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Why is Artificial Intelligence a market sector?. Seems as much useful as having a "PHP", "Java" or "<put technology name here>" market sector.

by petard 10y ago

jressey 10y ago
I totally understand your perspective, but I think people are interested in 'buying' artificial intelligence. It may be out of ignorance or maybe it's the way the market is describing 'help with implementing artificial intelligence.'
- photoJ 10y ago
  There is also algorithm/database based IP that is unique and worthy of separate purchase.
swalsh 10y ago
I disagree, if Tensor Flow was a market sector, that would be weird... but "Artificial Intelligence" as a term is the equivalent to "Web Development" as a term.
- FLGMwt 10y ago
  Aye, but do startups of today list "web dev" or "app dev" as their sector?
- LoSboccacc 10y ago
  Yeah but unless you sell tooling your sector is not the tools you use, unless you are esplicitly chasing buzzwords. I.e medium has a web development core, but that doesn't put it in the web development sector.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  See eg. the AI effect and Tessler's Theorem: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect There's this weird effect that's been observed wherever once an AI technique starts working, it becomes a field in its own right and ceases to be considered "AI". So for example, beam search and A* were once considered AI; now they're just algorithms that everyone should know. SVMs, decision trees, linear regression, and other statistical machine-learning techniques were once considered AI; now they form the basic knowledge for the field of data science. Computer vision, handwriting recognition, and OCR were once considered AI (indeed, they were some of the first applications of artificial neural networks); now they are fields in their own right. Ditto machine translation and voice recognition. Even information retrieval with its subfields of synonym recognition, language models, bigram recognition, NLP, named entity recognition, etc. were all considered AI. That "AI" is considered the hot sector means that VCs don't have a clue what is coming next.
JamilD 10y ago
Yeah, if you look at the description of the companies, it's much more indicative of what the companies actually do. I suspect AI is just a buzzword they use to attract more attention. From the article, the AI startups are doing: · Sales and marketing integration · Enterprise search · Multi-platform marketing · Slackbot for sales teams · Predictive analytics on customer lifecycle
pyromine 10y ago
I think the issue is that they're trying to signify how they're innovating rather than what sector the company is in. A better taxonomy would indicate their sector and either be AI powered <sector> or just include their AI processes in the description. The thing is though that AI opens lots and lots of new business opportunities and if these companies weren't doing nominally AI processes they wouldn't exist.
danpalmer 10y ago
Agreed. Our core proposition is very much in the "AI" camp, but our market sector is undeniably "fashion".

Why is Artificial Intelligence a market sector?. Seems as much useful as having a "PHP", "Java" or "<put technology name here>" market sector.

by petard 10y ago

Why is Artificial Intelligence a market sector?. Seems as much useful as having a "PHP", "Java" or "<put technology name here>" market sector.

jressey 10y ago

I totally understand your perspective, but I think people are interested in 'buying' artificial intelligence. It may be out of ignorance or maybe it's the way the market is describing 'help with implementing artificial intelligence.'

photoJ 10y ago
There is also algorithm/database based IP that is unique and worthy of separate purchase.

swalsh 10y ago

I disagree, if Tensor Flow was a market sector, that would be weird... but "Artificial Intelligence" as a term is the equivalent to "Web Development" as a term.

FLGMwt 10y ago
Aye, but do startups of today list "web dev" or "app dev" as their sector?
LoSboccacc 10y ago
Yeah but unless you sell tooling your sector is not the tools you use, unless you are esplicitly chasing buzzwords. I.e medium has a web development core, but that doesn't put it in the web development sector.
nostrademons 10y ago
See eg. the AI effect and Tessler's Theorem: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect There's this weird effect that's been observed wherever once an AI technique starts working, it becomes a field in its own right and ceases to be considered "AI". So for example, beam search and A* were once considered AI; now they're just algorithms that everyone should know. SVMs, decision trees, linear regression, and other statistical machine-learning techniques were once considered AI; now they form the basic knowledge for the field of data science. Computer vision, handwriting recognition, and OCR were once considered AI (indeed, they were some of the first applications of artificial neural networks); now they are fields in their own right. Ditto machine translation and voice recognition. Even information retrieval with its subfields of synonym recognition, language models, bigram recognition, NLP, named entity recognition, etc. were all considered AI. That "AI" is considered the hot sector means that VCs don't have a clue what is coming next.

JamilD 10y ago

Yeah, if you look at the description of the companies, it's much more indicative of what the companies actually do. I suspect AI is just a buzzword they use to attract more attention. From the article, the AI startups are doing: · Sales and marketing integration · Enterprise search · Multi-platform marketing · Slackbot for sales teams · Predictive analytics on customer lifecycle

pyromine 10y ago

I think the issue is that they're trying to signify how they're innovating rather than what sector the company is in. A better taxonomy would indicate their sector and either be AI powered <sector> or just include their AI processes in the description. The thing is though that AI opens lots and lots of new business opportunities and if these companies weren't doing nominally AI processes they wouldn't exist.

danpalmer 10y ago

Agreed. Our core proposition is very much in the "AI" camp, but our market sector is undeniably "fashion".