Deepgram and PyTorch: The Origins of Our Foundational AI Company

First things first: What’s a foundational AI company?

Well, many businesses out there call themselves “AI companies” because they somehow folded AI into their products on the side. Maybe a publishing company has Grammarly somewhere in its editing pipeline. Maybe a marketing firm will play with a GPT model to generate snappy headlines. Sure, AI is involved, but these are still publishing companies, not AI companies, at their core.

When you hear the words “foundational AI company” think of a business whose primary goal is to discover, develop, and apply frontier technologies in machine learning to the real world. Think of businesses like OpenAI or Deepgram.

In the case of Deepgram, our main product is a Speech-to-Text API. This API calls deep neural networks—the leading edge of AI—after all. In fact, from a phonetic and technological perspective, any speech-to-text software needs to have AI running under the hood.

Why?

Well, long story short, much like how everyone has a unique fingerprint, audio waveforms are like snowflakes. The same person can say the same word, with the same voice, in the same tone, and all the spectrograms would come out different.

As a result, it’s essentially impossible to map any given spectrogram or waveform to any given word because there are an infinite number of valid waveforms that can map to the word “Deepgram.” Or the word “computer." Or the word “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”