What racing reveals about working with AI - Episode 22

Hello. I'm Andrew Main, and this is the OpenAI podcast. In this episode, I spoke with OpenAI researcher Joyce Ruffel about her experience helping the Chip Ganassi racing team use AI to improve everything from logistics to driver performance. I also spoke with Chase Holden, co founder of RaceTech, about his experience using ChatGPT and Codex to build a racing company.

It's always going to be about who can organize the best.

The man and the machine. How do you get those to work together as possible?

When everybody's kind of on the same page, that's where results come from. Data's everything with racing at this point. I believe we are in what's called the data wars right now.

Joyce, tell us about your role at OpenAI.

So, I am a researcher here at OpenAI. I have looked, been looking at mostly data problems for the last few years here. Everything from data sources, data quality, data pipelines, data efficiency. And one of these data oriented projects I've been working on recently has been this research collaboration with Chip Ganassi racing. They currently run-in IndyCar, that is our primary focus with them right now. So in the IndyCar and the IndyNext series, they have also previously run-in NASCAR as well as in sports car.

So this is a very interesting intersection both as a researcher looking at data and I imagine there's a lot of data in motorsports.

Yes, there really is and it's a very unique kind of data. It's a lot of high bandwidth time series data that we can both look at retroactively, but we also want to be able to process in real time at the track, make calls, draw conclusions as quickly as possible. You know, Chip Ganassi is a storied team. They've been around thirty five years. They have tons and tons of data from a variety of different drivers on a number of different tracks with a in different series, different specs. So they have all the know how, but it's about making it accessible so they can compare and they can build hypot

How would you describe what Racetech does?