Valmiz™ AI Highlighted at AI Asia Expo

Manila, Philippines - January 02, 2024 -

January 2, 2024

Valmiz™ AI Highlighted at AI Asia Expo
ASTN Group™ Continuing Progress and Roadshow in 2024
By: Dawn Zoldi (Colonel USAF Ret.)

Held in the Philippines, home to one of ASTN Group’s two regional offices (the other is in the U.S.) and organized by the country’s Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), the event attracted more than 4,000 visitors. It featured 4 tracks with over 90 speakers from 15 countries engaging in strategic discussions about AI and its responsible integration across diverse sectors.

Notable among these speakers, Rommel Martínez, ASTN Group’s Chief Technology Officer, an AI researcher with over 24 years of experience in the tech industry and the brains behind Valmiz, a ground-breaking multi-agent human-centric AI, participated in multiple panels and presentations. Across three days, he educated attendees on the issues surrounding contemporary AI and his company’s cutting edge solutions through novel approaches.

Martínez specifically outlined the limitations of popular AI models such as typical machine learning (ML) and neural networks including GPT systems. These include their unpredictable behavior (e.g., hallucinations), inability to handle “black swans” (improbable events), lack of transparency, centralized operational models, inefficiencies (training costs), and lack of environmental sustainability (huge carbon footprint).

As an alternative, Martínez presented Valmiz, an Augmentive AI, a term he coined. More than 20 years in the making, Valmiz presents toolkits that augment a company’s existing ideas, workflows, and pipelines, using knowledge and expertise from different knowledge domains, while putting a human at the center to supervise operations. It combines features from knowledge bases, traditional databases, and symbolic AI.

“We named it Augmentive AI,” Martínez said, “because to augment means to enhance, to increase, and to support,” Martínez explained. “Valmiz is used to enhance an organization’s existing process without changing the workflow.”

ASTN Group uses the same kind of technology as NASA’s Remote Agent on Deep Space 1. That mission, a flyby of an asteroid and comet 100 million miles away from Earth, required NASA engineers to develop software that enabled remote code updates on the spacecraft, in order to make mission corrections. “Building on NASA’s legacy, we created true distributed AI,” Martínez noted. “We removed the traditional heavy reliance on dedicated servers and took a non-monolithic approach.”

Valmiz employs multiple agent redundancy. By decoupling AI agents, they can act independently performing specific tasks or they can be used for tighter integration. Such redundant AI agents can receive and execute instructions and still have the ability to converge, to form a “hive mind.” This allows the Valmiz program and data flow to be examined and patched while operations are being executed. It also enables users to perform preemptive manipulation and task adjustments, on the fly. And that data is reliable because Valmiz uses the data that the customer owns as its authoritative and pre-validated data source in the system. It turns such data into a company’s own knowledge base.

So, what’s next for Valmiz? Martínez says his tech is currently in its “alpha phase.” He anticipates it to reach beta status in the end of the second quarter 2024, with an initial public release to follow shortly after.

In the meantime, the folks in charge of the expo have already invited ASTN Group back for a reprise at their AI Asia Expo 2024 event in Thailand, scheduled for next August.

Until then, catch Martínez as he makes a repeat appearance on the popular Full Crew newscast on Tuesday January 23, 2024 at 9am MT | 11am ET.  He will also plug into an all-star AI panel at P3 Tech Consulting’s 3rd Annual Law-Tech Connect Workshop at AUVSI XPONENTIAL 2024 on April 22nd in San Diego, CA.

About ASTN Group

ASTN Group is an organization of world-class professionals, with experts across multiple disciplines, striving to build products and services that reshape industries. Among these, its keystone product, Valmiz Augmentive AI, is an innovative multi-agent AI system that will change the way we do things, from the airline industry, autonomous vehicles, financial systems, military applications, and more.

Learn more about ASTN Group at https://astn-group.com and Valmiz at https://valmiz.com.

Watch Rommel Martínez on the Dawn of Drones 2023 podcast here: https://youtu.be/bTuHRN844Kw.

See Rommel Martínez on the 2023 Full Crew: https://youtu.be/ytA0S05uztk.