From Friendship to Innovation: The SkyOptim Saga in the World of Artificial Intelligence

The startup SkyOptim stems from a friendship between two individuals who, through their discussions, discovered a new approach to thinking about Artificial Intelligence.
The fundamental idea is that Artificial Intelligence is innovative, and it is this aspect that sets it apart from statistics. To clarify this point, one only needs to observe how chess programs based on Deep Learning have succeeded in innovating. They have developed strategies and playing styles that were previously unknown. What is fascinating to observe is that these programs were trained on millions of games played in the past and managed to surpass the strategies contained in these games, meaning they devised different ways of approaching the game.
This ability to innovate fundamentally distinguishes Artificial Intelligence from statistics. A tool based on statistics, trained with a knowledge base, merely reproduces patterns found in that base and lacks the capacity to innovate.
It is interesting to note that this characterization of Artificial Intelligence is actually very ancient in human history. Referring to the art of combat, various Asian martial arts, such as Tai Chi Chuan, follow the same principle. The idea is to open one's body to be able to move it in all possible directions, producing an "innovative" gesture, one that has not been made by the body in the past. In doing so, the martial artist becomes "undetectable," meaning one cannot anticipate their actions by examining their posture. In the art of the Japanese sword, the same idea is found, with specific training designed to free the body from its conditioning and promote the "innovative gesture," one that arises without being slowed down by the mechanism of thought.
Our two friends shared this view of martial arts and dedicated their leisure time to designing algorithms that exploited this aspect. It is from this shared passion that SkyOptim was born, a startup focused on analyzing air traffic operations to identify "innovation opportunities" and associated gains.