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Ask HN: If future is AI – how can a company overtake Google/Facebook/Baidu?
Recent raise of AI to mainstream has also meant companies with large amounts of text/audio/video data are 'only' capable of having significant impact/progress. Google/Facebook/Baidu are way ahead in these. Any AI company would want to be with Google/Facebook etc for the data. There is a little paradox in this like a zen koan.
So if future belongs to AI - how should 'young turks coming out of school' plan to make impact or overtake likes of Google/Facebook.
- therealmarv 10y agoWhy do people think so? They have definitely more manpower for leading certain areas (like internet search results)... but their AIs certainly don't cover every aspect of life. Imagine a very specific "field of your choice" where AI can improve... so you take one of the many open source AI libraries and train/retrain that thing to your specific needs and voila, you have your own AI which solves your problem pretty good. The bigger problem is more that this sort of development is new for most developers... but I think this will change over time. <- this is a very good area where young people can be better than old developers. It's like a new chance maybe (like web development in the past).
- samblr 10y agoAlthough I do agree for a niche field AI. My original question is how do you get ahead of giants in a generic way once you come out of that niche. If we imagine internet as a book - google has that complete book in its servers with more understanding than any one. A niche field might be equivalent to a line in that book.
- therealmarv 10y agoYou're underexpecting your possibilities I would say. This is like saying: I will stop trying because the big companies are always better than me. Just go a little beside what they are focusing and then you will be better than them, for sure. Do it different etc.. Of course you will not beat them in their main game (search engine, personal assistant AI with searches etc.) but saying that this niche is only a line in the book is a huge underestimation... there are whole industries living in that niche. Google is not the world. For sure not.
- samblr 10y agoSorry I could not make myself clear on this - I am with you on Google is not the world. There will be a 'niche thing' in future which will overtake it. Just like Google over took Microsoft. Read any tech book during late 90s and even Bill Gates own books. He has predicted all billion dollar companies in his book 'Road Ahead' but nowhere is Microsoft created those billion dollar companies/markets. Hence my point is: With AI dependent on large amounts of data - what could be that which will be grow bigger than Google in AI. We have to come out of logic to see this.
- billconan 10y agoAndrew Ng said the current need for massive data is due to the naiveness of current ai. Human doesn't need to see that many pictures to do classification. So one shouldn't focus on "brute force" ai in order to compete.