Clinton Smith is a co-founder of Crescent Clipper, an early-stage company applying large-scale, general-purpose AI methods, often called the bitter lesson, to operational blind spots and labor automation in physical industries. He is also co-founder and CEO of RIOS Intelligent Machines, a factory automation robotics company backed by Yamaha Motor Ventures and Main Sequence, which he started in 2018 as CTO. Before RIOS he was a senior research staff member at PARC and a principal scientist at Physical Sciences Inc. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Princeton and a BS in computer engineering from Georgia Tech.