Sportswear brand Nike is developing its own generative AI model to design products using its vast bank of athlete data, Dezeen can reveal.
According to Nike's chief innovation officer John Hoke, the company is seeking to take advantage of its exclusive data on athlete performance with a bespoke large language model (LLM).
LLMs are a text-based form of artificial intelligence (AI) trained to recognise language patterns. The best-known example is OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Nike building AI "private garden"
"We use all the LLMs that are out there and we do have a model that we're building in-house," Hoke told Dezeen.
"It's a little bit of thinking about developing a private garden, of looking at our own datasets that are exclusive to Nike ? so performance data from an athlete, from our laboratories, et cetera. And then kind of commingling that with some things from the public garden, but making sure that that's all contained within what we're training the model on." The name of Nike's AI model is yet to be finalised.
Hoke spoke to Dezeen at a recent Nike event in Paris, where the brand unveiled its new collection of elite sports footwear ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games, which take place in the French capital this summer.
The company also showcased Athlete Imagined Revolution (AIR), a project that saw the design team create prototype shoes for 13 of Nike's top athletes ? including US sprinter Sha'Carri Richardson and French footballer Kylian Mbappé ? based...