mike rivera

In 2015, I built an AI that detects early cancer. It’s still running across hundreds of hospitals in the US today. It was the most fulfilling work of my life, and I was building in AI years before everyone called it “AI”. Building in AI then was a dream. Now It feels like we’ve taken a turn for the worse. It started when i was in undergrad. I built my first company: AI models that made the political data transparent to voters. At 21, I was offered six figures for it, but the buyers wanted to use it for reasons I couldn't ethically support. So we turned down the offer and shut down the company instead. In 2014, I moved into deep learning research on language models, for the Intelligence Community and Goldman Sachs. Then HCA Healthcare came to us. They put me in a competition against 10 people from IBM Watson. It was just me and the tools I’d built. Our job was to build an AI model that can catch the cancer that slips through the cracks in hospitals. It was the most intense 30 days of my life. Multiple all nighters. My models won. That turned into a $5M deal, and later its own company, Azra AI. Then the world caught on. ChatGPT and Claude arrived, and AI costs exploded. Building in AI in 2015 felt novel. We were using it to find cancer tumours and save lives. Now the biggest tech companies have turned AI into a money extraction machine. That’s when I decided to make a change. We raised $8.5M to build a better future for AI. On Wednesday, we’re launching Rayline. AI shouldn’t be locked inside a few labs’ models, prices and clouds. It should be open, transparent and decentralized. More on Wednesday.