like pretty, as you mentioned, key issues.

[00:24:26] Like for example, a lot of strollers weren't labeled and I hope our self-driving cars do those, these sorts of things. And so we relabeled the whole dataset by hand. I have this very fond memory is February, 2020. Brad and I are in Taiwan. So like Covid is actually just, just getting going. And the reason we were there is we were like, Hey, we can work on this from anywhere for a little bit.

[00:24:44] And so we spent like a, uh, let's go closer to Covid. Well, you know, I like to say we uh, we got early indicators of, uh, how bad it was gonna be. I bought a bunch of like N 90 fives before going o I remember going to the, the like buying a bunch of N 95 s and getting this craziest look like this like crazy tin hat guy.

[00:25:04] Wow. What is he doing? And then here's how you knew. I, I also got got by how bad it was gonna be. I left all of them in Taiwan cuz it's like, oh, you all need these. We'll be fine over in the us. And then come to find out, of course that Taiwan was a lot better in terms of, um, I think, yeah. Safety. But anyway, we were in Taiwan because we had planned this trip and you know, at the time we weren't super sure about the, uh, covid, these sorts of things.

[00:25:22] We always canceled it. We didn't, but I have this, this very specific time. Brad and I were riding on the train from Clay back to Taipei. It's like a four hour ride. And you mentioned Pioneer earlier, we were competing in Pioneer, which is almost like a gamified to-do list. Mm-hmm. Every week you say what you're gonna do and then other people evaluate.

[00:25:37] Did you actually do the things you said you were going to do? One of the things we said we were gonna do was like this, I think re-release of this data set. And so it's like late, we'd had a whole week, like, you know, weekend behind us and, uh, we're on this train and it was very unpleasant situation, but we relabeled this, this data set, and one sitting got it submitted before like the Sunday, Sunday countdown clock starts voting for, for.

[00:25:57] And, um, once that data got out back out there, just as you mentioned, it kind of picked up and Venture beat, um, noticed and wrote some stories about it. And we really rereleased of course, the data set that we did our best job of labeling. And now if anyone's listening, they can probably go out and like find some errors that we surely still have and maybe call us out and, you know, put us, put us on blast.

[00:26:15] The Economics of Annotation (Segmentation)

[00:26:15] But,

[00:26:16] um, well, well the reason I like this story is because it, it draws attention to the idea that annotation is difficult and basically anyone looking to use computer vision in their business who may not have an off-the-shelf data set is going to have to get involved in annotation. And I don't know what it costs.

[00:26:34] And that's probably one of the biggest hurdles for me to estimate how big a task this is. Right? So my question at a higher level is tell the customers, how do you tell customers to estimate the economics of annotation? Like how many images do, do we need? How much, how long is it gonna take? That, that kinda stuff.

[00:26:50] How much money and then what are the nuances to doing it well, right? Like, cuz obviously Udacity had a poor quality job, you guys had proved it, and there's errors every everywhere. Like where do

[00:26:59] these things go wrong? The really good news about annotation in general is that like annotation of course is a means to an end to have a model be able to recognize a thing.

[00:27:08] Increasingly there's models that are coming out that can recognize things zero shot without any annotation, which we're gonna talk about. Yeah. Which, we'll, we'll talk more about that in a moment. But in general, the good news is that like the trend is that annotation is gonna become decreasingly a blocker to starting to use computer vision in meaningful ways.

[00:27:24] Now that said, just as you mentioned, there's a lot of places where you still need to do. Annotation. I mean, even with these zero shot models, they might have of blind spots, or maybe you're a business, as you mentioned, that you know, it's proprietary data. Like only Rivian knows what a rivian is supposed to look like, right?

[00:27:39] Uh, at the time of, at the time of it being produced, like underneath the hood and, and all these sorts of things. And so, yeah, that's gonna necessarily require annotation. So your question of how long is it gonna take, how do you estimate these sorts of things, it really comes down to the complexity of the problem that you're solving and the amount of variance in the scene.

