If there’s one lesson the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident taught us, it’s that AI agents can be unpredictable. Howie Sun, CEO and co-founder of Laplace Intelligence, emphasized this point, stating,

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"Imagine if something like that happened in the physical world. AI agents are moving from computers into the real world, and we don’t really want physical AI to fail in the real world."

Based in Ann Arbor, Laplace is developing automated red-teaming, which involves stress-testing systems by deliberately attempting to make them fail. The company believes that the only way to ensure the safety of physical AI is to have AI test it. Sun explained,

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"Our goal is to help companies discover and fix problems before deployment—and, over time, build a shared foundation of evidence that customers, insurers, and regulators can trust."

Laplace is one of 20 startups competing in Startup Battlefield, part of TechCrunch Disrupt, taking place in downtown San Francisco. The company will present on the Startup Battlefield stage on Monday afternoon, October 13. Sun, along with co-founder and chief scientist Henry Liu, founded Laplace a year ago, emerging from 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 published a paper on this topic that made it onto the cover of the prestigious journal Nature. This led to interest from autonomous vehicle companies eager to implement their ideas.

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"I realized that I wanted to build this and take it from purely academic research into a product that’s useful in the real world," Sun said.

Using their academic research as a foundation, Sun and Liu established Laplace, named after Laplace’s demon, an 1814 thought experiment by French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace. This concept imagines that if one knew the exact state of everything in the universe, one could predict the future with total precision. Sun stated,

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"We are essentially using simulation to predict the real world’s future."

High-Fidelity Simulation

At the core of Laplace’s technology is a high-fidelity simulation reconstructed from the real world, paired with an AI agent that continuously probes for weaknesses and failure points. The aim is to ensure that any physical AI—whether a robot, autonomous vehicle, or smart city solution—is safe in simulation before deployment.