When Martin Markiewicz co-founded Singapore-based Silent Eight in 2013 to fight financial crime, he wanted to leverage nascent Artificial Intelligence to help him along the way—but not everyone understood. His parents, for instance, couldn’t grasp what he was up to. Now, he says, they get it.
“After AI went mainstream, suddenly, it’s not a mystery anymore,” he said in a 2023 interview. “Back in the day, when I was meeting with investors and people from banks—our actual customers, who are anti-money laundering specialists but not necessarily someone who understands AI—I was looking for the easiest way to get through those first conversations.”
Back then, he would simply list the mainstream companies with which he was working, including HSBC, First Abu Dhabi Bank, and Standard Chartered, and hope the corporate name-dropping did the trick. Now that AI is everywhere, the problem is no longer describing the concept: it’s describing how Silent Eight’s use of AI differs from large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.
Like ChatGPT, Silent Eight’s software is based on generative AI, but isn’t trained on an LLM. Instead, it’s trained on smaller, task-specific models that get to the core of the company’s mission, like tracking the translations of names across different languages. Rather than casting the widest net possible, Silent Eight is laser-focused on the discrete pain points of cybercrime.
It’s the culmination of more than two decades of fintech work for Markiewicz, the “builder at heart” whose first startup was Poland-based konsultant.it, a custom-built IT solutions company for small-to-medium-sized businesses that he ran for five years. In 2009, he founded Sevenflow Investments to revolutionize the technology for hydropower plants, leading the company to become the dominant player in the Polish market and expand into Romania.
But it’s at Silent Eight where Markiewicz is making his most lasting mark, having been at the forefront of AI for a dozen years now and counting. He has spoken of the company being IPO-ready by the end of this year, but regardless of who ultimately owns Silent Eight, it exists in Markiewicz’s vision. The man whose favorite book is Ray Kurzweil’s fundamental tech tome, How to Create a Mind, is now and forever trying to figure out how things work. It’s just what he does.
“Natural language, computer vision—these were all problems to crack,” he said. “And this is the technology to crack them. This is why we study this technology. This is why we invent new stuff.”
