16 ms·

YC AI

663 points by craigcannon 10y ago

urs2102 10y ago
This seems neat. Are there any other future verticals which you would consider domain specific perks for? Also, what exactly constitutes an AI startup? If you utilize a ML library to handle a small feature of your product, are you an AI startup?
itchyjunk 10y ago
Slightly off topic but had 2 questions. The last part reminded me of google training a bunch of robot arms [1]. Haven't seen much being done with it, does anyone know if anything is being done with the data? We don't really know how much of each resources it takes to grow something. How much oxygen does 1 tomato plant take? I think growing in space would require one to investigate such questions in more detail. Ever since I came across ML and DL, I wondered if there was a way to train a deepFarmer. Something that understands relations between minerals nutrients and the fruiting body. Sometimes you want to grow stuff that might have less of certain stuff but you want more off it. Eg: low calorie high volume foods. Or you might want high protein food. If an "AI" could figure out how to maximize vitamin C for example in tomato for a population that needs more of that vs it learns to make the tomato more water rich for some other reason. AI is interesting. [1] https://research.googleblog.com/2016/03/deep-learning-for-robots-learning-from.html https://research.googleblog.com/2016/03/deep-learning-for-ro... Edit: Forgot link
- hedgehog 10y ago
  On the agriculture topic NASA has been working in this area for a while: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/science/biofarming.html https://www.nasa.gov/missions/science/biofarming.html As I understand it growing crops in a small, sealed environment requires much more precise understanding of how plants behave than you do for traditional Earth-bound farming.
  - itchyjunk 10y ago
    Ah, interesting. I know NASA were doing some research in aeroponics [1] but I haven't seen anything recent on it. Lot of commercial systems I see don't have a lot of research behind but they are still getting better yields I think. I also saw an old but interesting system from MIT [2]. It would be very useful to mine data from these to train ML systems. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroponics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroponics [2] http://openag.media.mit.edu/ http://openag.media.mit.edu/
- fnbr 10y ago
  I've spoken to a few people who are interested in applying machine learning to hydroponic farming with the aim of creating vertical farms. If you could isolate the different rooms sufficiently, you could run machine learning to optimise yield (or Vitamin C). I have doubts as to the commercial viability of this, as farming is pretty low margin, so the overhead requirements for the capital expenditures would require pretty substantial gains in efficiency, which I think just don't exist.
  - contingencies 10y ago
    I have at least one serious potential investor ready for anyone attempting this (vertical farming automation). Also, I am interested to cooperate on creating reliable contracted urban demand without the need for retail packaging - http://infinite-food.com/ http://infinite-food.com/ - currently relocating to Shenzhen. If automated urban vertical farming happens it will probably happen in China because dense/cheap/economies of scale/rising food prices/rapid urbanization/transition toward smaller households/cultural preference for fresh and less processed foods/less regulatory issues.
    - simonrobb 10y ago
      Why vertical farming specifically? No doubt vertical farming will form part of the solution to feeding urban populations in the coming decades, but the area covered by open-air "horizontal" farming is immense. We just can't do construction on that scale, not to mention the incredible environmental impacts. Growing things with LEDs seems pretty wasteful when we have a great big star shining down on us all day. Vertical farming will bring fresh food to high-density populations for sure, it just isn't going to change the face of farming across the planet. Although it's a much more difficult problem to solve being an uncontrolled environment, my company is working on this automation but for traditional farms (http://touch.farm http://touch.farm). The first step is gathering rich data from different crops/climates, which is why we're starting by designing the cheapest and most usable ag sensors we can. If we can make sensor tech accessible to a wide range of farmers, we'll gain a rich enough dataset to start applying ML (and farmers and the environment win in the process). tl;dr: vertical farming is great, but what we really need is innovation/investment in traditional farming.
- ericjang 10y ago
  > The last part reminded me of google training a bunch of robot arms [1]. Haven't seen much being done with it, does anyone know if anything is being done with the data? The data gathered using aforementioned robot arms is available here: https://sites.google.com/site/brainrobotdata/home https://sites.google.com/site/brainrobotdata/home Google (specifically Google Brain Robotics) is continuing research on this. Exciting time to be alive.
itcrowd 10y ago
At Risk of being downvoted to oblivion and out of a very well-meant interest: what if you'd replace AI with Chinese traditional medicine in the post above? Why would AI be more viable than that? (Note: I am very skeptical towards CTM and quackery. But also towards AI and ML in general. Any pointers would be great. Why is this the new industry to look out for, for example?)
- AlexCoventry 10y ago
  Has Chinese medicine solved any long-standing problems recently? Are there new developments which suggest that factors contributing to its previous disappointments are about to be overcome? Is there a clear path for its development? The answer to all these questions, for AI, is yes.
  - itcrowd 10y ago
    Hi AlexCoventry, Please don't get me wrong: there is no future for CTM. You are 100% correct about this. However, quackery is still not a thing of the past. Therefore, I would ask of you not to debunk CTM or to point to its weaknesses (which has been done infinite times). I would like to know the AI-specific answers to your three questions (in your words or in a linked essay / paper). In a way, I don't want AI to be the "quackery of computer science": people use and believe it but it has no advantages. I would love it to be real. I am all for a future in which we can have AI/machine learning/deep learning if it actually makes a difference. But I would love to know your opinion on what difference that could be and a little on how to achieve that. Obviously it seems I am missing something since YC is eager to invest in this field (or fields).
    - dnautics 10y ago
      Your CTM analogy is not the best choice: I'd hazard to say probably around 90-95% of CTM is utter nonsense (and 99.9% of the internal justifications are), but, without CTM they'd have never discovered artemisinin, which is being deployed as a first-line treatment for malaria in areas where there is resistance to chloroquine.
- 10y ago
petra 10y ago
>> RFS: Robot Factories. From all the places where AI could help, why focus on that field, the place where the most vulnerable employees are found, the hundreds of millions from china, Bangladesh, etc - who have little chance of having a meaningful Social safety net ? >> job re-training, which will be a big part of the shift. I don't believe that this is realistic, even in the west. Why ? because the internet, who is obsessed about this subject, and doesn't lack imagination, can't even supply a decent list of what jobs will the future offer that could employ the masses who's jobs will be automated.
- mc32 10y ago
  Factory floor robots will be of use for economies where their populations are in decline, Japan, and soon China, much of Europe. The pace of adoption; as you imply, will negatively impact the workforce --China being China, though, I can see them doing this in a more methodical way, they do not wish to upset their population lest they unwittingly foment unrest. That said, despite whatever you think, VCs want return on investment and they do not really care about who and what they replace --for example, environmental concerns, they do their PR thing but they will still build/invest in projects which will develop in places with less stringent regulation effectively undermining their domestic posture on environmental issues as well as their posture vis a vis respect for the working person. They just want money and influence --but to feel conscientiously at ease they may engage in political issues that locally will appear to be progressive.
