DeepSeek’s Revelation Proves Our Point: How Amniscient's Already Building AI Faster & Cheaper

Introduction

Over the past few days, I’ve been reflecting on some exciting industry news—DeepSeek’s latest announcement—and realizing how strongly it echoes our own journey at Amniscient. Their core message? You don’t have to break the bank to achieve high-performing AI. DeepSeek is proving that with Large Language Models (LLMs), while we’re on a parallel track with Computer Vision (CV)—each of us tackling the same challenge from different angles, ensuring cutting-edge AI solutions remain accessible to all.

That very insight is the reason we founded Amniscient in the first place, and we’ve been successfully proving it here in the United States for some time now. AI disruption is possible for anyone, without a mountain of funding or unattainable levels of compute.

How it Started

I’ve seen firsthand how inefficient and expensive traditional AI approaches can be. While consulting for Cybersoft Technology in the K-12 education industry, I led a project to develop a computer vision solution for Point of Sale (POS) systems in school cafeterias.The company invested $2.6 million into the initiative to help manage the shortage of cafeteria workers by automatically identifying items on students' trays. The goal was to speed up service and ensure accountability—especially important during the COVID-19 lockdowns when free and reduced lunch programs were under significant strain.

‍

But that project proved to be far more challenging than anyone initially anticipated:

• Only 30 items were trained out of the thousands of possible cafeteria offerings.
• Data collection and labeling turned out to be an enormous manual effort–images had to be gathered, labeled, and annotated repeatedly.
• Annotations had to be corrected half a dozen times, and even then, for some times, accuracy topped out at around 83%.
• What was planned as a 6-month rollout stretched into 2 years, with ballooning costs and only partial success.

That experience became a turning point. I realized there had to be a more efficient way—one that would allow high-accuracy AI models to be built and deployed without sinking millions of dollars and years of effort into a single use case.

How it shifted

That’s why I founded Amniscient. I took the lessons from that project and built a team focused on solving these challenges in a fundamentally better way. Together, we developed our proprietary Amniscient ML engine with one guiding principle: efficiency. We’re  now working on the final steps of making our AmniEngine available for other companies that have their own distinct use cases.

Next we optimized the entire AI pipeline—from data collection to model training and ongoing maintenance—so our customers could see real results quickly, without the runaway costs typical of large-scale AI deployments. Additionally we realized the benefits of this shouldn’t just serve a technical audience, so we abstracted it into a low-code solution that allows quick iteration. This became our flagship product, AmniSphere.

Today, we can confidently say:

• Our Amniscient ML engine streamlines data preparation, reducing the kind of manual labor that drove costs so high in past projects.
• We have developed a model-building methodology that iterates rapidly, cutting the risk of endless re-annotations and re-labeling.
• Our execution times are significantly shorter, enabling clients to achieve robust and scalable AI solutions in a fraction of the time it used to take.
• We operate at a much lower cost than traditional approaches, partly because we've automated or optimized so many of the manual, error-prone steps.

‍

It’s been a gratifying journey watching our approach come to life. And while I can’t share all the secret sauce of how our engine works, I can assure you it stems directly from those hard lessons learned. We’ve built a platform that, much like DeepSeek is touting, delivers top-tier AI without the top-tier price tag.

If there’s one takeaway I hope readers get from our story, it’s this: The days of spending billions and waiting years for mediocre AI results are over. At Amniscient, we’ve already proven there’s a better, faster, and more cost-effective way to create the AI models that power transformative solutions—especially for industries that desperately need streamlined processes and accurate results.

Stay tuned—we’ll continue to share more insights into how we’re redefining AI development. If you’re ready to explore a more efficient way to build and deploy machine learning, we’d love to show you how our Amniscient ML engine can make a real impact on your organization.

‍

Thanks for reading, and here’s to building smarter, faster, and more affordable AI together.