Miltner’s CV is impressive: not only is he splitting his time between Prague and Silicon Valley working on AI projects, no mean feat in itself, he’s a former BCG consultant, an exited startup founder, and he even is an event organizer, helping put together meetups for AI Tinkerers, where enthusiasts hang out and show off their AI-created projects. He’s also working on launching a new startup, and somehow manages to find time for married life outside of work, too.
Unsurprisingly, he makes an energetic impression when you meet him, and the words come hard and fast. When asked how his deal with Stanford and CVUT works, he explains it’s the first double affiliation of its kind, where Miltner gets to study and teach at CVUT and Stanford simultaneously – in no small part thanks to his hands-on experience with AI.
Starting with sensors
Miltner got his start in AI with autonomous cars, founding a team that developed the country’s first self-driving race car at CVUT. His team did extremely well, he says: “ we actually beat MIT’s team so hard that they actually dissolved the next year.”
Still, he seems to have given up on automotive stuff after he came to the conclusion that “I don’t believe in the technology’s net positive impact enough to help it being adopted on public roads, and we were working with sensors and technologies that are still not implemented even in the Tesla robot taxis that are now being rolled out.”
After a brief stint studying Technology Policy in Cambridge, his next stop was being CTO of a UK-based startup focused on AI-based autonomous systems to secure physical infrastructure, but he left amicably when the company’s new product lines included a possible move towards military use cases where we would not be just doing passive security, but also potentially integrate AI solutions with active military systems.
“That can be a valid use case, but at the point where we were, in my view we just didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with both technical issues and ethical issues at the same time – and having the supreme technical role in the company, I felt the responsibility rested on my shoulders. So I said, ‘If you want to go that way, do it without me,’ and we parted ways.”
Miltner’s skepticism is refreshing at a time when so many experts wax lyrical about how wonderful AI is. While he clearly believes in the potential of the technology he’s devoting a big chunk of his life to, he’s not blind to its limitations. For example, his critical examination of autonomous driving systems isn’t only down to sensory issues, but also a lack of faith in its ability to react to new, unexpected situations.
”What do you do when a bear jumps on the road that was not present in the training dataset, or where there’s contradicting road signs? There’s an abundance of road signs in places where there shouldn’t be due to human made mistakes in regulation or sign placement. That’s very, very hard for an AI to handle right now. And that’s usually when accidents happen, something humans are extremely adaptable to. That’s where the bleeding edge just isn’t there yet.”
Academic pursuits
The end result, after a few more adventures in startups, was that he realized he wanted something else for a change: “ I’ve enjoyed it, but at the end of the day. I clearly am very motivated by purpose, so why not focus a couple years of my peak productive life on being impact driven and not commerce driven. Because even at startups, many people from corporations tend to think like, ‘oh, in the startup you can do whatever.’
Miltner emphasizes, though that they can actually be even more cutthroat. ”Between market pressures and investors you cannot just focus on what you believe is right. There is always someone forcing your hand, essentially.” His solution was to go to academia, at least for a while, and be more, in his words, “purpose-driven and free in intellectual pursuit.”
“ I think academia is often taken as this completely separate path, but especially abroad, it’s considered a very valid path after a few years in industry or in startups. You do an MBA or even a PhD and then you go right back if you like. As for me, I wanted to have an impact on what I consider the most pressing issue of today, so I wanted to use my background in AI to tackle climate change in some way.”
With 75% of emissions tied directly to energy use, to Miltner it seems obvious to tackle that somehow. Currently, he’s working on a project that will earn him his PhD as well as help forecast, control and model energy use. This, in turn, should help energy distribution system operators to place EV charging stations more effectively, for example. “Or to get the power from the point of generation to the point of consumption so that we don’t get blackouts like recently.”
He’s proud of the fact that most of his research was done working directly with energy companies on both sides of the ocean, learning how they operate while showing them what AI can do.
Silicon Valley vs Prague
Thanks to his work at both universities, Miltner is also perfectly placed to compare the startup ecosystem in both Silicon Valley and Prague. Though the two may seem worlds apart, he takes the question seriously: “Compared to Silicon Valley, there is no other place in the world where you have such a self-supporting flywheel of tech entrepreneurs supporting each other with VCs, universities, clients and all that.”
“For example, Stanford attracts technical talent that wants to build, so most people that have already made money in this space, the people that believe in it, are there, creating this huge support network. Other places are a lot more conservative when it comes to investing.”
“All this is to say that if we say that Prague isn’t on the same level, there is no shame in it. Even New York City, a global megalopolis, doesn’t offer this kind of support.” He thinks for a bit, then continues. “The attitude here is actually still very conservative and they’re used to investing in private equity. Very risk averse. That’s just not how startups work.”
That said, there’s no denying that there isn’t as much money around in CEE as in Silicon Valley. Besides the obvious, the fact that the market there is much more established, he also sees another reason: “I have seen Stanford tech talent can is some ways actually be markedly worse than Czech or Slovak talent coming out of CVUT, but the Americans just present it better, and they have the opportunity, unlike the Czech students to go to the best companies in the world immediately, even just for their summer internships.”
“No wonder they leapfrog their Czech counterparts within six months to a year after graduating in understanding not just how to build tech, but how to package it as a product.”
Future plans
As for the future, Miltner is, of course, working on another startup, this one focused on AI powered geospatial analyses. According to him, the pipeline of creating accurate maps is broken, a hole that AI agents could easily fill. The opportunities are limitless, from knowing where to place charging stations to figuring out the best coverage for supermarkets and shops, as well as being able to figure out better, more sustainable routes for traffic of goods and people.
“If people want to know more about it, they should follow my LinkedIn page,” he says, his eyes aglimmer, “I have a co-founder with a cool last name, and we’ll start hiring soon.”