  - contingencies 10y ago
    The number of industrial robots in Japan is actually dropping, whereas China is hockey-stick. (Source: UN report[0] released October 2016)[1] I visited two Chinese factories this week, one for injection-molded plastics and one for metal. Both were essentially collections of very expensive automated machinery such as 5-axis steel boring CNC controllers and high powered laser cutters, with a few gantries, finishing/packaging and storage areas. There were as many people on computers working with 3D models as there were standing on the factory floor. In the latter case, the primary interface was usually a keyboard and mouse or touchscreen. [0] http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/presspb2016d6_en.pdf http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/presspb2016d6_en.pd... (page 3, citing UNCTAD secretariat calculations, based on International Federation of Robotics, 2015, World Robotics 2015: Industrial Robots, available at http://www.ifr.org/industrial-robots/statistics/ http://www.ifr.org/industrial-robots/statistics/ (accessed 19 October 2016)) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12991293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12991293
makmanalp 10y ago
> Some think the excitement around Artificial Intelligence is overhyped. They might be right. But if they’re wrong, we’re on the precipice of something really big. I mean, even if it is overhyped, I think there's a lot to be excited about. Weak AI is still an amazing breakthrough for automation. The trick is to not try to do too much at a time. We do ourselves a disservice by not considering how amazingly efficient humans augmented by ML can be. The research for AI doing everything just isn't there yet, and that's OK.
personjerry 10y ago
How exactly does this "democratize" AI? Doesn't this only potentially prop up another AI company with the hope that YC will be backing it (and thus profit from its success)?
- cbanek 10y ago
  It just seems like "democratize" is one of those new startup buzzwords. But yes, it seems like really what they want to do is bring it to market, and by democratize, they mean have everyone buy it.
  - kabes 10y ago
    Yep, No one was taking "disrupt" serious anymore, so they needed a new word to strip from its meaning.
    - cbanek 10y ago
      It's official. HN has disturbed democratization.
    - ericjang 10y ago
      Did you mean 'disrupt'? Hadn't heard of "disturb" before used in startup lingo.
      - woah 10y ago
        I like it. "How This Startup Is Disturbing The Equipment Financing Market" "A startup is disturbing the consulting industry" "16 Startups Poised to Disturb the Education Market"
      - kabes 10y ago
        Woops, meant to say disrupt of course.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
pron 10y ago
> Some think the excitement around Artificial Intelligence is overhyped. They might be right. But if they’re wrong, we’re on the precipice of something really big. We can’t afford to ignore what might be the biggest technological leap since the Internet. 1. We need to work on big things whether or not they're overhyped and whether or not we're on some precipice. 2. Those who think what marketers call AI is overhyped (myself among them) don't think that it isn't something really big. Even though we haven made very little progress since the algorithms that power most modern machine learning were invented fifty years ago, there is no doubt that machine learning has become quite effective in practice in recent years due to advances in hardware, and heuristics accumulated over the past decades. It is certainly big; we just don't think it has anything to do with intelligence. 3. Are there any machine learning experts who think we are on the precipice of artificial intelligence? If so, do they think we can overcome our lack of theory or do they think that a workable theory is imminent?
malux85 10y ago
Is YC still interested in Solo Founders?
lowglow 10y ago
I asked this last time but got no response. 1. Is there a firewall between the information companies applying give you and the rest of the OpenAI effort? 2. What's to prevent a partner from seeing a good thing and passing the info along to a potential competitor already funded inside the program? Overall it seems that this may be used to give OpenAI a strategic competitive advantage by using ingress application data for market analysis/research/positioning/signaling/etc.
partycoder 10y ago
If you find it hard to sell AI based solutions, just call it automation rather than AI. It is a term that people react to differently. It's like the term "technology". Spoons, chairs, bricks are technology. The modern usage of the word technology is what people used to call "high technology".
roymurdock 10y ago
> We want to level the playing field for startups to ensure that innovation doesn’t get locked up in large companies like Google or Facebook. AI and ML are exciting because they promise to help us evolve systems and machines quickly to perform more accurately. This requires access to a constant flow of large, proprietary datasets. Providing cheap access to datacenters and compute power is a great first step for leveling the playing field for startups. I'll be interested to see how YC tackles the (IMO) more important problem of providing access to the data needed to train models. I think IBM has taken an extremely wise first step by acquiring the data assets of The Weather Company. This will give its Watson IoT portfolio a leg up on other companies that need to rely on a patchwork of public and private data sources when factoring something as integral as the weather into algorithms and logic engines. Perhaps YC can consider something similar, pooling investors and VCs together to acquire/partner with providers of essential data.
- woah 10y ago
  Isn't most weather data gathered by the government?
- gabrielgoh 10y ago
  reinforcement learning, the most promising approach for robotics today, doesn't require a lot of data to train. Or rather the data required to train it can be synthesized from the problem domain itself. Access to compute and hardware, possibly, but that is it.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  > We want to level the playing field for startups to ensure that innovation doesn’t get locked up in large companies like Google or Facebook. It's not just the data. It's also acquisition: Facebook and Google are figuring very large in the exit path of a lot of these companies. Which means that after one or more years the stated goal here could be nixed. You'd almost have to close that route before this statement is meaningful.
  - thr0waway1239 10y ago
    The two companies are like two giant vacuum cleaners sucking competition out of the technology industry. Taken in isolation, the two trends (data acquisition and talent acquisition) are already disturbing. Combine the two, and you have to wonder how dumb we actually are to allow things like Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp.
jph00 10y ago
If you're the kind of person that's interested in taking up this challenge, but you currently have the coding skills without the deep learning skills, we built something that can equip you with most of the current best practices in deep learning in <2 months: http://course.fast.ai/ http://course.fast.ai/ . It doesn't assume anything beyond high school math, but it doesn't dumb anything down (key mathematical tools are introduced when required, using a "code first" approach). We don't charge anything for the course and there are no ads - it's a key part of our mission so we give it to everyone for no charge: http://www.fast.ai/about/ http://www.fast.ai/about/ And yes, it does work. We have graduates who are now in the last round of applications for the Google Brain Residency, who are moving into deep learning PhDs, who have got jobs as deep learning practitioners in the bay area, etc: http://course.fast.ai/testimonials.html http://course.fast.ai/testimonials.html . Any time you get stuck, there's an extremely active community forum with lots of folks who will do their best to help you out: http://forums.fast.ai/ http://forums.fast.ai/ . (Sorry for the blatantly self-promotional post, but if you're reading this thread you're probably exactly the kind of person we're trying to help.)
- mbrookes 10y ago
