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> 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 exc

> 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.
frik 10y ago
IBM also bought Blekko, a general purpose web search emgine like Google and Bing. They use it to harvest data to build something like Freebase internally, now that Googe closed down Freebase (to ise it as well internally only). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blekko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blekko So it would definitely help smaller AI companies if an open minded consortium would launch a new FreeBase alike service and open web crawler with free data dump access. (WikiData is at the moment (and for the next months) several magnitudes smaller, and Freebase frozen stale data gets more useless every day)
- lowglow 10y ago
  When I first moved to SF I basically was building a FreeBase competitor for entity resolution and ontology building. I think opening up another service like this is required for the future. :)
samirm 10y ago
Completely agree. It's the (lack of) data that's the issue, not exposure to technology.

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.

frik 10y ago

IBM also bought Blekko, a general purpose web search emgine like Google and Bing. They use it to harvest data to build something like Freebase internally, now that Googe closed down Freebase (to ise it as well internally only). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blekko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blekko So it would definitely help smaller AI companies if an open minded consortium would launch a new FreeBase alike service and open web crawler with free data dump access. (WikiData is at the moment (and for the next months) several magnitudes smaller, and Freebase frozen stale data gets more useless every day)

lowglow 10y ago
When I first moved to SF I basically was building a FreeBase competitor for entity resolution and ontology building. I think opening up another service like this is required for the future. :)

samirm 10y ago

Completely agree. It's the (lack of) data that's the issue, not exposure to technology.