What an AI company actually does, explained in Assen
On a January evening in Assen, deepkapha.ai's chief operating officer sat down with a handful of secondary school pupils and walked them through the company's site, its people and its work.
The folder holds nine photographs and nothing else. No slides, no certificate, no programme. Everything here comes from the frames and from the EXIF written into them on the night.
An ordinary language classroom in the north of the Netherlands. Van Dale dictionaries lined along the window shelf, blue plastic chairs, a poster on the wall that reads 'Het allerbeste komt nog'. The camera timestamps run from 19:40 to 20:41 on 22 January 2019, so this was an evening session, held in the dark of a Drenthe January.
Foke Singh-Van Der Helm, chief operating officer of deepkapha.ai, led it. What went up on the projector was not a training deck. It was the company: the team page on deepkapha.ai, carrying her own entry and that of Jie Mei, head of research, and the LinkedIn profile of Tarry Singh, listed there as CEO, founder and AI researcher. On the laptop beside her sat a photograph of a workshop cohort with their arms in the air.
The group was small. Two pupils at pushed-together desks with notebooks open and pens in hand, one or two more taking notes off to the side. She spent part of the hour seated at their level and part of it on her feet at the board, and the wide frames of the half-empty room are honest about the numbers. What the pupils got was an hour with a working AI company: who it is, what it researches, where the work happens.
The school kept no record of the evening, so the account here is read off the photographs. One further frame is held back until the school confirms consent for the pupils in it.
