Godmothers of AI

Between two and three percent of women internationally receive venture capital funding, this does not mean young female founders should stop building.

In this episode of The Unseen, Claire Belhassine speaks with Ava Oppenheimer, founder of TryIto and Godmothers cover star, about the mathematical foundation AI forgot, the buried history of women in computing, and why the most important way to talk about AI right now is through a philosophical lens.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• How Ava emailed NASA at eleven, got a response, and stayed in touch.
• What happens when you give a computer too much physics to deal with.
• How aerospace engineering and fashion styling led to the problem her company sets out to solve.
• Why computers were women before computers existed, and what the history of the NASA computing rooms reveals about who gets written out of the story.
• How ENIAC, one of the first electronic computers, was operated by six women.
• Why neural networks replicate the brain, why the brain remains so profoundly misunderstood, and what that means for AI.
• How hallucinations in AI go back to intuition, the way a child learns by saying something back and being corrected, and why that is so hard to encode in a machine.
• Why between two and three percent of women internationally receive VC funding
• Why more and more technologists are converting to philosophy, and what that shift tells us about where AI is actually heading.
• What embodiment offers that AI cannot replicate, and why remembering we have bodies matters more than ever.
• Ava's favourite fictional robot, and what an enabler has to do with the future of technology.

ABOUT AVA OPPENHEIMER

Ava Oppenheimer studied aerospace engineering, worked as a fashion stylist on music videos, and joined Synthesia to work on volumetric capture research before founding TryIto. What started as a fashion-tech company solving fit-accurate virtual try-ons became something larger: a mission to fix the mathematical and physical foundations that AI is built on. She describes TryIto as building the missing compute layer AI needs to scale into real-world systems, making physical simulation stable and computationally efficient at scale. She is also the cover star of Issue Zero of the Godmothers zine, The Invisible Revolution. She lives and works in London.

If you are an investor and Ava's work resonates, find her at tryito.io.

FURTHER READING AND VIEWING

TryIto: tryito.io

Godmothers Zine Issue Zero, The Invisible Revolution, featuring Ava's cover story: www.godmothers.ai

Hidden Figures, dir. Theodore Melfi

ABOUT THE UNSEEN

The Unseen is a podcast from Godmothers Studio exploring the women whose ideas, work and imagination shape technology, culture and the world we are building.

Every Godmother starts by seeing something the rest of the world cannot yet see.

www.godmothers.ai

This episode was produced by Godmothers Studio.

Co-Producers: Saskia Cookson and Gianluca Allaria.

Presented by Claire Belhassine. Music by Tara Lily. Sound by Kit Proudfoot.

Newsletter sign up: www.godmothers.ai

Instagram: @godmothers.ai

LinkedIn: Godmothers of AI

Issue Zero of the Godmothers Zine, The Invisible Revolution (purchase via website)

www.godmothers.ai

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