Deep Dive
From fifth grade project to wildfire detection
Ryan built his first heat detector for a fifth-grade science class and kept iterating for years. He won progressively larger competitions, caught media attention, and eventually his dad saw an email pitching the technology. That led to OpenAI's involvement. The core insight is simple: fires are unstoppable once they spread, so catching them at ignition — the exact moment they start — changes everything.
How the sensor-ChatGPT combo works
Ryan's infrared sensors detect heat signature changes the instant a fire ignites. ChatGPT takes that raw, complicated telemetry and makes it human-readable through natural language. You can hold-to-talk and ask it anything: Why is this flagged as a fire? What are the GPS coordinates? What's the fire's current size? The system answers in plain English, not dashboards or data tables. The goal is to blanket ridge terrain and canyons with a network of these sensors, all feeding real-time intelligence to whoever's monitoring.