A day after President Donald Trump rescinded Biden’s executive order urging federal agencies to formulate standards for responsible development of artificial intelligence, Maia Hightower, CEO of Equality AI, posted on Linkedin: “A Bittersweet Chapter: Equality AI is closing its doors.”
Trump’s executive order was the “final nail” but Equality AI had been struggling to find enough clients to cover its costs, Hightower told STAT in an interview. In the absence of overarching federal initiatives to vet algorithms in health care, it’s fallen to those using artificial intelligence in their hospitals to make sure that their tools are helping and not hurting patients. When Hightower was chief medical information officer and chief population health officer at the University of Iowa, she and her leadership realized that they didn’t have the tools to effectively evaluate the risk they were taking by using an AI model embedded in one of their platforms.
“That’s actually how Equality AI was born, was to try to build out tools for health care systems to be able to manage AI risk, starting with bias detection and mitigation,” said Hightower. The company, founded in 2021 with a modest $1.25 million in venture capital funding from Salt Lake City investors EPIC Ventures and Grix VC (Hightower by then was chief medical information officer at the University of Utah), grew to 12 employees at its peak but shut down last week after being unable to find funding to sustain it.
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