Symbiotic Builds AI to Chart New Paths for Human Ingenuity

Artificial intelligence (AI) is widely considered to be the technology with the greatest potential to alter the future of humanity. While current approaches in AI development have focused on creating generally capable AI systems that deal with language processing and reasoning, an emergent startup is taking a whole new approach.

Symbiotic, founded by a team of graduates from top U.S. and U.K. universities, has a goal to build machines that channel the inventive creativity of humanity's most divergent thinkers.

Symbiotic CEO and co-founder Riccardo Di Molfetta expands on this: "In the past, researchers have described creativity as the final frontier of AI, and I think they are right. If you think about it, creativity is what makes us truly human. We think that solving it is the key to unlocking more advanced capabilities in AI, and that's what we are trying to accomplish with Symbiotic."

Today, we sat down with Federico Panzera, one of the founding members of the startup, to learn more about Symbiotic's mission. Panzera has been integral to shaping the company's vision and development since its earliest days.

Panzera is at the crossroads of human creativity and technology, intertwining the two on a personal level. "I am driven by the idea that human curiosity and ingenuity can be amplified through our interaction with technology. What AI offers today is the realization of a world where art, technology, and human potential are inseparable."

This vision resonates deeply with Panzera, and his history underscores the critical need for instilling genuine creative capabilities into AI. "I grew up in a family that revered the artistic legacy of my grandmother, Barbara Scurto, who was a pioneer artist of the Futurist movement in Italy."

Panzera's experience in curating and creating art started early. Since the age of 18, he has managed his grandmother's entire art collection, bringing her work to some of the world's most prestigious exhibitions.

At the age of 19, he expanded his artistic reach by curating an entire exhibition in Milan. Titled "Reimagining Classics," it showcased works from over 40 young artists, each piece a fresh take on classic designs. Panzera himself contributed to the exhibition, reimagining Gaudí' ’s "Calvet Mirror."

The Futurists were a group led by poets, artists, and philosophers who envisioned a world where technology would fundamentally redefine what it means to be human in the modern age. Over a century later, Symbiotic is picking up where the Futurists left off with a vision that echoes their early dreams of human-machine symbiosis.

Symbiotic's emphasis on combining technology and the arts is a fascinating parallel with that of the Futurists.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Barbara Scurto fully embodied Futurism's ethos with her dual role as an aviator and artist. In those times, airplanes were cutting-edge technology, much like AI today. Just as early aviation was characterized by danger and exhilaration, requiring immense skill and bravery to navigate uncharted skies, it could be said that AI represents a similar endeavor.

At just 16, Scurto defied legal restrictions to obtain her pilot's license from a flying club in her local town, which was explicitly forbidden for women at the time. Her entry into the Futurist movement was as dramatic as her airplane paintings. In 1938, the founder of Futurism chanced upon one of her paintings, "Vomito dall'aereo," displayed in a frame-maker's shop window in Milan. Captivated by the painting's representation of flight, the Futurist founder immediately recognized Scurto's talent and invited her to an exhibit in Venice that same year.

Scurto's aero-paintings offered dynamic visualizations of a world transformed by the collaboration of humans and machines. Her firsthand, daring experiences as a pilot provided insights that distinguished her from many of her Futurist peers. Her work pioneered the concept of the Futurist "superwoman" — a feminine parallel to the Futurist movement's interpretation of Nietzsche's "overman."

Panzera, who has established an art foundation to honor his grandmother's legacy, elaborates: "The Futurist concept that was expressed through Barbara's work is strikingly similar to Symbiotic's efforts to build creative machines. Specifically, my grandmother sought to synthesize different visual elements to create new pictorial realities. This mirrors how human creativity works through the blending of different ideas to produce novel concepts. Whether it's art or technology, both serve as mediums that develop connections we might otherwise overlook. They extend our creative reach beyond our natural capabilities."

Building machines that can think like the most creative humans is a challenge that has also captivated Kevin Nejad, CTO co-founder of Symbiotic. One of the main reasons he pursued his PhD research in neuroscience and machine learning followed a similar line of inquiry: to understand the human brain and develop algorithms for more capable machine intelligence.

"Creativity is still underexplored in the research community, although some people are starting to realize that it could be one of the missing links for artificial superintelligence," Nejad admits that, while he's explored several research pathways in the past, working on creativity is different. "It's not just another research topic — it feels like we're on the brink of something new."

Symbiotic aims to build the world's premier lab dedicated to AI creativity. "We believe that it is impossible to do this without participation from human creatives," explains Di Molfetta. "Unlike games or scientific problems, creativity defies easy evaluation – with many describing it as one of the 'grand challenges' of the AI field." Human creators working on concrete creative projects are the closest thing we have to ground truth in evaluating creative outputs and processes.

While Di Molfetta hesitates to divulge too much ("We like to keep a few surprises up our sleeve," he says with a grin), he reveals that Symbiotic is already collaborating with some of the foremost creative minds and leaders to add concrete value to teams across the world by building a next-gen system.

Despite being relatively new, Symbiotic's ambitions are far-reaching: "Current LLMs largely depend on the creative entropy of human users," says Nejad, "We think that people's perceptions of the role of AI will shift significantly when this paradigm changes in the future."

Panzera reflects on this idea by drawing a parallel to his grandmother's work as part of the Futurist movement. "Barbara saw the world differently because of her unconventional experience as both a pilot and a woman artist in an artistic community largely dominated by men," he maintains.

As Panzera speaks, it is evident he is driven by the same passion that once drove his grandmother. "Who would have thought?" he adds with a smile, "that AI could breathe life into my grandmother's vision nearly a century later?"

BDG Media newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.