  The course is excellent, and thank you for making it and offering it for free - but a word of caution for those considering following it: Along the way you will incur not-insignificant costs for Amazon EC2 GPU instances, and, even if your instance is shut down, SSD EBS storage costs. Edit: To be clear, I'm not suggesting it's not worth it, just highlighting that theres's more than a time commitment to budget for.
  - mej10 10y ago
    Like how much? If you are going to get into deep learning for real seems like it might be worth building a multi-GPU workstation?
    - jph00 10y ago
      One forum user put together a <$700 complete PC with an adequate GPU. You definitely don't need >1 GPU. Or you can use spot instances, as a sibling comment mentions - about $0.20/hour generally.
deepnotderp 10y ago
Would YC be interested in funding a deep learning chip startup?
emcq 10y ago
Perhaps due to the article starting with discussing how AI might be overhyped, but I'm very much not blown away by this post. Reinforcement learning for self improving robots is one of their called out areas? I've never found companies focused on tech or research problems first to be all that successful. In terms of a research projects it's not very interesting or socially beneficial compared to self driving cars or robotics applications in medicine. It all leaves me wondering what YC's strategy is here. Maybe it's easier to establish a fund in AI, get smart people to apply, or that their expected future returns are higher?
johnrob 10y ago
At some point, making food/housing/healthcare cheaper seems like a more achievable goal than finding work for people (who are in theory competing with AI).
jbarham 10y ago
I really hope the bit about "free machine-powered psychologists" is satire, but given YC's unironic techno utopianism fear that it is not. Reading "Computer Power and Human Reason" by Joseph Weizenbaum (published over 40 years ago!) should remind people that attempting to build a "machine-powered psychologist", even if it's something that can be done, is not something that should be done.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  Even if you say it isn't people will still interpret it as they wish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA Was against the creators insistence taken as the real deal.
- arikr 10y ago
  Why? Can you explain for those that haven't read the book
legel 10y ago
The post is clear that A.I. startups in this vertical will be given special resources, but not clear if there will be more startups selected specificially for this?
throwawaysbdi 10y ago
Ahhh this is the moment I've been waiting for. Hype has officially hit stratospheric proportions. Time to add the words "deep" or "learn" to your startup name and reap in the dough!
- nojvek 10y ago
  It's only hype if it doesn't work. Beating humans at games which were previously thought only humans could play. Speech recognition, image recognition, translation have all made leaps in last 5 years. Sure it's silicon Valley and a lot of companies will scam themselves in but I absolutely believe there will be another Google coming out soon or has already been born who will capitalize on AI.
  - omarchowdhury 10y ago
    Another Google as in a startup specifically using AI to improve search? Is Google really going to miss improving search with AI with all their billions and brains?
    - throwaway729 10y ago
      Parent probably meant another company that goes from $0 to megacorp before your newborn child graduates college. Not a search company.
- psyc 10y ago
  There may well be that kind of "hype" in the near-term, in startup land, but there is 0 chance that AI itself is hype.
gabrielgoh 10y ago
I've wanted to break into robotics from machine learning for a long time, but I haven't found a good entry point for the problem. It seems like a rather large vertical cliff I have no way of scaling. One of the handholds I'd need is a physics engine which which models a robotic arm down to the finest levels of motor control and feedback. I am not a mechanical engineer, and I do not know where to begin with a problem like that. I don't imagine this is hard to build using existing physics engines, but it wouldn't work out the box. It requires some deep domain knowledge of things like friction, tensile strength, and so on. A system like this would spur progress in robotics immensely.
- ambicapter 10y ago
  Why do you think you need a physics engine (outside of simulation/testing)? Don't humans get by pretty well with only an intuitive one?
  - gabrielgoh 10y ago
    it is for simulation, as you say - but this is a critical for employing reinforcement learning. The internal (inverse) model will of course, be based on a simplified system, like a DNN
    - saycheese 10y ago
      Maybe or maybe you could just model what the workers already do, predict what they should do, and dynamically provide feedback, simulation, etc.
      - gabrielgoh 10y ago
        im not quite sure what you're suggesting. there needs to be a source of ground truth to inform the robot if what is being done is right. And actually having a physical robot arm for this would be way too slow
        10y ago
elmar 10y ago
So how to correctly "mention this post in your application." just insert the URL ? "https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-ai/" https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-ai/"
kolbe 10y ago
As someone who's capable of implementing and understanding many of the most fashionable tools in AI, I don't know what to do with the current economy. I think there is far too much attention being paid to the pie-in-the-sky research, and even though wealthy investors think the things that they don't understand and I do are capable of accomplishing things that they think can be accomplished and I don't, the problem is that they want to pay people like me to chase their dream. And while I do love money, I also love the idea of living a meaningful and fulfilling existence by pursing technologies that will advance mankind. Can other people who've actually seen real promise in their AI research chime in and help convince me that we are actually on the precipice of something meaningful? Not just more classification problems and leveraging the use of more advanced hardware to do more complicated tasks.
- aabajian 10y ago
  Hi kolbe, have you seen this research paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v533/n7602/full/nature17435.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v533/n7602/full/nature1... They train a model that translates signals from the motor cortex to directly stimulate the patient's forearm muscles. It is the first case of a quadriplegic man being able to control his arm directly with his mind.
  - kolbe 10y ago
    That is really cool. Just like it was really cool when we learned how to translate neural signals farther away from the motor cortex to do similar things a decade ago. But I'm failing to see the evidence of revolutionary AI. I see a really well-researched piece of hardware paired with a solid understanding of anatomy and probably a few great data scientists to assist in it all.
  - blackRust 10y ago
    And the consensus in the Neuroscience community, from what I understand, is that this is two things (1) a great feat of engineering and (2) a great demonstration of the brain's ability to learn and adapt.
- PublicEnemy111 10y ago
tylermenezes 10y ago
I'm excited to see what new ways companies will find to call a bunch of if-statements "AI".
- stagbeetle 10y ago
  Curious, what would qualify as AI under your definitions?
  - tylermenezes 10y ago
    The joke I was trying to make is that a lot of startups are doing the same things as always but calling it "AI." A chatbot using NLP technology from the early 2000s is suddenly "AI." There are plenty of actually innovative products in the AI space.
    - stagbeetle 10y ago
      Curious again, what are the innovative products in AI right now?
      - tylermenezes 10y ago
        Major verticals that come to mind in terms of progress are healthcare imaging and research and self-driving cars.
aabajian 10y ago
I'm interested in this per my earlier discussion on machine learning in radiology (see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13571847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13571847). It's disappointing that you have to be in the Bay Area to participate. I'm just starting residency and don't have the time to drop everything and enroll in an incubator. I think I'm one of the few people with a master's degree in computer science and (soon) to have a medical degree. I can handle the technical and medical sides of a radiology informatics / machine learning business, but I'd need someone to manage the business, marketing and sales sides.
