Order born from Anarchy

We'll admit it. We're not the typical tech company. Far from it, in fact.

To start, we aren't in Silicon Valley. Or Tel Aviv, Seattle, or Shanghai for that matter. No, we call Columbus, Ohio home. We aren't some huge tech giant. We might have the name "Corporation" in our title, but is admittedly misleading. In fact, we are five midwesterners from mostly middle class upbringings--with the exception of Bryant, the golden boy with the silver spoon. We had the typical nuclear family nineties suburban upbringing. Ok, we weren't entirely normal--we spent our high school past time diligently coding rather than playing sports or chasing girls. (To be clear, we tried both. And failed miserably.)

But coding was what we were good at. Most of us were actually good enough that we could have went to Caltech or Carnegie Mellon on full rides, but due to our strong friendship we decided to attend OSU together. Go Bucks! (Actually, we don't really care...again, the sports thing.) Things went so well at OSU that we decided to stay on for grad school together--mostly because they gave us our own lab to work on our AI research. On second thought, maybe this isn't entirely different from many tech company stories. 

Oh, but then there was that time we almost went to prison.

It wasn't our fault. Not exactly, at least. You see, during our second year of grad school, we--Matt, Brady, Steve, Bryant, and Jim--completed our first pseudo-AI system ANON (Anarchist Neural Optical Network). For fun, we gave it anarchist motivations--just something to annoy students with various minor misdemeanors like sending fake classroom cancellations and time changes, late night fire alarms, etc.

Unfortunately, unbeknownst to us, our system was much closer to being sentient than we realized. And it was much more anarchic. In fact, within days it had--lets just say it had taken on much much bigger enemies--institutions that made the OSU registrar look like child's play.

Anyways, we realized just in time, pulling the plug moments before ANON was able to transfer funds out of three major banks it had illegally accessed. To this day, we aren't entirely certain what it had intended to do with the money (and what we do know stays with the five of us!), as ANON's intentions were internally encrypted. Still, we managed to halt these major infractions before they occurred and no one was the wiser.

Nevertheless, we were, however, eventually outed for the minor school hacks when Steve drunkenly bragged about it to a girl at a bar. (Being bad with the other sex was a pervasive problem.)  

Luckily, the authorities determined that ANON had done little to no actual financial or other harm and we were given probation by the authorities. Still, OSU kicked us out of school indefinitely. 

We were down, but not out. Sure, we had lost our funding and lab, but we had realized that our pseudo-AI build was powerful--and seemingly further along than any other in existence. For us it was a no brainer. We had to do whatever it took to continue the development of our Neural Optical Network (NON) based AI. We decided it was best to drop the whole "anarchist" part, of course, but the ANON build taught us something--programming philosophy into the system rendered the beginnings of powerful motivations. 

Kicked out of school or not, the five of us were deadset on pushing forward. We moved into a loft in the Short North of Columbus, calling ourselves the Sentience Corporation, and set out on the quest of our lives--to be the first to create a true AI.

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS AT 589 Whitby…

For Matt, Steve, and Jim, this is where it started--coding deep into the night during highschool in a suburb of Columbus called Worthington.