Person attributes
Suzanne Gildert is a British physicist working as co-founder of Sanctuary.ai. Prior to founding sanctuary.ai in January 2018, she co-founded Kindred AI and worked as a lead physicist for D-Wave Systems.
Gildert, born and raised in Manchester, England, achieved her Ph.D in Physics and Electronics from the University of Birmingham, UK, where she subsequently took a postdoctoral role in July 2008. In this position, she focused research on superconducting devices at ultra-low temperatures, giving her experience with design, creation and problem-solving in hardware systems.
Gildert began her private sector career in April 2010 as an experimental physicist for D-Wave Systems, a Canadian quantum computing company based in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. She was recruited by CEO Geordie Rose and joined the company's machine learning group in 2011, designing and coding most of the use cases D-Wave produced between 2011-2013. These inventions included MAXCAT, the world's first quantum computer game as well as the world's first robot controlled by a quantum computer.
She designed D-Waves Developer Portal and led quantum computing training programs for Lockheed Martin, Google and NASA.
Gildert joined D-Wave CEO Geordie Rose, George Babu and James Bergstra in July 2014 to co-found Kindred AI, an artificial intelligence and robotics company headquartered in San Francisco, California.
As CSO of Kindred, Gildert designed and built over 30 robots to show and demonstrate Kindred's core technology concept of human-robot tele-operation for reinforcement learning. She oversaw the company grow to over 50 employees and helped raise over $50 million in venture funding.
Her original goal for Kindred was to create lifelike machines with humanlike intelligence, as opposed to the non-humanoid industrial machines Kindred now makes. As a result Kindred's Artificial General Intellgence (AGI) division, led by Gildert, spun off from Kindred AI.
Gildert co-founded Sanctuary.AI with Geordie Rose in January 2018, looking to create robots with human-like looks, intelligence and emotions that can live alongside people. This is in contrast to her robots at Kindred, which can learn and improve performance on specific tasks, but are unable to grow and act as a human would beyond that. Gildert also argues that since everything in our world is designed for the human body, it would be more cost effective to build human-like robots than to change our infrastructure around new robots.
The privately funded company hasn't rushed to on create a market product, with Gildert stating she expects Sanctuary's robots to develop "in a childlike way in the first few years." In addition to the creation of these human-like robots, "Synths", Sanctuary's mission is to create a micro-society where 'synths' can develop and to explore the ethical issues that arise from creating human-like machines.
