GrayBelt Innovations is a holding company for subsidiaries based on the life’s work of its founder, Craig Brown. For a detailed resume, under the menu option “Links” select “Curriculum Vitae”
About Craig Brown (Architect, Software Engineer, CISO)
I spent the past 48 years on the cutting edge of technology. I was one of the very early developers in the post-mainframe world. I contributed, along with many other people, to hundreds of technologies which now power almost everything.
As a developer, I contributed to connectivity protocols which led towards Internet technology. So, it was a natural move to become an early pioneer in the field of information security.
Information Security, Development and very old documents on UseNet, led to a credibility respected outside of the US. I spent much of three years embedded in Russia observing the efforts of Russian hackers. I believe I have an understanding of foreign actors that is unique to anyone working in this space.
As an entrepreneur, I founded a number of companies, some in sectors very different than technology. With one effort, I introduced the concept of “energy food” which led to a billion-dollar industry.
You know Gates, Zuckerberg, Altman, Theil and Musk. Why are they billionaires while I am
still a middle-class schmuck? First, (according to me) I am a paper billionaire. But as my dad would say, “ That and a dime would get me a cup of coffee”. Read through these documents and decide if you agree. The truth is that every opportunity I had to cash out ended in a moral conflict. There is a line I will not cross. The aforementioned individuals cross this line every time I read the news. Not for nothing, if there was a way to test technical understanding, I would be comfortable in a game of tech jeopardy against any one of them.
And I do have a disability that only appears to be relevant in the United States. One thing that all of the early developers had in common was that we were not good at self-promotion, and very few of us gained fame and fortune from our inventions. Where I stand out is that I may be the last man standing from that group. I am beyond retirement age, and despite heart disease, I continue to push forward.
They say history is written by the winners, and there is a reason you don’t know my story. But the one thing I am known for is being knocked down and then getting back up. And I offer one thing that no one else in the world can provide: a written record of my entire career. I got a modem in 1982 and started an online page intended to cover my entire career. That document evolved into a scrapbook that was moved from one online technology to the next throughout my career. Everything I claim can be traced back to an article in a newspaper, or a magazine, or some other record located on my resume site. It can be viewed from the menu item under “Links” labeled “Curriculum Vitae.”
I spent many years contributing to society in any way that I could. The story behind the Layoff Support Network during the last recession is completely true. I funded a large relief effort for people who were laid off. In doing that, I used much of my retirement funding. As I am well past retirement age, hopefully this website will help in that regard.
CISOware
GrayBelt Innovations is a holding company with two wholly-owned subsidiaries. These companies exist to package and monetize technologies I invented. These technologies are beyond the capabilities of a startup and require the resources of a large company or nation-state to manage. The first is under the company name CISOware. Over a 10-year period, a platform was built for what was initially intended to be information security software as a service. It is named Reflex. Reflex has been complete and operational for several years. However, the pandemic delayed expansion, and then the emphasis on large-language-model-based AI has led to an expansion of its capabilities.
In the ’90s, I created a personal finance product called Floater. It was sold by Floater Corporation. Floater is historically unique in that it contained what I called AI. My definition of AI was software that can make decisions based on some criteria. The criteria were based on the preferences of the user who configured it.
Floater got great media coverage, and its customer base was growing. However, that was a time when the majority of small software companies were crushed by Microsoft. I have had many years to think about AI and greatly expanded the original capabilities of the Floater engine.
From the perspective of someone in the information security field, Reflex is a platform for incident response. It introduces technologies unique to Reflex. For example, the ability to build a mobile application specific to a task and send it to the devices of staff as they work on that task. It has the ability to predict if an incident response will be successful by understanding the capabilities of the staff assigned to the incident. This is an advance in AI that no frontier AI can match.
But the real value in the platform is not obvious. Reflex solves the biggest problem in frontier AI. Reflex introduces a closed-loop system which creates data. If acquired by a frontier company, that company could select a domain and modify Reflex, market it toward users of that domain, and have those users create data. You can read more under the Reflex menu item here or visit the site.
Reflex also offers a practical solution to the problem of rogue AI agents, a capability built into the platform years before AI agents became a concern. Reflex includes a feature for creating artificial people. Its original purpose was to model people with particular skills and see how they would affect the outcome of an incident response. These artificial participants could once be made mischievous, deliberately causing problems so that teams could practice handling them. That ability was later removed, because a virtual person causing trouble during a real incident added an unnecessary complication. The underlying design remains: Reflex treats non-human participants as members of the team. Handling a rogue agent, or an agent operating under a “trust but verify” arrangement, is built into the core of Reflex.
CISOware expects to conduct a private equity offering under Rule 506(c) of Regulation D to raise $5 million for a two- to three-year project to prepare Reflex for commercial deployment. The offering is expected to be limited to accredited investors, with a minimum investment of $250,000 for individual investors, subject to applicable verification requirements. No investment will be accepted unless and until the offering is formally commenced and the investor’s accredited-investor status has been verified.
The Graybelt Academy
I created another company called The GrayBelt Academy. The Academy is where my other research in AI is being used. The purpose of the Academy was to clearly separate the research in progress from the completed Reflex project.
One project is called GrayBelt Domains. It involves using some technologies made available by the adoption of large language models. But a GrayBelt domain runs on widely available consumer hardware. It could be viewed as a toolkit to build locally running AI. A GrayBelt domain can also learn and grow with new information. I developed a patent-pending system which works in the opposite way as a traditional RAG system. A hybrid of a standard relational database combined with a vector database builds all the intelligence. An open-source large language model is only used to produce language output. This technology would allow a nation-state to enter as a competitor to frontier AI companies without spending billions of dollars. This project is being presented to multiple foreign governments. Note that the model project is very small and not capable of any kind of sensitive operations.
As the entire world is focused on the big AI companies, I see a repeat of what occurred in the ’90s. The small innovative products are being ignored. There is a lot of technology here, and some is years ahead of what is currently available. All of it dies with me unless I pass it on now.