If there’s one lesson the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident taught us, it’s that AI agents can be unpredictable. The company is betting that the only way to make sure physical AI is safe is to have AI test it. Laplace is one of 20 startups competing in Startup Battlefield, TechCrunch Disrupt’s three-day pitch competition in downtown San Francisco.
It will present on the Startup Battlefield stage Monday afternoon, October 13. Sun, alongside his co-founder and chief scientist Henry Liu, founded Laplace a year ago out of the University of Michigan. Sun has spent the last eight years in academia researching how to challenge autonomous driving AI in simulation.
In 2023, he and Liu — his then-PhD advisor — published a paper on the subject that made it onto the cover of the top scientific journal Nature. That’s when the calls started coming in from autonomous vehicle companies interested in implementing their ideas. Using their academic research as a base, Sun and Liu built Laplace, so named for “Laplace’s demon,” an 1814 thought experiment by French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace that imagined that if you knew the exact state of everything in the universe, you could predict the future with total precision.
At the startup’s core is a high-fidelity simulation reconstructed from the real world, paired with an AI agent that constantly probes for weaknesses and failure points. The goal is to ensure that any physical AI — be it a robot, autonomous vehicle, or smart city solution — is safe in simulation before it’s deployed in the real world. The simulation environment is a post-trained version of Nvidia’s Cosmos, an AI world simulation platform, that’s grounded in the real world, allowing Laplace to reconstruct anything from an Arizona highway to a Paris pedestrian crossing.
Simulations are generated by blending a mesh of different real-world information. A Google Street View image could serve as a reference from which an entire street is generated. But rather than generating something random, the simulator combines real-world map data to recreate an environment that’s true to scale.
Developers can then use language prompts to change the setting in real time, like adding in afternoon traffic. Sun says Laplace pulls real-time traffic and congestion information from navigation providers like TomTom. Within Laplace’s simulations, not only the environment is simulated, but also the behavior of other actors.
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