ai-factories
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Irfan Khan Wants Enterprise AI to Leave the Demo and Clock In
After three decades in enterprise technology, the CLOUDSUFI co-founder is betting that AI’s useful future will be built from proprietary data, repeatable systems and people who remain firmly in charge.
Jim Gao
Jim Gao is the CEO and co-founder of Phaidra, a Seattle-based AI company building autonomous, self-learning control systems for the world's most complex industrial facilities, from data centers to vaccine plants. A mechanical engineer by training, he spent roughly a decade designing cooling systems for Google's data centers before teaching himself machine learning on nights and weekends. After AlphaGo, he launched DeepMind Energy, where reinforcement learning cut Google's data-center cooling energy by up to 40 percent. In 2019 he and two co-founders spun that idea into Phaidra, which by 2025 had raised over $120 million to make AI factories radically more efficient.