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As AI Explodes, Investors Pour Big Bucks Into Startups (siliconangle.com)
Investment in AI startups is on a tear as venture capitalists and corporate investors scramble to stake out a leadership position in what could be the driving trend in technology for decades to come. From a report: The financial interest in AI, machine learning and related technologies is hardly new. CB Insights has tracked some $18.4 billion invested in 2,541 AI-related startups since 2012. But the trend is only accelerating. In the latest MoneyTree report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and CB Insights, which showed otherwise mostly stagnant startup funding, AI and machine learning companies shined, reaching an eight-quarter high of $820 million invested in 90 companies. A flurry of significant investments in a number of AI-related companies this past week underscored the point. On Wednesday alone, for instance, AI-powered analytics software provider CognitiveScale raised a $15 million round, voice AI startup Snips raised $13 million and, to top it off, machine learning consultancy Element AI got an unusually large $102 million early-stage investment just eight months after the company was launched. Then on Thursday and Friday, two other AI-powered companies, Conviva and Codota, announced fundings too.
First, there is nothing besides weak AI (i.e. the "AI" with no "I", better called "automation"). Second, it is not "exploding". There have been no fundamental breakthroughs for quite a while. There have been gradual speed-improvements, but they are, well, gradual. The only thing that has been "exploding" is the hype about AI, i.e. this is nothing but a bubble of hot air.
Of course some people will get rich from this, but there will be no fundamentally new products or services from this anytime soon.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Too bad 'AI' is just a fancy term for computing. :P This isn't any different than health startups or VR a few years ago, the rate at which VCs throw good money after bad chasing fads is insanity. in another few years it'll be something else, and AI will have been dropped like a hot rock by most of them. It's a new form of day trading: get in, profit off of the hype, get out. Though it lines their pockets nicely, it does nothing to help anyone or progress anything in a meaningful way, and it artificially inflates expectations. It could easily take the economy out again, eventually. The SEC is fast asleep.
Could this be the foreshadowing of another AI Winter? I remember the AI Winter of the late 1980's and early 1990's. At that time, the hype was about some of the truly amazing things that could be done in Prolog like languages. Pattern matching. Deductive reasoning. Theorem provers. Computer Algebra Systems (CAS). And especially Expert Systems.
The expectations got totally out of control. Wow! A knowledge expert could write a set of rules so that an expert system could predict who is a bad credit risk! Etc. Of course, modern statistical approaches might be much better at that. But I use it as an example of having too great of expectations.
Like today, these modern statistical classifiers are amazing! But one day one of those statistical classifiers will mis-classify a pedestrian in front of a vehicle. Another possible way there could be wrong expectations is that both human beings and also managers might expect these systems to have some kind of insight or creativity. Or possibly deductive reasoning power (like the classic AI systems actually had, to a degree).
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
What's the connection between this and glug glub blub?
They both sound like a bubble.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
At present active investors can't game index investors easily. The orders from traders for index funds get swamped out lost among the orders from actively managed fund traders. But with AI systems, it might learn to place a large buy order in a relatively thinly traded component of a large index, a few microseconds before selling a large lot of the index itself. How much to buy, how early to buy, what to buy, when to sell etc are not calculated deterministically by human traders. But AI might find the pattern and learn it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It doesn't matter whether or not these other people use the term "AI" in the same way that you do; you know what they're talking about: Advancements in machine-learning and neural-nets have created another opportunity for wealth creation and therefore investment.
If you insist on being such a pedant, you'll miss out on this development, too, just like all the other lucrative developments that have flown over the heads of you Slashdotting fools. No matter, though; the world doesn't care that you leave yourself behind—your gnashing of teeth won't prevent the rest of us from having a good time!
(Oh, but the way: You, too, are just an automation; at some point, automation becomes so complex that it is indistinguishable from "sentience".)
While I agree with the sentiment, the reality is that the dollar values are imaginary and translating from one imaginary context to another doesn't mean intuitive expectations would be met.
Since we love car analogies, if you had the labor and resources to produce one Lamborghini Aventador, you could not take those same resources to make 20 Toyota Corollas, even though the price difference suggests you could (400k vs. 20k).
It's still sad and unfair since, but not so easy to fix.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Compress AI or something :)
Seems to be the best application of AI yet.