deleted 10y ago
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edblarney 10y ago
This seems to be breaking the YC 'golden rule' which I think is 'do something useful'. AI is an approach, it's not a solution. I think AI is going to make it's way into 'everything' but rather incrementally. I'm weary that there will be a lot of 'pure AI' type companies around. Surely, there'll be a few that are 'AI focused' ... but it's all so techie and not so much 'market' or 'solution' oriented it leaves me a little skeptical. AirBnB, Stripe, Zenefits, Instacart, Docker, Mixpanel - all big YC companies focusing on solutions - I can barely see how AI would apply to any of them, other than maybe some incremental improvements on things like 'fraud detection' or what not. Ok, maybe some marketing conversion. No doubt YC is making a good call here because they want to reap the rewards of all the resulting M&A activity, which I think will be a boon ... But it's interesting nontheless.
karmicthreat 10y ago
I think this is one of the few RFS that I would drop everything for. The factory environment has to be one of the most frustrating as a software developer. So much low hanging fruit that you really have to develop too much if you are not following the typical industrial idioms. (Throw ladder logic at it, keep at it till it barely works, then run it till the wheels fall off.) Even just something as simple as reporting on a 30K$ PLC driven machine is painful. You can't buy a 10K HMI with Wonderware (a still painful piece of software) so you just ignore it. In my particular case I developed a simple reporting system on a RPI. These industrial systems are usually not capable of even SQL or MQTT. You have to strap on an extra piece of hardware and a ton more money for licensing. Even deployment is painful. You can't just push new code because you have no way to mock your industrial systems. Even if you could you will need to live edit your code into the PLC or you will wipe its current state of recipes and other user data. Because your PLC wasn't able to use standard SWE tools to get that data. God help you if you need to roll back. So I am applying to this. Everything is broken. Where do you even start? Fix the platform, fix the robots, fix the job setup, fix the people.
- aryamaan 10y ago
  What?
  - karmicthreat 10y ago
    Exactly. These systems are pretty foreign to most people. It has completely different vernacular, idioms and tradition. It is very different than say backend development.
- aapusaam 10y ago
  Industrial IoT modules are solving these problems. I have been developing/deploying these modules for the past two years that interface to the controllers and send MQTT messages OTA to the cloud for analytics. Ofcourse, it is a bit of a challenge to interface to these legacy industrial systems, but not impossible.
samirparikh 10y ago
Seeing as how sam altman has invested in an AI startup (vicarious.com), which is pursuing robotics applications, why would he/YC want to fund competitors for RFS ?
- skynode 10y ago
  Democratize all the things. Democracy is dead. Long live AI Democracy.
mackan_swe 10y ago
My goal is also to democratize AI, in particular AI research. I believe that every developer should have at their disposal the same kind of tooling and, even more important, the same ability to intersect their data with the world's data. Engineers at Facebook, Google, Microsoft and so on can test their models or even enrich them by using the Facebook, Google or Bing dataset. Independent entrepreneurs cannot do the same thing with the same ease. If we want to reach general AI any time soon, indie entrepreneurs must be let in to play. My strategy is to build a service, free for non-profits to use, that would solve the problem of "if I only had the same data Google engineers had, this product would be perfect". Here is how it would work. 1. Go to my webpage and register a site you want me to index for you. The site URL you enter may already have been registered by another user, but to be sure the data is in my index, register it again. I will now continue to index this site every 24 hours for as long as I live. You need higher frequency indexing? Sure, no problem. You will owe me for the additional cost. 2. Download a client of choice from the website, we have them in c#, java, python, R ect. The client will let you query your own private data as well as the data in the cloud (the data I'm now generating and refreshing every 24 hours). The query language will also let you join or intersect between the two datasets. In fact, due to the nature of RPC you can use your local data and all of the data I'm generating and refreshing, as if it was your data. 3. In the end, I will be indexing such a large part of the internet that there will not be much use for Google anymore, or ads. That's the vision. I'm not American and can't see how I'm a good fit for the YC program this summer. However I will be needing funds for cloud machines pretty soon and so far I've found noone at OpenAI to contact. Is there anyone from OpenAI reading this? This should be right up your alley. Care to speak?
- zodiac 10y ago
  I have a question about your site - "Google engineers" have a lot more data than just "Google's index of the web", they have street view data, data from people doing captchas (including the new street sign ones), click data for how people use their products (gmail, maps), maybe android autocorrect data, speech recognition etc - how would you provide access to those?
  - mackan_swe 10y ago
eddd 10y ago
I see ML and AI raising on the market quite fast. How does this work? How many ML engineers are out there? If, broadly speaking, we have shortage of software engineers, what is the demand for ML engineers? It is not something you learn overnight as a dev or mathematician, so where are there coming from?
- bra-ket 10y ago
  coursera
EGreg 10y ago
"We think the increased efficiency from AI will net out positive for the world, but we’re mindful of fears of job loss. As such we’re also looking to fund companies focused on job re-training, which will be a big part of the shift." I find a lot of wishful thinking, denial and cognitive dissonance in this sentiment, which is found everywhere. "Computers will eliminate these jobs, but humans will always have more to do." Um... If computers can learn at an accelerated pace, what makes you think that by the time you learn that next thing, it won't already be eliminated (or shortly afterwards) by a fleet of computers that use global knowledge? Do you really think that Uber driver - turned - newbie architect is going to be in demand vs the existing architects with their new AI helpers? It's not black and white, but the AVERAGE demand for human labor is going down, not because EVERY human job will be eliminated but because automation allows LESS people to do the job. So wages drop. On average. The only real solutions are either unconditional basic income, or single payer free healthcare / food / recreation.
patkai 10y ago
I'm not surprised that the general public is worried about AI but I would expect many others to worry about data. Exaggerating a bit: mathematics and AI skills is something any talented person can get individually, but gathering useful personal data on a large scale requires a huge infrastructure. So if we want to "democratize" then I'm wondering why not democratize access to data.
amelius 10y ago
Perhaps it's an idea for YC to start a "job agency for AIs". On the "demand" side, client-companies can offer problems to be solved by AI. On the "offer" side, startups can provide algorithms solving specific problems. YC can be a mediator, running the algorithms, and keeping the data of client-companies safe from anybody else (including the AI startups). Here's an example of such an agency: http://www.aigency.co/about/ http://www.aigency.co/about/
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Entangled 10y ago
> If the experiment works out, we’ll expand what we offer to include things like access to proprietary datasets and computing infrastructure. Datasets, that's the most important point in Machine Learning and exactly what Google has been collecting for the past decades. I wanted to start a project about dermatological images but how would I get that information? Then decided to start an agricultural project but then again, how to get a million images to identify a thousand species? Birds? Legal documents? Human faces? Fashion? Speech? Translation? Everything needs a huge collection of datasets. The tools are there, that's the easiest part.

