WSC Sports announces Gen AI-specific division

WSC Sports

WSC Sports has promoted Itai Epstein to becomes the company’s first Dir of Gen AI to lead a newly formed division. The Gen AI group already has 22 engineers and business execs assigned to it with plans to double within the year as part of WSC Sports’ deep commitment to the burgeoning field. WSC Sports has devised a two-year roadmap of Gen AI products, including an AI Commentary tool that has already been deployed with a major league. The underlying foundation of its generative AI work is a multimodal — meaning text, video and audio — large language model (LLM) that is specifically trained for sports functionality that WSC Sports is calling a large sports model, or LSM.

WSC Sports CEO Daniel Shichman told SBJ a few months ago that it was beginning such a project built off what he believes is the biggest indexed database of sports content in the world.

“We have the video footage, we have the audio, we have everything indexed,” Shichman said. “So for us to go and build a dedicated model that understands sports, I think we’re in the best position to build such a neural network, a large language model, which understand sports that will be able to create a lot of new tasks.”

Epstein has been with WSC Sports for nearly five years, most recently serving as director of business development and head of EMEA and China. WSC Sports, one of SBJ’s 10 Most Innovative Sports Tech Companies and winner of the inaugural Best in AI award, works with more than 450 rightsholders to automate the creation of video clips.

“You will be able to really personalize experiences much quicker and with much more flexibility because you won’t have to train the system on each and every specific task, and I think that’s where the world is aiming to go, regardless of generative AI,” Shichman said. “The business requires leagues and broadcasters to personalize the experience.”