[danielharan]

I learned about AI by participating in the challenge, and ended up co-founding an AI company as a result.

Netflix got more than 1 million dollar in free advertising from it, and are still getting brand value out of it today. They implemented some of the algorithms, and probably got a 10X ROI through retention alone.

As mentioned in the Quora answer, they were also able to recruit top talent - and that's much harder to put an ROI figure on.

[kqr]

Similar story here. The company I work at founded when a couple of very bright people realised why the Netflix stuff won't generalise to many other areas, and sought to find something that did instead. So far, very successful!