663 points by craigcannon 10y ago

This seems neat. Are there any other future verticals which you would consider domain specific perks for? Also, what exactly constitutes an AI startup? If you utilize a ML library to handle a small feature of your product, are you an AI startup?

itchyjunk 10y ago

Slightly off topic but had 2 questions. The last part reminded me of google training a bunch of robot arms [1]. Haven't seen much being done with it, does anyone know if anything is being done with the data? We don't really know how much of each resources it takes to grow something. How much oxygen does 1 tomato plant take? I think growing in space would require one to investigate such questions in more detail. Ever since I came across ML and DL, I wondered if there was a way to train a deepFarmer. Something that understands relations between minerals nutrients and the fruiting body. Sometimes you want to grow stuff that might have less of certain stuff but you want more off it. Eg: low calorie high volume foods. Or you might want high protein food. If an "AI" could figure out how to maximize vitamin C for example in tomato for a population that needs more of that vs it learns to make the tomato more water rich for some other reason. AI is interesting. [1] https://research.googleblog.com/2016/03/deep-learning-for-robots-learning-from.html https://research.googleblog.com/2016/03/deep-learning-for-ro... Edit: Forgot link

hedgehog 10y ago
On the agriculture topic NASA has been working in this area for a while: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/science/biofarming.html https://www.nasa.gov/missions/science/biofarming.html As I understand it growing crops in a small, sealed environment requires much more precise understanding of how plants behave than you do for traditional Earth-bound farming.
- itchyjunk 10y ago
  Ah, interesting. I know NASA were doing some research in aeroponics [1] but I haven't seen anything recent on it. Lot of commercial systems I see don't have a lot of research behind but they are still getting better yields I think. I also saw an old but interesting system from MIT [2]. It would be very useful to mine data from these to train ML systems. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroponics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroponics [2] http://openag.media.mit.edu/ http://openag.media.mit.edu/
fnbr 10y ago
I've spoken to a few people who are interested in applying machine learning to hydroponic farming with the aim of creating vertical farms. If you could isolate the different rooms sufficiently, you could run machine learning to optimise yield (or Vitamin C). I have doubts as to the commercial viability of this, as farming is pretty low margin, so the overhead requirements for the capital expenditures would require pretty substantial gains in efficiency, which I think just don't exist.
- contingencies 10y ago
  I have at least one serious potential investor ready for anyone attempting this (vertical farming automation). Also, I am interested to cooperate on creating reliable contracted urban demand without the need for retail packaging - http://infinite-food.com/ http://infinite-food.com/ - currently relocating to Shenzhen. If automated urban vertical farming happens it will probably happen in China because dense/cheap/economies of scale/rising food prices/rapid urbanization/transition toward smaller households/cultural preference for fresh and less processed foods/less regulatory issues.
  - simonrobb 10y ago
    Why vertical farming specifically? No doubt vertical farming will form part of the solution to feeding urban populations in the coming decades, but the area covered by open-air "horizontal" farming is immense. We just can't do construction on that scale, not to mention the incredible environmental impacts. Growing things with LEDs seems pretty wasteful when we have a great big star shining down on us all day. Vertical farming will bring fresh food to high-density populations for sure, it just isn't going to change the face of farming across the planet. Although it's a much more difficult problem to solve being an uncontrolled environment, my company is working on this automation but for traditional farms (http://touch.farm http://touch.farm). The first step is gathering rich data from different crops/climates, which is why we're starting by designing the cheapest and most usable ag sensors we can. If we can make sensor tech accessible to a wide range of farmers, we'll gain a rich enough dataset to start applying ML (and farmers and the environment win in the process). tl;dr: vertical farming is great, but what we really need is innovation/investment in traditional farming.
ericjang 10y ago
> The last part reminded me of google training a bunch of robot arms [1]. Haven't seen much being done with it, does anyone know if anything is being done with the data? The data gathered using aforementioned robot arms is available here: https://sites.google.com/site/brainrobotdata/home https://sites.google.com/site/brainrobotdata/home Google (specifically Google Brain Robotics) is continuing research on this. Exciting time to be alive.

itcrowd 10y ago

At Risk of being downvoted to oblivion and out of a very well-meant interest: what if you'd replace AI with Chinese traditional medicine in the post above? Why would AI be more viable than that? (Note: I am very skeptical towards CTM and quackery. But also towards AI and ML in general. Any pointers would be great. Why is this the new industry to look out for, for example?)

AlexCoventry 10y ago
Has Chinese medicine solved any long-standing problems recently? Are there new developments which suggest that factors contributing to its previous disappointments are about to be overcome? Is there a clear path for its development? The answer to all these questions, for AI, is yes.
- itcrowd 10y ago
  Hi AlexCoventry, Please don't get me wrong: there is no future for CTM. You are 100% correct about this. However, quackery is still not a thing of the past. Therefore, I would ask of you not to debunk CTM or to point to its weaknesses (which has been done infinite times). I would like to know the AI-specific answers to your three questions (in your words or in a linked essay / paper). In a way, I don't want AI to be the "quackery of computer science": people use and believe it but it has no advantages. I would love it to be real. I am all for a future in which we can have AI/machine learning/deep learning if it actually makes a difference. But I would love to know your opinion on what difference that could be and a little on how to achieve that. Obviously it seems I am missing something since YC is eager to invest in this field (or fields).
  - dnautics 10y ago
    Your CTM analogy is not the best choice: I'd hazard to say probably around 90-95% of CTM is utter nonsense (and 99.9% of the internal justifications are), but, without CTM they'd have never discovered artemisinin, which is being deployed as a first-line treatment for malaria in areas where there is resistance to chloroquine.
10y ago

petra 10y ago

>> RFS: Robot Factories. From all the places where AI could help, why focus on that field, the place where the most vulnerable employees are found, the hundreds of millions from china, Bangladesh, etc - who have little chance of having a meaningful Social safety net ? >> job re-training, which will be a big part of the shift. I don't believe that this is realistic, even in the west. Why ? because the internet, who is obsessed about this subject, and doesn't lack imagination, can't even supply a decent list of what jobs will the future offer that could employ the masses who's jobs will be automated.

