[ghaff]

I fully agree that big data has essentially been renamed to AI. Which makes sense because AI today ~= ML/DL which require lots of data.

And, as someone who went through the data warehousing fad in the late 90s, there's a lot of naive belief in pouring in a lot of data and magic happening.

That said, there has been a lot of advance that, once it's happened, we just don't call it AI any longer. Route optimization (Google Maps), predictive analytics in some domains, image recognition. Yeah, a lot of it is just fuzzy pattern recognition but some of it is pretty good.

The more fundamental question IMO is how far DL can even take you. We've actually seen a lot of progress there but we also haven't seen a lot of forward motion in cognitive science for example. So do we just run out of steam in some of the areas, like autonomous vehicles, where we think we're doing pretty well today.

[solomatov]

Big data is not AI. Big data is processing of a giant datasets with quite classic models, such as Logistic Regression in a distributed way. That's what frameworks such as Spark and Hadoop do. AI or deep learning is different. Usually, they don't distribute across many machines so well.