A Calculated Decision: How Pittsburgh Forged Lovelace AI's Advantage
By Carlos J. Queirós
From a modest office in Pittsburgh’s Bakery Square neighborhood, Andrew Moore leads a company whose software will decide–within seconds–where a rescue helicopter flies or which cargo vessel requires an inspection for smuggled materials. The former Google Pittsburgh site lead and Carnegie Mellon dean has spent three decades translating academic breakthroughs into operational systems. His latest venture, Lovelace AI, turns floods of satellite imagery, sensors readings, and text reports into actionable insights for military commanders, investors, risk managers, and other high-stake users.
Andrew Moore. Lovelace AI’s Co-founder and CEO
Moore is widely respected among technologists—not through bombast, but through decades of foundational work that influenced a generation of computer scientists.
“If you're a PhD in computer science over the past three decades, you were either taught by Andrew Moore or you read his work,” as one colleague puts it.
“After every tragedy you hear, ‘if only someone had connected the dots’,” Moore says. “Today there are trillions of dots. Humans alone can’t keep up.”
Moore’s solution—to build analytic technology that keeps people safe by making sense of overwhelming data before it’s too late—must work because lives depend on it. Doing that reliably requires building a system around applied artificial intelligence, which is why Moore built Lovelace in Pittsburgh rather than Silicon Valley.
In many ways, Moore embodies Pittsburgh itself: understated yet influential, rigorous yet approachable, more concerned with getting things right than getting attention.
Pittsburgh: The World’s Serious AI City
Moore's assessment of Pittsburgh cuts to the heart of what differentiates the city:
"I don't want Pittsburgh to be known as the world's AI city. I want it to be known as the world's serious AI city."
This distinction matters profoundly to Moore who understands Lovelace AI’s technology is used when lives hang in the balance.
"I'm going to tell you about something that really frustrates me: those YouTube videos showing a robot successfully doing something cool. What we're actually seeing is the best take out of a hundred attempts—the robot screwed up on the other 99 occasions, but we never see those failures."
For Lovelace AI's defense applications, such demonstration bias proves dangerous.
"The places where we can put automation in responsibly are only ones where our AIs do the right thing. Not 90% of the time, not 99% of the time, but 99.99% of the time," he says.
Moore's path to this conviction began with a childhood dream that would fundamentally reshape his understanding of where serious technology gets built. Growing up in England, he was captivated by artificial intelligence, initially harboring Silicon Valley aspirations.
But when Moore came to America to work at MIT, learning what really happened at Carnegie Mellon completely shifted his perspective:
“My dream quickly became, is there any chance I could become a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon? And that's what I was obsessed about. Computer science as a discipline is artistic and it's creative. You're playing with mathematics and abstractions," Moore explains. "And when you start to read what's possible behind all of that, all arrows keep pointing back to Oakland and Carnegie Mellon. It really is the place, if you truly love the beauty of computer science.”
This reputation is exactly why Google established its first engineering office outside the Valley, with Moore as the leader they hired to run that office. In 2014 Moore left Google to return to CMU as Dean of Computer Science, returned to Google in 2018 to lead their Cloud AI team, and most recently, in January 2023, he founded Lovelace AI. Each of these positions were based in Pittsburgh because of something Silicon Valley couldn't replicate.
"I'm really proud of our careful understatement in Pittsburgh, where the research groups at Pitt, CMU and around the city are very careful about asking, ‘Is this realistic, ready for prime time?’ as opposed to ‘Is this going to be a demo which wows our investors?’ "
Pittsburgh’s Cafe Culture Advantage
Moore's confidence in Pittsburgh rests on something arguably more valuable than venture capital concentration: intellectual density and collaborative proximity.
The advantage becomes tangible when Lovelace AI tackles complex challenges like real-time data fusion—combining satellite imagery, drone footage, intelligence reports, and structured databases into actionable intelligence. Rather than hiring across disciplines or consulting remote experts, Moore can tap into Pittsburgh’s concentrated expertise.
"I have so many friends around who I can just call,” he says. "I know a lot about AI, but all the things that I'm slightly fuzzy on, I know the world expert, and I can walk to them in 15 minutes."
Within that short walk sits Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, the U.S. Army’s AI Integration Center, and more than 20 AI startups like Duolingo, Hellbender, and Strategy Robot. The result is an AI Avenue cafe culture where a computer-vision PhD, a distributed‑systems veteran, and a former Navy cryptologist can argue over model latency on a lunch break—and then prototype the fix that afternoon.
The Full AI Stack
Unlike regions that focus on software alone, Pittsburgh provides the full infrastructure needed for serious AI deployment. Moore emphasizes that building useful AI requires complex orchestration of specialized capabilities—and Pittsburgh delivers the complete ecosystem.
"Sometimes people do come to me and say, what does an AI engineer do?” Moore says, gesturing across his office of Lovelace employees. “They live on the shoulders of experts who get the underlying operating systems and distributed computing fast enough, who live on the shoulders of experts who get the chips and hardware working, who live on the shoulders of folks who provide the power and cooling for the compute. It wouldn't make sense to talk about an AI ecosystem with only one part of that stack. Above us are the people on the front lines keeping people safe. They need us.”
