Cleanlab: The History, Present, and Future

Cleanlab is a startup that aims to make AI work reliably with noisy, real-world data and labels. Founded by Curtis Northcutt, the company spun out of his decade-long PhD research at MIT. The foundational work was done in collaboration with Isaac Chuang, inventor of the first working quantum computer. Cleanlab's mission is to empower AI to work with real-world data and solve human-centric problems that previously seemed unsolvable due to label errors. The company has grown rapidly since its incorporation in late 2021, with dozens of tech, healthcare, finance, and data-related companies using their technology. Cleanlab's approach is based on math and science published in top peer-reviewed conferences and journals in machine learning and AI. The company believes in free dissemination of ideas and information, which is why they make all their research contributions public and open-access, including algorithms, code, and datasets. In the future, Cleanlab envisions a world where AI can fulfill its promise to empower humanity, even though human data is messy. They aim to build a world where medical practitioners can trust machine learning models to make reliable diagnoses by using Cleanlab to train on cleaned data. The company's ultimate goal is to create a world where AI actually works for people and their real-world, messy data.