Funny you should mention healthcare. So my friend went into "big data" after college. Hadoop mostly. Eventually worked at an insurance company. With a big enough set he could spot the similarities between the fraudsters and identify when someone was committing insurance fraud. You know, with a hit-miss rate. It was really just a tool to point the auditors in the right direction.
He could ALSO spot trends with people who got certain diagnosis's and certain tests as those who might have a particular disease. The way he described it was that most people who had a list of symptoms, went to a skin specialist, then had two certain tests performed commonly were diagnosed with a certain disease. But not all of them. He made a system that recommended the ones that didn't get diagnosed to go get checked for that particular disease, and lo and behold a lot of them had it. Now.... That's likely just catching doctor's screw-ups. But it's getting people help and having a complete non-doctor and a tool diagnosing people through their medical records. ...Which saved the insurance company some money eventually, hence why he was paid to do it.
But wtf is with Slashdot's kneejerk attacks against AI?
Please fund our bubble
But isn't what you describe just statistical analysis rather than actual AI? Data processing is not AI per se. However, I do agree with you that the consensus within Slashdot community seems to be that the only valid kind of AI is the one that gains self-awareness and start killing its creator.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
It's extremely hard to create a batch clearance protocol (say, once per minute) where you don't create an information hazard where firm A arranges to receive a vital public stock press release a 0.1 ms before the cutoff time, while it's competitor receives the same press release 0.1 ms after the cutoff time. You just have to pick the right city to post the first formal announcement.
Trust me, with this kind of trading advantage available, Bitcoin would flow into the dark wallets of press release enter-key jockeys everywhere.
Okay, you have a better idea. So you create a worldwide publication system that makes the same information available to everyone 10 s before the trade block, after which even Twitter falls silent. Now everyone bidding is on a level information playing field. (Hey there, Mr Greedy Stockbroker, no talking out of school using spread spectrum!) Maybe you settle a global trade auction once per hour, prior to which all new information on the planet that makes the cut is bundled up into some kind of giant ZFS Merkel tree, and everyone gets a copy. Then, for 10 s before the hour, all global fiber and radio goes dark until everyone places their fair bids, to be resolved by the One True Settlement Pass.
Sound like a plan?
HFT truly is a pox on humanity, but unfortunately, the pox has a billion year precedent: organisms have always competed for having the fastest nervous systems, and figuring out a way to gain proximity on the vital and timely survival information.
At the end of the day, HFT is just biology pursued by other means.
But with some peculiar twists.
Imagine how—in this New World Order—the Pompeii office places some extremely shrewd bets in the microseconds before it ceases to exist.
I've so far only managed to come up with one proper solution: build a Ringworld. A Ringworld where all news is effectively local news (so long as walls perform). A Fukushima incident takes out the entire conflict metal supply in Scorpio quadrant? Surely the localized market blip is hard to detect a mere 5 light-seconds upring or downring.
Some of the most interesting features of the Ringworld economy are dictated less by its size, than it's fundamentally linear macro-scale geometry.
Now, there would still be some competition to create the fastest possible communication network, Ringworld-wide ("wide" on Ringworld generally means "trivial in size", but we'll ignore this). The fastest diametric system probably involves shooting polarized neutrinos straight through the sun. If macro-HFT nanoseconds matter enough to you, surely you'll figure this out.
Same as Social Media Bubble.
I don't know, there was a lot about the process he never told me. But if it ever starts to teach itself how to apply statistical analysis to the data set and identify "probable fraud" or "probable cancer" all by itself without a statistician in the loop, then it's AI. And my friend isn't a statistician.
My point was that there's actual real meaningful work with gains to be made in healthcare by software. Statistical analysis, big data, hadoop, AI, or whatever.
Slashdot community seems to be that the only valid kind of AI is the one that gains self-awareness
Yeah, good luck defining whateverthefuck that means. I think this is that sort of egocentric thing where people like to think humanity is fundamentally special somehow. They didn't want to admit that humans are animals. Or that other animals recognized themselves in mirrors. Or that they use tools or language or drugs. "Self-awareness" might as well be a synonym with "soul" for all the good that does.
My AI is telling me that I should invest BIG bucks into AI startups.
What could possibly go wrong?
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.