THE CHALLENGE
There’s a lot of information on the web: some good, some bad, much of it useful. But sorting through those expanses of knowledge can be tricky. The same can be said for a document you’re working on. You know something is missing, but what?
In 2011, John Frank, Dan Roberts and Max Kleiman-Weiner, Hertz Fellows who all met at summer Hertz events, brainstormed how AI might predict which information would be added to a human-powered knowledge base like Wikipedia.
Together, they wrote code to digest Wikipedia edit history and determine how long it takes for a news article to be cited there, and found that the average lag time between a news article’s initial publication and its eventual citations is about a year. But some are updated within minutes, and others lie dormant for years, waiting for a human editor to get involved.
It became clear that humans have an important role judging and giving value to pieces of knowledge. “The question is, how should AI help?” said Roberts.
THE SOLUTION
From that brainstorming session, Diffeo was born. It’s collaborative machine intelligence that analyzes text in a user’s working documents, identifies named entities and proposes related ones. That might be through in-progress documents in Word, Outlook, Media Wiki and other editing tools.
By analyzing working notes, Diffeo’s autonomous research assistants assess what someone is studying or working on, sees what’s missing, and recommends what might fill in knowledge gaps.
“It was organic collaboration that sprouted Diffeo, a startup company with deep roots in the Hertz community.”
John Frank
Chief Executive Officer, Darwin Galactic
THE IMPACT
In 2017, Diffeo joined the Salesforce Incubator, a five-month program for startup companies, and in 2019, Salesforce acquired the company. Diffeo’s collaborative intelligence product is now called “Einstein Relationship Insights” on the Salesforce platform, and helps users discover critical relationships by exploring disparate data sources from unstructured web pages and structured information like Salesforce records.