[00:27:57] So let's give some contextual examples. If you're trying to recognize, we'll say a scratch on one specific part and you have very strong lighting. You might need fewer images because you control the lighting, you know the exact part and maybe you're lucky in the scratch. Happens more often than not in similar parts or similar, uh, portions of the given part.

[00:28:17] So in that context, you, you, the function of variance, the variance is, is, is lower. So the number of images you need is also lower to start getting up to work. Now the orders of magnitude we're talking about is that like you can have an initial like working model from like 30 to 50 images. Yeah. In this context, which is shockingly low.

[00:28:32] Like I feel like there's kind of an open secret in computer vision now, the general heuristic that often. Users, is that like, you know, maybe 200 images per class is when you start to have a model that you can rely

[00:28:45] on? Rely meaning like 90, 99, 90, 90%, um,

[00:28:50] uh, like what's 85 plus 85? Okay. Um, that's good. Again, these are very, very finger in the wind estimates cuz the variance we're talking about.

[00:28:59] But the real question is like, at what point, like the framing is not like at what point do it get to 99, right? The framing is at what point can I use this thing to be better than the alternative, which is humans, which maybe humans or maybe like this problem wasn't possible at all. And so usually the question isn't like, how do I get to 99?

[00:29:15] A hundred percent? It's how do I ensure that like the value I am able to get from putting this thing in production is greater than the alternative? In fact, even if you have a model that's less accurate than humans, there might be some circumstances where you can tolerate, uh, a greater amount of inaccuracy.

[00:29:32] And if you look at the accuracy relative to the cost, Using a model is extremely cheap. Using a human for the same sort of task can be very expensive. Now, in terms of the actual accuracy of of what you get, there's probably some point at which the cost, but relative accuracy exceeds of a model, exceeds the high cost and hopefully high accuracy of, of a human comparable, like for example, there's like cameras that will track soccer balls or track events happening during sporting matches.

[00:30:02] And you can go through and you know, we actually have users that work in sports analytics. You can go through and have a human. Hours and hours of footage. Cuz not just watching their team, they're watching every other team, they're watching scouting teams, they're watching junior teams, they're watching competitors.

[00:30:15] And you could have them like, you know, track and follow every single time the ball goes within blank region of the field or every time blank player goes into, uh, this portion of the field. And you could have, you know, exact, like a hundred percent accuracy if that person, maybe, maybe not a hundred, a human may be like 95, 90 7% accuracy of every single time the ball is in this region or this player is on the field.

[00:30:36] Truthfully, maybe if you're scouting analytics, you actually don't need 97% accuracy of knowing that that player is on the field. And in fact, if you can just have a model run at a 1000th, a 10000th of the cost and goes through and finds all the times that Messi was present on the field mm-hmm. That the ball was in this region of the.

[00:30:54] Then even if that model is slightly less accurate, the cost is just so orders of magnitude different. And the stakes like the stakes of this problem, of knowing like the total number of minutes that Messi played will say are such that we have a higher air tolerance, that it's a no-brainer to start to use Yeah, a computer vision model in this context.

[00:31:12] So not every problem requires equivalent or greater human performance. Even when it does, you'd be surprised at how fast models get there. And in the times when you, uh, really look at a problem, the question is, how much accuracy do I need to start to get value from this? This thing, like the package example is a great one, right?

[00:31:27] Like I could in theory set up a camera that's constantly watching in front of my porch and I could watch the camera whenever I have a package and then go down. But of course, I'm not gonna do that. I value my time to do other sorts of things instead. And so like there, there's this net new capability of, oh, great, I can have an always on thing that tells me when a package shows up, even if you know the, the thing that's gonna text me.

[00:31:46] When a package shows up, let's say a flat pack shows up instead of a box and it doesn't know what a flat pack likes, looks like initially. Doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because I didn't have this capability at all before. And I think that's the true case where a lot of computer vision problems exist is like it.

[00:32:00] It's like you didn't even have this capability, this superpower before at all, let alone assigning a given human to do the task. And that's where we see like this explosion of, of value.

[00:32:10] Awesome. Awesome. That