It’s this layered expertise that sets Pittsburgh apart.
"None of us could be building here if we just relied on our own discipline,” says Moore. “We need the fact that Pittsburgh is one of the greatest engineering towns in history."
The city's energy infrastructure—from natural gas powering current data centers to robotics and to advanced nuclear development for next-generation facilities—provides sustainable competitive advantages.
Sustaining the Advantage
Pittsburgh's economic model makes developing this kind of full AI stack sustainable for the long term. Office space costs substantially less than Silicon Valley, and tech salaries run below West Coast levels. For Moore, these aren't just cost savings—they enable a fundamentally different approach to AI development.
"One of the things I think you see among people generally living and working in the Pittsburgh area is we take really interesting, fascinating things, but we get serious about them quite quickly," Moore observes.
The economic advantages allow what Moore calls "serious AI," meaning sustained investment in reliability and mathematical precision rather than venture capital theater. This approach requires the kind of talent that Carnegie Mellon's specialized programs consistently produce—graduates with deep mathematical foundations and practical engineering experience. The broader talent retention advantage proves significant for Pittsburgh-based companies, as evidenced by Moore's team, which reflects the different pathways that bring talent to the city: engineering graduates from CMU, machine learning engineers from Amazon and Google, and national security veterans.
Geographic and Cultural Advantages That Scale
Geography matters in defense contracting.
Pittsburgh sits within 400 miles of major East Coast defense contractors and government agencies, facilitating the relationship building that defense procurement requires. Its proximity to Washington DC and New York gives companies like Lovelace AI natural advantages that Silicon Valley struggles to replicate, particularly when navigating defense contracting complexity or the financial services industry.
Beyond location, Pittsburgh's industrial heritage shapes how companies approach AI development. The city's culture prioritizes mission accomplishment over market valuation, engineering solutions over marketing narratives. Such alignment with defense priorities runs deeper than corporate strategy and reflects values embedded throughout the region's technology community.
Moore sees this as a defining characteristic of the region's approach.
"Here in Pittsburgh we've really been looking at the fact that there are great opportunities, but there are also great opportunities for evil people," he explains. "We have to be ready to defeat them."
But this focus extends beyond immediate threats to broader questions of purpose.
"I love the fact that here we have a community of people who are thinking about these bigger questions rather than just maybe looking for a quick buck from the latest consumer product," Moore adds.
These advantages translate into tangible business outcomes. Investors recognized the strategic value of Pittsburgh's defense-focused ecosystem when evaluating Lovelace AI's funding strategy, which according to PitchBook has included a $17.4 million seed round led by RRE Ventures that established the company as an emerging player in defense AI data fusion technology. This reputation attracts sophisticated investors who understand defense market dynamics, contributing to the record-breaking $689 million in venture capital invested in Pittsburgh's tech ecosystem during Q1 2025 alone according to the latest PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. The region's defense credentials are further strengthened by $4.2 billion in major defense contracts at CMU, making Pittsburgh a top destination for AI and robotics investment.
"And so the history of investment in Pittsburgh is actually greatly improving," says Moore. "And I think part of the reason is it's the place for serious AI, not just cool demos."
This credibility in turn attracts expanding defense infrastructure. Parallax Advanced Research is developing a secure facility at Bakery Square, designed to support classified government work requiring the highest security clearances. Such facilities enable local companies to compete for sensitive defense contracts that require specialized physical security measures.
Broader institutional recognition also reinforces Pittsburgh’s strategic positioning. One of several recent noteworthy examples was the October 2024 selection of Pittsburgh as NVIDIA's first "AI Tech Community," providing companies like Lovelace AI with access to NVIDIA's latest frameworks, its Inception startup accelerator, and Joint Technology Centers.
These recent developments don’t just create Pittsburgh’s latest AI advantages, they amplify strengths that have been culminating in the region for decades.
Pittsburgh: Where AI Gets Real
Moore's assessment of Pittsburgh's transformation reflects the city's emergence as a serious AI center built over generations of foundational work. Moore traces this leadership back to the 1950s and 1960s, when pioneers Alan Newell and Herbert Simon, both professors at CMU, took artificial intelligence seriously as practical technology rather than academic curiosity.
"Ten years ago, I was very worried that people didn't know about Pittsburgh,” Moore says. “Now I can walk into a room and it's a badge of honor to say I'm from here because we do have all of these wins under our belts that prove Pittsburgh delivers."
Moore's conviction runs deeper than regional pride:
“Pittsburgh is the place which I trust to be sober-minded and incredibly creative when it comes to using artificial intelligence to make the world safer."
Even from a hypothetical perch in Washington or New York, he says, "I'd come to Pittsburgh if I wanted something which exceeded my expectations and actually worked reliably."
The city that once powered America's industrial transformation is now engineering its technological defense. When the stakes are highest—when algorithms decide who gets rescued first, which threats matter most, how resources get deployed—reliability isn't a feature.
It's everything.
And that's exactly what this city delivers. This is Pittsburgh's moment.
In Pittsburgh, AI gets serious.