mc32 10y ago
Factory floor robots will be of use for economies where their populations are in decline, Japan, and soon China, much of Europe. The pace of adoption; as you imply, will negatively impact the workforce --China being China, though, I can see them doing this in a more methodical way, they do not wish to upset their population lest they unwittingly foment unrest. That said, despite whatever you think, VCs want return on investment and they do not really care about who and what they replace --for example, environmental concerns, they do their PR thing but they will still build/invest in projects which will develop in places with less stringent regulation effectively undermining their domestic posture on environmental issues as well as their posture vis a vis respect for the working person. They just want money and influence --but to feel conscientiously at ease they may engage in political issues that locally will appear to be progressive.
- contingencies 10y ago
  The number of industrial robots in Japan is actually dropping, whereas China is hockey-stick. (Source: UN report[0] released October 2016)[1] I visited two Chinese factories this week, one for injection-molded plastics and one for metal. Both were essentially collections of very expensive automated machinery such as 5-axis steel boring CNC controllers and high powered laser cutters, with a few gantries, finishing/packaging and storage areas. There were as many people on computers working with 3D models as there were standing on the factory floor. In the latter case, the primary interface was usually a keyboard and mouse or touchscreen. [0] http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/presspb2016d6_en.pdf http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/presspb2016d6_en.pd... (page 3, citing UNCTAD secretariat calculations, based on International Federation of Robotics, 2015, World Robotics 2015: Industrial Robots, available at http://www.ifr.org/industrial-robots/statistics/ http://www.ifr.org/industrial-robots/statistics/ (accessed 19 October 2016)) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12991293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12991293

makmanalp 10y ago

> Some think the excitement around Artificial Intelligence is overhyped. They might be right. But if they’re wrong, we’re on the precipice of something really big. I mean, even if it is overhyped, I think there's a lot to be excited about. Weak AI is still an amazing breakthrough for automation. The trick is to not try to do too much at a time. We do ourselves a disservice by not considering how amazingly efficient humans augmented by ML can be. The research for AI doing everything just isn't there yet, and that's OK.

personjerry 10y ago

How exactly does this "democratize" AI? Doesn't this only potentially prop up another AI company with the hope that YC will be backing it (and thus profit from its success)?

cbanek 10y ago
It just seems like "democratize" is one of those new startup buzzwords. But yes, it seems like really what they want to do is bring it to market, and by democratize, they mean have everyone buy it.
- kabes 10y ago
  Yep, No one was taking "disrupt" serious anymore, so they needed a new word to strip from its meaning.
  - cbanek 10y ago
    It's official. HN has disturbed democratization.
  - ericjang 10y ago
    Did you mean 'disrupt'? Hadn't heard of "disturb" before used in startup lingo.
    - woah 10y ago
      I like it. "How This Startup Is Disturbing The Equipment Financing Market" "A startup is disturbing the consulting industry" "16 Startups Poised to Disturb the Education Market"
    - kabes 10y ago
      Woops, meant to say disrupt of course.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

pron 10y ago

> Some think the excitement around Artificial Intelligence is overhyped. They might be right. But if they’re wrong, we’re on the precipice of something really big. We can’t afford to ignore what might be the biggest technological leap since the Internet. 1. We need to work on big things whether or not they're overhyped and whether or not we're on some precipice. 2. Those who think what marketers call AI is overhyped (myself among them) don't think that it isn't something really big. Even though we haven made very little progress since the algorithms that power most modern machine learning were invented fifty years ago, there is no doubt that machine learning has become quite effective in practice in recent years due to advances in hardware, and heuristics accumulated over the past decades. It is certainly big; we just don't think it has anything to do with intelligence. 3. Are there any machine learning experts who think we are on the precipice of artificial intelligence? If so, do they think we can overcome our lack of theory or do they think that a workable theory is imminent?

malux85 10y ago

Is YC still interested in Solo Founders?

lowglow 10y ago

I asked this last time but got no response. 1. Is there a firewall between the information companies applying give you and the rest of the OpenAI effort? 2. What's to prevent a partner from seeing a good thing and passing the info along to a potential competitor already funded inside the program? Overall it seems that this may be used to give OpenAI a strategic competitive advantage by using ingress application data for market analysis/research/positioning/signaling/etc.

partycoder 10y ago

If you find it hard to sell AI based solutions, just call it automation rather than AI. It is a term that people react to differently. It's like the term "technology". Spoons, chairs, bricks are technology. The modern usage of the word technology is what people used to call "high technology".

roymurdock 10y ago

> We want to level the playing field for startups to ensure that innovation doesn’t get locked up in large companies like Google or Facebook. AI and ML are exciting because they promise to help us evolve systems and machines quickly to perform more accurately. This requires access to a constant flow of large, proprietary datasets. Providing cheap access to datacenters and compute power is a great first step for leveling the playing field for startups. I'll be interested to see how YC tackles the (IMO) more important problem of providing access to the data needed to train models. I think IBM has taken an extremely wise first step by acquiring the data assets of The Weather Company. This will give its Watson IoT portfolio a leg up on other companies that need to rely on a patchwork of public and private data sources when factoring something as integral as the weather into algorithms and logic engines. Perhaps YC can consider something similar, pooling investors and VCs together to acquire/partner with providers of essential data.

woah 10y ago
Isn't most weather data gathered by the government?
gabrielgoh 10y ago
reinforcement learning, the most promising approach for robotics today, doesn't require a lot of data to train. Or rather the data required to train it can be synthesized from the problem domain itself. Access to compute and hardware, possibly, but that is it.
jacquesm 10y ago
> We want to level the playing field for startups to ensure that innovation doesn’t get locked up in large companies like Google or Facebook. It's not just the data. It's also acquisition: Facebook and Google are figuring very large in the exit path of a lot of these companies. Which means that after one or more years the stated goal here could be nixed. You'd almost have to close that route before this statement is meaningful.
- thr0waway1239 10y ago
  The two companies are like two giant vacuum cleaners sucking competition out of the technology industry. Taken in isolation, the two trends (data acquisition and talent acquisition) are already disturbing. Combine the two, and you have to wonder how dumb we actually are to allow things like Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp.

jph00 10y ago

If you're the kind of person that's interested in taking up this challenge, but you currently have the coding skills without the deep learning skills, we built something that can equip you with most of the current best practices in deep learning in <2 months: http://course.fast.ai/ http://course.fast.ai/ . It doesn't assume anything beyond high school math, but it doesn't dumb anything down (key mathematical tools are introduced when required, using a "code first" approach). We don't charge anything for the course and there are no ads - it's a key part of our mission so we give it to everyone for no charge: http://www.fast.ai/about/ http://www.fast.ai/about/ And yes, it does work. We have graduates who are now in the last round of applications for the Google Brain Residency, who are moving into deep learning PhDs, who have got jobs as deep learning practitioners in the bay area, etc: http://course.fast.ai/testimonials.html http://course.fast.ai/testimonials.html . Any time you get stuck, there's an extremely active community forum with lots of folks who will do their best to help you out: http://forums.fast.ai/ http://forums.fast.ai/ . (Sorry for the blatantly self-promotional post, but if you're reading this thread you're probably exactly the kind of person we're trying to help.)

