An Exciting Partnership With The Technical University of Munich

Our mission at the AI Foundation is to responsibly move the world forward by giving each of us our own AI. To responsibly execute this mission, we have to ensure that everyone has the tools to protect themselves from the potential dangers of such technologies. Thus, we set out from day one to unite the world’s top innovators, AI scientists, engineers, and investors who share our same commitment to this responsibility.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we have been collaborating with one such team at the Technical University of Munich’s (TUM) Visual Computing Lab, led by globally respected scientist Professor Matthias Niessner. TUM is one of the top research institutions in computer vision, graphics, and machine learning, focusing on cutting-edge techniques for 3D reconstruction, semantic 3D scene understanding, video editing, AI-driven video synthesis, and forgery detection. They created Face2Face (you may have caught Matthias on Jimmy Kimmel), the technology behind many of the fake videos you’ve probably seen floating around the internet (like this one).

Our non-profit is dedicated to fighting the potential risks of AI by building and sharing Guardian AI tools like our first product, Reality Defender. We are working to make this freely available for everyone to combat developments like deepfakes that challenge our material reality. Our collaboration with TUM, specifically focused on detecting and flagging media forgeries (fake images and videos), has already led to the publication of several papers and the release of a public dataset that other researchers can build upon.

We are now in a paradigm where authenticity of images and videos can no longer be taken at face value, as artificial intelligence and other technologies allow for instant generation of complex fakes. As a result of the proliferation of fakes, human agency and free thinking are at risk. The AI Foundation is committed to addressing both imminent and distant future threats through our partnerships. And by partnering with TUM, we are confident that we have added another great ally to this mission.

We look forward to continuing to push the limits of cutting-edge research as part of this partnership and are dedicated to openly sharing our research breakthroughs and the tools we build so we can all benefit together.