01 / Starting with humans
A future shared by humans and robots.
A robot could be your teammate or your adversary. Robots will need to coordinate with each other, and humans and robots will need to work as teams. Sometimes that means combining strengths to achieve a shared goal. Sometimes it means working together against an adversary, whether human, robotic, or both.
We believe understanding human movement and intuition is essential to winning in that future. Sports is the best laboratory for studying both.
A coach sees an opportunity, communicates an intention, and trusts players to adapt as the game unfolds. Studying that exchange reveals how humans anticipate, make decisions, and work together.
02 / Why sports
Sports is the best laboratory.
The most optimized human movement.
Timing. Balance. Anticipation. Human ability, pushed to its limits.
The most optimized tactics.
Every move changes the choices available to everyone else.
An environment we can observe.
Watch an idea meet reality. Learn from what happens next.
Sports brings these things together. Clear objectives. Shared rules. People who cooperate, compete, and respond to one another. Every game gives us another chance to study how a decision becomes an outcome.
Film records what happened. We want to understand what else could have happened.
03 / Sports and AI
What AI can do for sports.
AI can power better tactics for athletes. It can help coaches explore more ideas and give more people access to useful feedback.
Imagine pausing a play, drawing a different move, and seeing what follows. Let the other players respond. Rewind. Try again. Take the promising idea into practice.
We are creating the best coach in the world for every sport. We will put that coaching in the hands of every existing athlete and create a billion new athletes.
The other direction
What sports can do for AI.
The more interesting question is what is worth learning from sports, and where else we can take it.
What can sports teach us that we can use elsewhere? Could a training recipe discovered here make entirely new experiences possible?
Sports asks intelligence to understand intention as well as action. A player creates space for someone else. A coach changes a plan. An opponent adapts. Those relationships could teach us how people and machines coordinate in a changing world.
04 / Beyond the game
The future we're building.
We imagine a future of work built around human-robot teaming. People communicating intent. Machines understanding their roles. Different capabilities contributing to a shared goal.
A rescue worker directs a robot through a collapsed building to find survivors. Several robots work together to free a rover stuck in sand. In both cases, they need to understand the goal, divide the work, and adapt as the situation changes.
05 / Our conviction
AI is often built to replace or imitate humans. We believe the greater opportunity is to understand them.
We are Long Humans.
Sports is one of the most human things we do. That is where we begin.