Ai2’s Skylight project launches ‘Shippy,’ an AI agent that dives into ocean data

Skylight, the free ocean-monitoring platform built by Seattle’s Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), launched an AI agent that gives maritime analysts answers to plain-language questions about what’s happening across the world’s oceans, from illegal fishing to vessels that have gone dark.

The agent, dubbed Shippy, runs on Skylight’s live vessel-tracking and satellite data, with every answer linking back to the underlying records so analysts can verify and reproduce it.

Skylight is one of a group of environmental projects that moved in 2021 to Ai2 from Vulcan Inc., now known as Vale Group, the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s holding company.

Researchers at Skylight have spent years building tools to spot illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, which it says accounts for billions of dollars in losses each year and hits developing countries that depend on their fisheries the hardest. The platform is free, and Skylight says it is used by more than 300 organizations across about 70 countries.

It combines free satellite data with commercial imagery and vessel-tracking feeds to flag suspicious behavior, such as a ship going dark or two vessels meeting at sea to transfer catch.

Ai2 has open-sourced the computer-vision models behind the project.

Like Skylight itself, Shippy will be free to governments, regional fisheries bodies and qualifying nonprofits. For now it is limited to a small group of agencies and partners, with Skylight planning to expand access to a broader community of users as it updates and improves the tool.

Skylight says it built in limits to keep the agent useful and accountable. Shippy sticks to maritime questions, presents facts without making legal judgments, declines defense-related requests, and stops rather than guess when a question runs past what its data can answer. Decisions such as where to send a patrol, the team says, stay with “the humans in the room.”

The launch reflects a broader shift at Ai2 toward applying AI to specific real-world problems. Former CEO Ali Farhadi and other researchers left earlier this year to join Microsoft, as the Ai2 board reconsidered whether the nonprofit should be trying to go toe-to-toe with heavily funded tech giants in developing advanced AI models.

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