Hydrogen Torch, H2O’s latest product, is designed to deliver the AI capabilities of web giants to the rest of the world, says CEO Sri Ambati.

There are about 1200 chess grandmasters in the world, and only 250 AI grandmasters. In chess, as in AI, grandmaster is an accolade reserved for the top tier of professional players. In AI, this accolade is given out to the top-performing data scientists in Kaggle’s progression system.

H2O.ai, the AI Cloud company which raised $100 million in a Series E round at the end of 2021, and which is now valued at $1.6 billion, employs 10% of the world’s AI grandmasters. The company just announced H2O Hydrogen Torch, a product aiming to bring AI grand mastery for image, video, and natural language processing (NLP) to the enterprise.

We connected with H2O CEO and Founder Sri Ambati, and we discussed everything from H2O’s origins and overall offering to Hydrogen Torch and where it fits into the AI landscape.

Ambati first started working with AI doing voice-to-text translation for the Indian space research program some decades ago. He subsequently stumbled upon neural networks, which were at an early stage at the time. As an immigrant in Silicon Valley, he spent time working in startups. He also spent time on sabbaticals between Berkeley and Stanford and met mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists.

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