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While Silicon Valley churns out AI tools for automating routine tasks and spreadsheets, a new startup has emerged with a refreshing vision.
Symbiotic (Palo Alto), founded by Harvard and Oxford graduates Riccardo Di Molfetta and Kevin Kermani Nejad, believe that creative computation is the key to unlocking the next major breakthrough in artificial intelligence. Their goal? To rekindle the dream of the creative computer by making AI that embodies more of the qualities that make humans truly exceptional beyond simple task completion.
One might wonder what sets Symbiotic’s systems apart from today’s generative tools like Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E. While terms like “creativity” and “AI art” have gained popularity, they often misrepresent the more complex, human-like creative processes that Symbiotic is aiming to achieve. True creativity, the founders explain, is not one of many technical challenges, but AI’s grandest, unsolved frontier.
In fact, creativity isn’t just about assembling known elements in novel ways, but exploring new questions and transforming the very conceptual space where these questions are generated.
“We are never going to unlock this technology’s potential if AI cannot help us venture into the unknown and ask new questions rather than just solving problems for us.” Di Molfetta says. “The risk lies in developing more sophisticated automation while missing the potential of AI as a catalyst for human intellectual advancement.”
Reimagining the creative industry
Symbiotic’s vision comes at a pivotal moment for the creative industry. Today, creatives are more fragmented in their work than ever before. Rather than working fluidly across media and concepts, they are increasingly relegated to managing tools, stitching together outputs, and orchestrating different systems.
The latest adoption of AI tools such as Midjourney and DALL-E are making this worse, turning many creative professionals into prompt engineers and software managers and forcing them to move back and forth from one platform to another instead of engaging with creative ideation. Symbiotic sees this fragmentation as one of many fundamental problems that limits the full expression of creative talent and innovation within organizations.
For many teams, high-quality creative capability remains one of the most significant challenges and expenses. From Fortune 500 to small-to-medium firms, the demands of producing original creative work drain resources, slow down timelines, and often fall short of capturing a unified creative vision. Despite all this, today’s creative services market exceeds $2 trillion annually.
Symbiotic envision a system that acts as a full extension of creative teams and will eventually serve as a central creative “brain” for firms and organizations. Unlike traditional AI tools that assist only in isolated and prompt-dependent tasks, Symbiotic are working on a new type of artificial creative mind that can be useful across a variety of different tasks, from ideation to production.
In a world where projects are often delayed or scaled back due to limitations in human capacity and high production costs, Symbiotic’s approach promises a breakthrough that could change everything.
Building the future of human-AI collaboration
What sets Symbiotic apart is its approach to developing AI systems. Rather than simply training models on existing creative works, the team is studying how creative thinking actually happens.
“We’re not just trying to replicate the output of creative thinking, but the very process,” says Nejad. “Current models are still far from reaching the thresholds we’ve defined. We’re looking at creativity as a multi-dimensional, multi-faceted system that goes far beyond just generating novel content.”
The company is already collaborating with creative professionals across various disciplines to build and refine their technology. Their approach has attracted interest from leading creative firms and domain experts, though specific partnerships remain under wraps.
The team behind the vision
The founders’ backgrounds uniquely position them to tackle this ambitious challenge. Di Molfetta brings a deep understanding of creativity shaped by his multidisciplinary exploration of the subject. In his academic work, he has proposed that creativity demands a broader approach that moves beyond technical confines to embrace insights from the humanities, arts, and cognitive sciences. The initial inception for Symbiotic came at the MIT Media Lab during his studies, after he realized how the visual arts can accurately explain how human vision works.
Nejad, on the other hand, contributes through his expertise in neuroscience and machine learning, with a particular focus on understanding how creative thinking emerges in both biological and artificial systems.
Federico Panzera, a member of the founding team, also brings extensive experience in bridging art and technology thanks to his background as a successful art curator in some of Italy and Europe’s most prestigious galleries. Panzera is currently leading the company’s product efforts alongside Riccardo and Kevin.
“What excites me most about our technology is the potential to give creatives a way to cut through the noise of tools and softwares for production,” says Panzera. “We’re not just building another tool for a narrow task—we’re creating a superintelligent partner that lets people focus back on what really matters in their creative processes.”
Looking ahead
The company sees its technology eventually becoming essential across multiple creative industries. But perhaps most intriguingly, they foresee their creative computer evolving into a personal partner for everyone, not just professionals. “This is one of the most exciting applications of this technology; the potential to enrich our lives by expanding human creativity in all of its forms, from common to extraordinary acts,” Nejad concludes.
The recent explosion of tools like Midjourney and DALL-E has demonstrated massive market demand for creative AI applications. However, Symbiotic’s ambitions go far beyond current offerings. Investors close to their work have described how the novelty lies not in just democratizing creative tools, but in democratizing the intelligence that can orchestrate those tools.
As AI continues to reshape industries, Symbiotic’s approach presents a new paradigm to think about the role of machines in our age: will we create mere mirrors of human capability, reflecting back our existing knowledge with greater speed and precision? Or will we unlock AI’s potential as a partner in discovery, capable of illuminating new intellectual territories?
Whether Symbiotic will succeed in their ambitious mission remains to be seen, but their vision offers an intriguing glimpse into a future where AI could become an amplifier of human creativity.