mbrookes 10y ago
The course is excellent, and thank you for making it and offering it for free - but a word of caution for those considering following it: Along the way you will incur not-insignificant costs for Amazon EC2 GPU instances, and, even if your instance is shut down, SSD EBS storage costs. Edit: To be clear, I'm not suggesting it's not worth it, just highlighting that theres's more than a time commitment to budget for.
- mej10 10y ago
  Like how much? If you are going to get into deep learning for real seems like it might be worth building a multi-GPU workstation?
  - jph00 10y ago
    One forum user put together a <$700 complete PC with an adequate GPU. You definitely don't need >1 GPU. Or you can use spot instances, as a sibling comment mentions - about $0.20/hour generally.

deepnotderp 10y ago

Would YC be interested in funding a deep learning chip startup?

emcq 10y ago

Perhaps due to the article starting with discussing how AI might be overhyped, but I'm very much not blown away by this post. Reinforcement learning for self improving robots is one of their called out areas? I've never found companies focused on tech or research problems first to be all that successful. In terms of a research projects it's not very interesting or socially beneficial compared to self driving cars or robotics applications in medicine. It all leaves me wondering what YC's strategy is here. Maybe it's easier to establish a fund in AI, get smart people to apply, or that their expected future returns are higher?

johnrob 10y ago

At some point, making food/housing/healthcare cheaper seems like a more achievable goal than finding work for people (who are in theory competing with AI).

jbarham 10y ago

I really hope the bit about "free machine-powered psychologists" is satire, but given YC's unironic techno utopianism fear that it is not. Reading "Computer Power and Human Reason" by Joseph Weizenbaum (published over 40 years ago!) should remind people that attempting to build a "machine-powered psychologist", even if it's something that can be done, is not something that should be done.

jacquesm 10y ago
Even if you say it isn't people will still interpret it as they wish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA Was against the creators insistence taken as the real deal.
arikr 10y ago
Why? Can you explain for those that haven't read the book

legel 10y ago

The post is clear that A.I. startups in this vertical will be given special resources, but not clear if there will be more startups selected specificially for this?

throwawaysbdi 10y ago

Ahhh this is the moment I've been waiting for. Hype has officially hit stratospheric proportions. Time to add the words "deep" or "learn" to your startup name and reap in the dough!

nojvek 10y ago
It's only hype if it doesn't work. Beating humans at games which were previously thought only humans could play. Speech recognition, image recognition, translation have all made leaps in last 5 years. Sure it's silicon Valley and a lot of companies will scam themselves in but I absolutely believe there will be another Google coming out soon or has already been born who will capitalize on AI.
- omarchowdhury 10y ago
  Another Google as in a startup specifically using AI to improve search? Is Google really going to miss improving search with AI with all their billions and brains?
  - throwaway729 10y ago
    Parent probably meant another company that goes from $0 to megacorp before your newborn child graduates college. Not a search company.
psyc 10y ago
There may well be that kind of "hype" in the near-term, in startup land, but there is 0 chance that AI itself is hype.

gabrielgoh 10y ago

I've wanted to break into robotics from machine learning for a long time, but I haven't found a good entry point for the problem. It seems like a rather large vertical cliff I have no way of scaling. One of the handholds I'd need is a physics engine which which models a robotic arm down to the finest levels of motor control and feedback. I am not a mechanical engineer, and I do not know where to begin with a problem like that. I don't imagine this is hard to build using existing physics engines, but it wouldn't work out the box. It requires some deep domain knowledge of things like friction, tensile strength, and so on. A system like this would spur progress in robotics immensely.

ambicapter 10y ago
Why do you think you need a physics engine (outside of simulation/testing)? Don't humans get by pretty well with only an intuitive one?
- gabrielgoh 10y ago
  it is for simulation, as you say - but this is a critical for employing reinforcement learning. The internal (inverse) model will of course, be based on a simplified system, like a DNN
  - saycheese 10y ago
    Maybe or maybe you could just model what the workers already do, predict what they should do, and dynamically provide feedback, simulation, etc.
    - gabrielgoh 10y ago
      im not quite sure what you're suggesting. there needs to be a source of ground truth to inform the robot if what is being done is right. And actually having a physical robot arm for this would be way too slow
      - 10y ago

elmar 10y ago

So how to correctly "mention this post in your application." just insert the URL ? "https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-ai/" https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-ai/"

kolbe 10y ago

As someone who's capable of implementing and understanding many of the most fashionable tools in AI, I don't know what to do with the current economy. I think there is far too much attention being paid to the pie-in-the-sky research, and even though wealthy investors think the things that they don't understand and I do are capable of accomplishing things that they think can be accomplished and I don't, the problem is that they want to pay people like me to chase their dream. And while I do love money, I also love the idea of living a meaningful and fulfilling existence by pursing technologies that will advance mankind. Can other people who've actually seen real promise in their AI research chime in and help convince me that we are actually on the precipice of something meaningful? Not just more classification problems and leveraging the use of more advanced hardware to do more complicated tasks.

aabajian 10y ago
Hi kolbe, have you seen this research paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v533/n7602/full/nature17435.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v533/n7602/full/nature1... They train a model that translates signals from the motor cortex to directly stimulate the patient's forearm muscles. It is the first case of a quadriplegic man being able to control his arm directly with his mind.
- kolbe 10y ago
  That is really cool. Just like it was really cool when we learned how to translate neural signals farther away from the motor cortex to do similar things a decade ago. But I'm failing to see the evidence of revolutionary AI. I see a really well-researched piece of hardware paired with a solid understanding of anatomy and probably a few great data scientists to assist in it all.
- blackRust 10y ago
  And the consensus in the Neuroscience community, from what I understand, is that this is two things (1) a great feat of engineering and (2) a great demonstration of the brain's ability to learn and adapt.
PublicEnemy111 10y ago

tylermenezes 10y ago

I'm excited to see what new ways companies will find to call a bunch of if-statements "AI".

stagbeetle 10y ago
Curious, what would qualify as AI under your definitions?
- tylermenezes 10y ago
  The joke I was trying to make is that a lot of startups are doing the same things as always but calling it "AI." A chatbot using NLP technology from the early 2000s is suddenly "AI." There are plenty of actually innovative products in the AI space.
  - stagbeetle 10y ago
    Curious again, what are the innovative products in AI right now?
    - tylermenezes 10y ago
      Major verticals that come to mind in terms of progress are healthcare imaging and research and self-driving cars.

