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Edition 3: Humans of Builders Club
An inside peak inside the arena, spotlighting top ANZ AI Builders, tinkerers and founders
Annie Liao & Rebecca Williams
January 01, 2024
Edition 3: Humans of The Builders Club
An inside peak inside the arena, spotlighting builders turning their dreams into reality.
Humans of The Builder Club
[Edition #3] Written by Chuhao Liu, with Rebecca Williams and Annie Liao
We are so excited to share the next installment of “Humans of Builders Club”. A series spotlighting the authentic human story of ambitious AI Builders.
This week, we’re chatting with Chuhao Liu of Sunflower AI, who is creating a world that is more accessible to everyone, especially hearing-impaired people and non-native speakers, by providing live captions for live events 🚀 🌻!
Let's start with your background! Can you share with us your career journey and what led you to what you're currently doing?
My educational background is in civil engineering in Beijing, Texas and Sydney. I founded an AI startup while I was PhD student with my two PhD friends, one of them later became my wife!
Although the startup didn’t succeed at the end, I managed to receive Global Talent visa (permanent residency) thanks to the initial traction of this startup.
I found I really love being a founder and wanted to continuously build. After birth of my first baby in 2021, I couldn’t do PhD study and startup at the same time. That’s the pivotal moment of my life. I decided to drop out my PhD to pursue startup journey full-time.
My wife built a crochet YouTube channel that can support our living cost, after she graduate from Biology PhD. We managed to bootstrap for two years.
I actually self-learnt AI through online course like fast.ai, CS50, MIT’s missing semester for your CS education, Andrew Ng’s machine learning.
What inspires you as an entrepreneur?
My Dad. He is an entrepreneur that sells “high-tech” chicken. He invented a very nutritional chicken to sell for 10 times regular price. While I was a high school student, I was helping to sell chicken together with my father to restaurants one by one, I’d help carry them around. This experience and hustle inspired me to be an entrepreneur.
How did you build up your technical expertise during a typical week?
Asking friends and community who are experts in the field I want to learn. Then study the resource they recommended.
Can you recommend any books, podcasts, links that have helped you on your builder journey?
Books:
Resource
What are you most excited about right now?
1 in 6 people in Australia has hearing loss.
We found our social impact and our “why”. We recently pivoted from Youtube captions to using AI to provide live captions for live events, a more scalable service with larger impact.
Having captions at events is enabling something previously unachievable prior to AI developments. After pivoting, two people who have hearing loss already messaged me to thank me for doing this. I just feel my life is so meaningful.
What are you currently building right now?
AI live captions for live events. Imagine when you attend an event, you can simply scan a QR code and live captions shows on your phone.
If you are non-native speaker, you can add another captions of your native language. After the event, key takeaways will be sent to you. We can greatly reduce the barrier of communication using the power of Gen AI.
Imagine a world that is more accessible to everyone.
You can stay up to date with Chuhao’s builder journey by following his LinkedIn here
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