Amarjot Singh talks with Jason Barnard about building adaptive AI. Amarjot Singh, founder and CEO of Skylark Labs, talks with Jason Barnard about how machines can be taught to learn like humans, the complexities of building true autonomy, and why long-term memory systems are critical to progress. Amarjot Singh shares his journey with Jason Barnard from academic research to launching a commercial AI company in the defense sector. He shares the realities of navigating long sales cycles, hiring for highly specialized roles, and creating a mission-driven team culture. They also touch on the continuous evolution of AI memory systems and the strategic partnerships needed to thrive in defense innovation. Amarjot Singh envisions a future just 5 to 10 years away — one where digital beings don’t just exist, but learn, adapt, and coexist alongside humans. What you’ll learn from Amarjot Singh 00:00 Amarjot Singh and Jason Barnard 01:48 What is the Gemini Result for Amarjot Singh, According to Jason Barnard? 02:09 Why is the Deep Research That Jason Barnard Made for Amarjot Singh So Long? 03:08 What Happens When Jason Barnard Asks Gemini to Access Information Beyond Its Hippocampus Memory? 03:47 How Should You Feel About Google Using Academic Data to Shape Your Online Identity in AI? 04:32 How Should You Convince Investors to See You as Both Academically Credible and Profitable? 04:55 How Did Amarjot Singh Move From Academic Research to Building a Commercial AI Company for Defense? 05:07 Why is Cambridge a Great Place for Building Fundamental Technologies? 05:14 Why Should You Aim to Simplify How Machines Make Sense of the World Like the Brain and Children Do? 06:08 What is the Difference Between How AI and a Child React to Situations They Have Never Encountered? 06:22 What is Missing in Traditional AI Systems That Amarjot Singh is Trying to Address in His Company? 07:20 Why is Adaptive AI Particularly Valuable in Defense Systems? 07:57 How Does the Approach of Amarjot Singh to AI Differ From Simply Replicating the Human Brain? 08:04 What Learning Capabilities Are Being Replicated in AI to Make it More Efficient and Adaptive? 09:13 What is the Difference Between Short and Long Answers When it Comes to Retaining Information? 09:28 What Happens When You Add New Content to Your Website? 10:17 How Does Credibility Affect the Confidence in Information of a Machine? 10:43 Why is the Credibility of Information Important? 11:38 Why is Memory Considered Continuous Instead of Being Short-Term and Long-Term? 12:18 Why is Frequency and Recency Important When Encoding Information? 12:39 What Factors Influence How We Retain Knowledge? 13:11 How Does the Knowledge Graph Determine the Importance Between Pieces of Information? 14:43 How Do You Deal With the Long Sales Cycles in the Defense Industry? 16:06 How Do You Find People Smart and Skilled Enough to Handle the Highly Complex Work of Your Business? 17:01 What Impact Does Giving People the Freedom to Choose Their Work Have On Your Company? 18:16 How Do You Protect Your Intellectual Property When Working Across Different Countries? 19:43 How Much Has AI Development Been Influenced by the Brain? 20:58 How Fast Do You Think AI Technology Will Evolve in the Future? This episode was recorded live on video May 13th 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h_cH4xRqCw Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD6RR3Om8bchttps://www.theverge.com/2018/6/6/17433482/ai-automated-surveillance-drones-spot-violent-behavior-crowdshttps://www.innovatorsunder35.com/the-list/amarjot-singh/Amarjot Singh Transcript from Amarjot Singh with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. Building Adaptive AI [00:00:00] Amarjot Singh: We do a lot of difficult deployments. We go to the desert, we go into the sea. Sometime it's fun, sometime it's not. But you want to be able to have anchors you can rely on and keep on doing what you need to do when nothing is working. And that is, I think the only way to do that is if you are, what you're doing is meaningful work. [00:00:21] Jason Barnard: Right. And that's a really good kind of point as well is when you're doing something and it doesn't appear to be working, how do you keep your team motivated to keep trying and keep finding new ways?  [00:00:32] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives, and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world. [00:00:48] Narrator: How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands at test of time and becomes their legacy? A legacy we're proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.  [00:01:01] Jason Barnard: Hi everybody and welcome to another Fastlane Founders. I'm Jason Barnard and I'm here with a quick hello and we're good to go. [00:01:09] Jason Barnard: Welcome to the show, Amarjot Singh.  [00:01:14] Amarjot Singh: Glad to have me, Jason..  [00:01:16] Jason Barnard: I literally just realized that your surname is perfect for that introductory song because I'm singing.  [00:01:26] Amarjot Singh: That's great.  [00:01:26] Jason Barnard: And that's not a very funny joke, but I had to make it because as I sing, I thought that's good. Anyway, let's get onto the topic, which is going to be about building Adaptive AI. [00:01:37] Jason Barnard: And I just asked you, are you basically building AI that learns like humans replicating our brains? And you said something along those lines. So we'll be getting into that in a moment. But before we go onto that, I wanted to show you. The Gemini result for your name, which is pretty good. I asked it to tell me about you. [00:01:57] Jason Barnard: And it comes up with a reasonably good answer. I quite like that, and I think your academic background is what it picks up on, and then it's moved on to your corporate background, which is now. But then I thought, let's use deep research, which I'm really enjoying and I've made a video because it's really long. [00:02:15] Jason Barnard: It's really long because it knows so much about you and there's so much information about you. So the idea here is I asked deep research on Gemini to build a plan to tell me about you. And it built a plan and then it executed and you see that table, that's a lot of information about you and your academic work. [00:02:33] Jason Barnard: It goes through an entire history of your life, which I believe is pretty accurate with that second table there. It's got seven sections all about your life as an academic, the work you're doing, the work you're doing with Skylark, and it literally doesn't stop.  [00:02:49] Amarjot Singh: Am I crazy?  [00:02:50] Jason Barnard: This is something. Yeah. We all need to pay attention to and we all need to take care of because if I want to know about you, I can ask Gemini and it will tell me a quick overview like that. [00:03:01] Jason Barnard: And it needs to get it from its called hippocampus in the brain.  [00:03:07] Amarjot Singh: Yep. Hippocampus.  [00:03:08] Jason Barnard: And then if I asked it to dig down and figure out more and go into its long-term memory that it doesn't necessarily have in that hippocampus memory, it then does this and it's a due diligence using AI, which I love. And at Kalicube, it's exactly what we do for our clients. We make sure that it is accurate and convincing for your audience. And I think for you, it already is because of your academic career. Because Google and the other AI have got so much solid information about academia and they trust those academic institutions. [00:03:45] Jason Barnard: How do you feel about that?  [00:03:47] Amarjot Singh: I feel like that's great. I'm actually overwhelmed that once you showed me that table and the seven sections, that there is actually so much information out there about me. Now I wonder if all of that is accurate or if I wanted to tweak it in a certain way so that I come off as more appealing to the investors or other entrepreneurs or our clients. And that's the thing I'm thinking about.  [00:04:13] Jason Barnard: That's a great point because the whole thing about pivoting. You've pivot from academic research to building a commercial AI company is really, important because how you frame it across your entire digital ecosystem will greatly influence how the machine frames it. [00:04:32] Jason Barnard: So as you said, if you want to convince investors, you need to convince them that your academic qualifications are there, but that you can actually make money for them. And it's up to you to frame it. It's up to you to spread that message so that the machines will repeat it. And that's what we do at Kalicube. [00:04:47] Jason Barnard: But I'm now interested in how did you move from academic research to building a commercial AI company, particularly in defense?  [00:04:54] Amarjot Singh: I did my PhD in the UK.  [00:05:00] Jason Barnard: Cambridge.  [00:05:01] Amarjot Singh: Yeah, Cambridge. I went to Cambridge.  [00:05:03] Jason Barnard: That came from deep research. Sorry.  [00:05:06] Amarjot Singh: No. That was great. I had a great experience and Cambridge is all about building fundamental technologies, and that's what I did. I started the human brain. I was trying to figure out how the brain is able to make sense of the world. How kids make sense of the world, but they're able to do it really quickly within seconds. While machine required a lot of data, it requires a lot of compute. So I was interested in simplifying how machines could do the same thing. And I was able to an extent, able to do that. But beyond that,