The Apple FaceID Co-Inventor Building a Frontier AI Model for the Human Brain
Startup Hemispheric has raised $52 million to develop an AI model that analyzes brain activity without invasive surgery. The founders, including a former Apple FaceID developer, used data from 100,000 volunteers to train the model.
Why it matters
This technology could revolutionize medical diagnostics for conditions like Alzheimer's and depression by providing non-invasive, data-driven insights into brain health.
Now, Gidi Littwin’s startup, Hemispheric, has raised $52 million in funding after gathering data on 100,000 people’s brains to train deep learning models to examine the brain without the need for invasive procedures.
Littwin left Apple in 2020, looking for a change. He found it when his Hemispheric cofounder Hagai Lalazar cold-messaged him on LinkedIn. Lalazar had begun to develop artificial intelligence to study the brain without the need for surgery, and was looking for a commercially minded cofounder to drive the company forward. By the time he found Littwin, he had spoken to around 75 candidates.
Littwin had helped develop FaceID, and at that time was working on hand-tracking for an augmented reality product, the Vision Pro. As part of this, he had to collect what he told WIRED were “hundreds of thousands of subjects’ worth of data” to train the deep learning models powering the technology.
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