aabajian 10y ago

I'm interested in this per my earlier discussion on machine learning in radiology (see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13571847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13571847). It's disappointing that you have to be in the Bay Area to participate. I'm just starting residency and don't have the time to drop everything and enroll in an incubator. I think I'm one of the few people with a master's degree in computer science and (soon) to have a medical degree. I can handle the technical and medical sides of a radiology informatics / machine learning business, but I'd need someone to manage the business, marketing and sales sides.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

edblarney 10y ago

This seems to be breaking the YC 'golden rule' which I think is 'do something useful'. AI is an approach, it's not a solution. I think AI is going to make it's way into 'everything' but rather incrementally. I'm weary that there will be a lot of 'pure AI' type companies around. Surely, there'll be a few that are 'AI focused' ... but it's all so techie and not so much 'market' or 'solution' oriented it leaves me a little skeptical. AirBnB, Stripe, Zenefits, Instacart, Docker, Mixpanel - all big YC companies focusing on solutions - I can barely see how AI would apply to any of them, other than maybe some incremental improvements on things like 'fraud detection' or what not. Ok, maybe some marketing conversion. No doubt YC is making a good call here because they want to reap the rewards of all the resulting M&A activity, which I think will be a boon ... But it's interesting nontheless.

karmicthreat 10y ago

I think this is one of the few RFS that I would drop everything for. The factory environment has to be one of the most frustrating as a software developer. So much low hanging fruit that you really have to develop too much if you are not following the typical industrial idioms. (Throw ladder logic at it, keep at it till it barely works, then run it till the wheels fall off.) Even just something as simple as reporting on a 30K$ PLC driven machine is painful. You can't buy a 10K HMI with Wonderware (a still painful piece of software) so you just ignore it. In my particular case I developed a simple reporting system on a RPI. These industrial systems are usually not capable of even SQL or MQTT. You have to strap on an extra piece of hardware and a ton more money for licensing. Even deployment is painful. You can't just push new code because you have no way to mock your industrial systems. Even if you could you will need to live edit your code into the PLC or you will wipe its current state of recipes and other user data. Because your PLC wasn't able to use standard SWE tools to get that data. God help you if you need to roll back. So I am applying to this. Everything is broken. Where do you even start? Fix the platform, fix the robots, fix the job setup, fix the people.

aryamaan 10y ago
What?
- karmicthreat 10y ago
  Exactly. These systems are pretty foreign to most people. It has completely different vernacular, idioms and tradition. It is very different than say backend development.
aapusaam 10y ago
Industrial IoT modules are solving these problems. I have been developing/deploying these modules for the past two years that interface to the controllers and send MQTT messages OTA to the cloud for analytics. Ofcourse, it is a bit of a challenge to interface to these legacy industrial systems, but not impossible.

samirparikh 10y ago

Seeing as how sam altman has invested in an AI startup (vicarious.com), which is pursuing robotics applications, why would he/YC want to fund competitors for RFS ?

skynode 10y ago
Democratize all the things. Democracy is dead. Long live AI Democracy.

mackan_swe 10y ago

My goal is also to democratize AI, in particular AI research. I believe that every developer should have at their disposal the same kind of tooling and, even more important, the same ability to intersect their data with the world's data. Engineers at Facebook, Google, Microsoft and so on can test their models or even enrich them by using the Facebook, Google or Bing dataset. Independent entrepreneurs cannot do the same thing with the same ease. If we want to reach general AI any time soon, indie entrepreneurs must be let in to play. My strategy is to build a service, free for non-profits to use, that would solve the problem of "if I only had the same data Google engineers had, this product would be perfect". Here is how it would work. 1. Go to my webpage and register a site you want me to index for you. The site URL you enter may already have been registered by another user, but to be sure the data is in my index, register it again. I will now continue to index this site every 24 hours for as long as I live. You need higher frequency indexing? Sure, no problem. You will owe me for the additional cost. 2. Download a client of choice from the website, we have them in c#, java, python, R ect. The client will let you query your own private data as well as the data in the cloud (the data I'm now generating and refreshing every 24 hours). The query language will also let you join or intersect between the two datasets. In fact, due to the nature of RPC you can use your local data and all of the data I'm generating and refreshing, as if it was your data. 3. In the end, I will be indexing such a large part of the internet that there will not be much use for Google anymore, or ads. That's the vision. I'm not American and can't see how I'm a good fit for the YC program this summer. However I will be needing funds for cloud machines pretty soon and so far I've found noone at OpenAI to contact. Is there anyone from OpenAI reading this? This should be right up your alley. Care to speak?

zodiac 10y ago
I have a question about your site - "Google engineers" have a lot more data than just "Google's index of the web", they have street view data, data from people doing captchas (including the new street sign ones), click data for how people use their products (gmail, maps), maybe android autocorrect data, speech recognition etc - how would you provide access to those?
- mackan_swe 10y ago

eddd 10y ago

I see ML and AI raising on the market quite fast. How does this work? How many ML engineers are out there? If, broadly speaking, we have shortage of software engineers, what is the demand for ML engineers? It is not something you learn overnight as a dev or mathematician, so where are there coming from?

bra-ket 10y ago
coursera

EGreg 10y ago

"We think the increased efficiency from AI will net out positive for the world, but we’re mindful of fears of job loss. As such we’re also looking to fund companies focused on job re-training, which will be a big part of the shift." I find a lot of wishful thinking, denial and cognitive dissonance in this sentiment, which is found everywhere. "Computers will eliminate these jobs, but humans will always have more to do." Um... If computers can learn at an accelerated pace, what makes you think that by the time you learn that next thing, it won't already be eliminated (or shortly afterwards) by a fleet of computers that use global knowledge? Do you really think that Uber driver - turned - newbie architect is going to be in demand vs the existing architects with their new AI helpers? It's not black and white, but the AVERAGE demand for human labor is going down, not because EVERY human job will be eliminated but because automation allows LESS people to do the job. So wages drop. On average. The only real solutions are either unconditional basic income, or single payer free healthcare / food / recreation.

patkai 10y ago

I'm not surprised that the general public is worried about AI but I would expect many others to worry about data. Exaggerating a bit: mathematics and AI skills is something any talented person can get individually, but gathering useful personal data on a large scale requires a huge infrastructure. So if we want to "democratize" then I'm wondering why not democratize access to data.

amelius 10y ago

Perhaps it's an idea for YC to start a "job agency for AIs". On the "demand" side, client-companies can offer problems to be solved by AI. On the "offer" side, startups can provide algorithms solving specific problems. YC can be a mediator, running the algorithms, and keeping the data of client-companies safe from anybody else (including the AI startups). Here's an example of such an agency: http://www.aigency.co/about/ http://www.aigency.co/about/

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Entangled 10y ago

> If the experiment works out, we’ll expand what we offer to include things like access to proprietary datasets and computing infrastructure. Datasets, that's the most important point in Machine Learning and exactly what Google has been collecting for the past decades. I wanted to start a project about dermatological images but how would I get that information? Then decided to start an agricultural project but then again, how to get a million images to identify a thousand species? Birds? Legal documents? Human faces? Fashion? Speech? Translation? Everything needs a huge collection of datasets. The tools are there, that's the easiest part.