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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.
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
A bubble is when your mother gives you stock tips for the latest technology startups. That's a good sign to get out of the market while fools are still rushing in.
Seems to be the best application of AI yet.
Please fund our bubble
Same as Social Media Bubble.
(Oh, but the way: You, too, are just an automation; at some point, automation becomes so complex that it is indistinguishable from "sentience".)
You can spread your religion-surrogate crap somewhere else please. There is no scientific basis to your claim.
You appear to have it backwards. Nearly all if not all of our scientific knowledge points to humans being an automation just like any other robot, although much more complex and with fundamentally different hardware. Religion or religion-surrogates are the only source of belief to the contrary.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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.