In a 7th-grade speech class, Cyril Gorlla was one of many students to speak about something he was passionate about. His classmates shared their favorite sports teams, movies and food. Young Gorlla gave a breakdown of Google’s developer conference that year, describing the operating system architecture of the Android smart phone.   Today, Gorlla, 23, is the co-founder and CEO of CTGT, a startup company that utilizes a technology to eliminate artificial intelligence hallucinations (incorrect or misleading AI results). The work Gorlla and his partner, co-founder and CTO Trevor Tuttle, were doing attracted partnerships with the likes of businessman and television personality Mark Cuban and Zapier co-founder Mike Knoop.  “I was doing undergrad and grad programs at UCSD (University of California San Diego),” Gorlla said during a recent telephone interview from his office in San Francisco. “I finished my undergrad but dropped out this year in April to pursue the company.”  Gorlla was born in India and came to Newhall with his family when he was 2 years old. His mother, Suhasini Gorlla, said her son developed an interest in computers early on. He’d take apart computers and then reassemble them.   Then there was the time Gorlla’s mother went back to school — to College of the Canyons. Gorlla was only 11 years old. He would help his mom with her assignments.   “I actually did that class with her,” he said. “I aced it. That was the moment when I really fell in love with computing and with coding.”  Upon his high-school graduation from Santa Clarita Christian School in Canyon Country, Gorlla decided to go to UCSD for the university’s computer science department and the specific AI work they were doing.  According to publicity materials from Gorlla’s company, Gorlla was awarded UCSD’s Endowed Chairs Fellowship, where he studied under deep-learning pioneer and ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) fellow Mikhail Belkin. Gorlla has gone on to give invited talks at major industry conferences, and he’s even discussed responsible AI with prominent figures like former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.  It was during his first year of grad school — when he was giving a presentation at the International Conference on Learning Representations — that he found himself faced with a tough decision. He was sharing details about the work he was doing with AI models that were giving wrong information.  “I didn’t really want to see just this research like languish in that conference where just a couple people see it or a couple hundred people see it,” he said. “I actually wanted to see it affect the world and the industry.”   And so, Gorlla left school and started CTGT. The name is a rearrangement of Gorlla’s initials and the initials of his business partner, Tuttle. In April, Gorlla moved to San Francisco, and the company that he and Tuttle founded has since been working with nine enterprises and showing promise to continue its growth.  According to Gorlla, CTGT’s technology can reduce hallucinations by about 85% and make state-of-the-art machine learning nearly 10 times more efficient, enabling deployment in critical sectors like health care and finance. This is important, he said, as AI is getting closer and closer to making more crucial decisions in the world.  “This is very much almost like a Manhattan-Project moment in that there’s so much going on right now, and we have the capacity to really affect how the world will look,” Gorlla said. “So, it’s really important in this current moment to prioritize and basically follow a perspective of AI that really focuses on understanding what these models do.”  Gorlla explained what he called the “black box” — you put something into the black box, and then something comes out.   “We don’t know what happens inside,” he said. “And so, in trying to understand that black box, what we’re doing is especially important, because right now, you ask ChatGPT to give you a recipe, and it tells you to mix bread and glue together.”  That’s something that he suggested has happened before.  “But say AI is getting more integrated in our society,” Gorlla continued, “and now it’s making credit decisions, and now you’re denied a home loan because the AI has hallucinated. The extreme scenario is that we plug AI into our governments. Like, it makes immigration decisions, defense decisions — autonomous everything. Because technology progress is inevitable, we need to be sure that we’re pursuing it in the right direction.”   That’s Gorlla’s goal with CTGT — to make sure that AI is trustworthy.  Of course, Gorlla’s parents are proud. His mother said her son’s ability to adapt at such a young age is truly inspiring. His choice to pursue a future in AI, she said, reflects his passion, his skills and his work ethic, which he’s cultivated over the years.   “When he was 8 years old,” she wrote in a message, “I got hit with major health issues. He showed a lot of empathy during my sickness. He used to do homework by sitting by the side of my bed in the hospital, since no one was there to take care of him at home while his dad was at work.”   Gorlla continues to work hard, always looking to make a difference. He feels he can do just that through what he’s doing now.   “Computing to me — the real power of it — was the fact that I could build something that could affect people all over the world, regardless of my immediate circumstances, whatever those were,” he said. “As I went to high school, I started really experimenting with AI. I used to take apart my laptops to get a bit more performance (out of them) to train AI models. And this is when I really noticed that the amount of resources that people had could really affect their ability to train and use AI. And so, that’s what really led to what my research focused on at UCSD and eventually at the company.”  The post Young Newhall native’s startup tackles biggest challenge in AI  appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.