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by nora4 3057 days ago
"In his view, AI businesses are also different from regular startups because you generally get a closed feedback loop that allows you to quickly see what works (and what doesn’t)."

What is he talking about here? First of all, this is just the basic lean startup methodology. Any startup (especially consumer ones) try to do that, i.e. A/B testing new features. Second, he may be referring to the case that once you have a big comprehensive dataset already gathered, then you can just iterate improving the model.

My (cynical) answer: good luck with that. The real issue with AI especially in mission-critical situations is data in edge cases. Even if you can improve on your train/test data, that barely translates to customer satisfaction unless the edge cases are treated well. And edge cases will be revealed very slowly by encountering data in the field. Just ask anybody working on voice-assistant agents (Alexa, Siri, Google one) or self-driving. It's not a fast loop by any means.

Of course, Ng probably knows all this which makes me feel even more bothered.
1 comments
otoburb 3057 days ago
>>Of course, Ng probably knows all this which makes me feel even more bothered.

Ng's implied claim is that he has a head start on how to tackle the edge cases, along with other hard problems encountered in the field, based on his experience at Baidu. This is what got him the "easy" capital raise. If he really has an edge (no pun intended), then it makes sense for him to apply it while it's still relevant.

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nora4 3057 days ago
Maybe. Part of me thinks it's somewhat of a small money grab. (hope it's not.)

What I will bet money on though is that no massive success will come out of this. The key to AI is data & hardware (and not algorithm or methodology -- where everyone is essentially doing the same) and that's the domain of already giant tech companies. There can be a lot of good use cases in teaching far-off industries on how to use AI (manufacturing, etc.) but that's essentially a consulting business which will have a limited window. So lots of little successes is completely achievable; massive successes I hardly doubt.

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