Shawn Shen believes that AI will need to remember what it sees in order to succeed in the physical world. Shen’s company Memories.ai is using Nvidia AI tools to build the infrastructure for wearables and robotics to be able to remember and recall visual memories.
Memories.ai announced a collaboration with semiconductor giant Nvidia at its GTC conference on Monday. Through this partnership, Memories.ai uses Nvidia’s Cosmos-Reason 2, a reasoning vision language model, and Nvidia Metropolis, an application for video search and summarization, to continue to develop its visual memory technology.
Shen (pictured above left) told TechCrunch that he and his co-founder and CTO, Ben Zhou (pictured above right), got the idea for the company while building the AI system behind Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses. Building the AI glasses got them thinking about how people would actually use the tech in real life if users couldn’t recall the video data they were recording.
They looked around to see if they could find anyone already building that type of visual memory solution for AI. When they couldn’t, they decided to spin out of Meta and build it themselves.
“AI is already doing really well in the digital world. What about the physical world?” Shen said. “AI wearables, robotics need memories as well. … Ultimately, you need AI to have visual memories. We believe in that future.”
The ability for AI systems to remember, in general, is relatively new. OpenAI updated ChatGPT to start to remember past chats in 2024 and fine-tuned that feature in 2025. Elon Musk’s xAI and Google Gemini have also launched their own memory tools in the past two years.
But these advancements have largely focused on text-based memory, Shen said. Text-based memory is much more structured and easier to index but isn’t as helpful for physical AI applications that largely interact with the world through sight and visuals.
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