Clarifai was founded in 2013 by Matthew Zeiler, a Ph.D. student who recently placed in the top 5 spots of the 2013 ImageNet Challenge. Initially, the company offered free and paid versions of image and video recognition via their API and a consumer-facing iPhone app called Forevery. In 2014 Style Me Pretty, a wedding lifestyle website which used the technology to provide images that are personally adapted to the user, became Clarifai's first customer. In 2016, Clarifai released version 2 of their API, adding custom training and visual search to its platform. In 2017 the company moved all research work to a San Francisco office and all government-related endeavors to an office in Washington D.C. Later that year, the company announced a mobile SDK, which allowed users to run their platform without an internet connection. In 2018 Clarifai released an on-premise solution. In 2019, Clarifai opened a new office in Estonia'scapital cityTallinn.
The core of Clarifai's technology is based on convolutional neural networks, which Zeiler focused on for his PhD work. It is a process which enables a computer to learn from data examples and draw its own conclusions, giving applications the ability to predict correct tags for images or videos. The platform includes the ability to moderate content, perform visual search, visual similarity, and organize media collections. It has pre-built recognition models that can identify a specific set of concepts like food or travel, NSFW, and its general model which can identify a range of concepts including objects, ideas, and emotion. It also has the ability to create custom models which can identify other arbitrary objects such as cars or breeds of dogs. The 2018 Model 1.5 with machine-labeled datasets claims to recognize up to 11,000 concepts from object detection, as well as things like mood or theme.
In 2018 Zeiler disclosed that the company was a participant in Project Maven, a US Department of Defense AI program. The disclosure, in a blog post on the company website, came after a Wired story reported that a former employee had filed a wrongful termination suit. The suit alleged that she was dismissed for requesting that Clarifai disclose a 2017 server compromise to the Pentagon and other customers. Zeiler asserted that the breach involved only "an isolated research server", and that customers were notified following an external security audit. In late January, 2019, several Clarifai employees posted an open letter on a company message board expressing concerns that the June 13 blog-post of Zeiler’s contained implications of Clarifai’s complicit involvement with potentially unethical uses of AI technology, e.g. automated warfare. These allegations are part of the societal concern over the ethical development and use of AI, which has been growing alongside the pace of AI’s advancement.
