‘AI is stuck because it fell in love with stats and big data’
NEW YORK–”Why is AI (artificial intelligence) stuck?” asked Gary Marcus of Geometric Intelligence.”Because it has fallen in love with statistics and big data.” He was showing how, in so many ways, AI is not where we thought it would be by now. For example, one would expect translation online by now to be more precise but not, really. Quoting Peter Thiel, he also said: “We wanted flying cars instead we got 140 characters,” in reference to Twitter, of course.
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Marcus was at the Data-Driven meetup last January 19 at Bloomberg. Marcus, a scientist, bestselling author and entrepreneur, had the crowd of data scientists, developers and business intelligence analysts chuckling along with his funny yet whip-smart and practical insights. He is also professor of psychology and neural science at NYU.
The other presenters were Amir Orad, CEO of Sisense, which handles business intelligence for complex data; Shivon Zilis, investor at Bloomberg Beta, an early-stage VC firm; and Dan Scholnick, general partner at Trinity Ventures, a VC firm based in Silicon Valley.
Started 8 years ago, Orad likes to say how Sisense came about because of 5 data geeks who met in university and who wanted to make business intelligence understandable, cost-efficient and accurate,” adding how “the more complex your data the more you spend.”
Sisense is bringing disruptive simplicity for big data or multi-source data. He run a list of things the company is looking into: DBA to build database’ defining what data will be queried; joining tables upfront; normalizing and creating a star schema.
What lessons have they learned at Sisense? “Dream big. Refine benefits. Don’t automate, obliterate Disrupt, don’t improve. Be totally different, that’s the only way to offer value,” he said.
“Speed is not the end game but beginning of something else,” he added.
Shivon Zilis of Bloomberg Beta gave us updates on the companies that the venture capital fund is investing on–hundreds of them that she certainly had no time to explain but show, slide after slide, the logos of many recognizable names. She termed it an “explosion of activity” with “startups focusing on niches that provide immediate value”
In all these investments, Zilis listed the following what-if scenarios that we certainly hoped can be solved: what if I had the same support as a Fortune 400 CEO?; what if I never had to feel lonely again; what if I never had to go to a primary care physician; what if I could measure the effectiveness of every word I said? what if I never had to drive again?
Some realistic expectation includes how in five years, it will be crazy for a farmer to overwater their fields or how in five years it will be crazy to ever hit “publish “without using a domain specific text optimizer, one that makes you smarter even when you’re not using it.
It was also good to hear Scholnick of Trinity Ventures say that his VC firm doesn’t outsource work to junior staff, which have become important for startups looking to reach the decision makers right away.
As for hiring, he advised startups to make sure they’re hiring people with the right experience
