15 ms·
Andrew Ng is raising a $150M AI Fund
- Quintus_ 9y agoIs it likely that I (and other Andrew Ng 'fans') will be able to buy stock in his company?
- BayesStreet 9y agoI would also love to but extremely unlikely, crowdsource bureaucracy is a nightmare and he won't have problems raising that much.
- alphydan 9y agoHe will be issuing the NG coin in an ICO ...
- forgotmysn 9y agothere is usually a minimum investment amount. for a fund of this size, im guessing it would be around $5m
- tachyonbeam 9y agoI find this really frustrating about tech investing. Much of the early investment opportunities are only available to the richest. It's an insider's game.
- likelynew 9y agoI don't think it is not unique to tech investing, but it is true for all small companies.
- padobson 9y agoOr big companies. If you wanted a chance to profit from Snap, Square, Twitter or (coming soon) Pinterest, you had to be a high level investor. I believe most regulations that block this kind of investment are done in the name of protecting the little guy.
- goobynight 9y agoThey are done in order to protect the little guy, due to the high risk associated with the high reward. Otherwise, you will get people that have negative net worth, maybe $20k in credit card debt + student loans that they pay minimums on, and a few kids dumping a year of savings into Snapchat and losing it all. While it sucks for small players that are ok with high risk investing (and would be ok losing it), there just isn't a way to stop the flood of stupid that would come with it. Probably the closest thing I've seen to being able to invest in something like this is cryptocurrecy,
- forgotmysn 9y agoIt's not unique to tech, but it's necessary for funds of this size. Let's say Andrew's entire fund is made up of $5m investors. That means he has to close at least 30 investors, which means he probably has to pitch 60-90. Not only that, but actively maintaining 30 relationships and making sure they are effectively informed of the funds progress is difficult and time consuming as well. Andrew's time is probably best spent working with portfolio companies on their tech, so the less time he has to spend courting and showing love to LP's the better. That's why they limit investment size. It's not to be purposefully exclusionary, they just have to be mindful of efficient use of time.
- KasianFranks 9y ago"Many of these funds are putting time and resources into securing data sets" - this is key.
- elmar 9y agoLooks like Data sets are going to be the moat of AI companies.
- cr0sh 9y agoDefinitely an echo of what I just commented (didn't see your comment until after I posted mine); data sets and the collection of them already are seen as very valuable, and I would imagine this would only become more true as time passes, if we don't hit another winter, that is...
- bobsil1 9y agoUntil one shot and transfer learning work.
- Eridrus 9y agoAll the one-shot approaches I've seen are IMO transfer learning in disguise, which raises the question of "what are you transferring from?". So while these should hopefully reduce the need for truly gigantic datasets about everything, there is still a limit of how much info you can extract from a fixed amount of data.
- 0xbear 9y agoLarge datasets will still be important for all but strictly perceptual tasks.
- danohu 9y agoopen/free data sources are likely to become very important. AI hasn't yet been super-important in the open data world, but I'd expect it to gain a lot of prominence as time goes by.
- cr0sh 9y agoI look at announcements like this, and past ones about Ng, and I always marvel at how things have gone since I took and completed his 2011 ML Class... That was one helluva course, challenging and interesting, and fun all at the same time (and so much "concretely" - lol). From what I understand, that course is still available thru Coursera (which Ng booted up after the ML Class experiment; Udacity was Thrun's contribution after his and Norvig's AI Class, which ran at the same time in 2011).
- emerongi 9y agoIt's still available. I've been taking it for the past month or so. After learning more about him, he's probably the only person in the world that I envy. I resonate with his ideas a lot, but I'm like 1% of what he is. It makes me a bit sad. I'll be taking his new course as well and hopefully one day I will be able to work in the same field as him.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- zitterbewegung 9y agoYou should focus on what you can do to make yourself a better person. Anyone on earth can compare themselves to another person and get the sense they feel inferior . Wherever You Go, There You Are.
- thoughtpalette 9y agoImposter Syndrome is pretty common in CS/Software dev. I try to recognize it for what it is when I feel it and move along. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
- tabeth 9y agoI'm curious to the opinions of people here on companies collecting data to build data sets vs. privacy.
- Eridrus 9y agoPrivacy activists have long ignored any benefits of data collection and as we continue to extract more and more value from data this should become more evident and we will be forced to start discussing concrete harms rather than people's general discomfort.
- canoebuilder 9y agoAside from running large scale analyses over large health data sets, what are some examples where the value derived from large aggregations of personal data is dispersed widely through a society rather than being captured mostly by a single corporation or organization?
- stevenhuang 9y agoBuilding large data sets doesn't necessarily mean from personal data. Look at open-data initiatives such as http://open.canada.ca/en/open-data http://open.canada.ca/en/open-data . Lots of potential for useful tools to be created if the data is there, which won't happen if even benign data like that are kept under wraps/not collected.
- icebraining 9y agoOf course, this is not true. Plenty of harms have been shown, particularly based on past history. But these are dismissed as things that couldn't possibly happen again. Which means that the objections will only be accepted when it's too late. Marge: Do I have to be dead before you’ll help me? Wiggum: Well, not dead – dying. [Marge gets up to leave] No, no, no, no. Don’t walk away. How about this: just show me the knife in your back. Not too deep, but it should be able to stand by itself.
- nihonde 9y ago
- ktta 9y agoOfftopic, but this amp page is the cleanest page I've ever seen. I would love to just use the amp version for all TechCrunch pages. Anyone in the mood to make a chrome extension? (I'm on desktop, and the results are still clean without adblocker)
- taytus 9y agoPlug: We are on it :) https://roboamp.com https://roboamp.com
- wyldfire 9y agoAside: how do you pronounce his surname?
- a1exyz 9y ago"ing"
- adam12 9y agosounds more like oong or ooung to me (1 syllable).
- n3t 9y agoTip: when you don't know how to pronounce someone's name, find an interview (podcast? video interview?) with that person.
- sh33mp 9y agoHe spent a couple of years in Singapore, so I'm going by the pronunciation there. (May be different in different regions, and I'm not sure about his preferred pronunciation now). It would do something like this: Start with the word "urn". Now don't drag it out, make it short. Make the "n" and "ng" sound at the end (urng). Now take out the "r" sound (uhng). It seems like Americans do tend to pronounce it "ehng" instead.
- bllguo 9y agoYour comment appears to be correct: https://www.quora.com/How-does-Andrew-Ng-prefer-his-name-to-be-pronounced https://www.quora.com/How-does-Andrew-Ng-prefer-his-name-to-...
- Danihan 9y agoIn the video it sounds like "ooge". Similar to "rouge" or "stooge" but cropped short. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUO3Pk0nOCM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUO3Pk0nOCM
- 9y ago
- fiatjaf 9y agoIf he had called it AICOIN he could have raised much more.
- eternalcode 9y agoI chuckled at the Un-settling reality of Alt-Coins and greed.
- lowglow 9y agoSynapse AI is an "AI Coin" you might be interested in. https://synapse.ai/ https://synapse.ai/
- fiatjaf 9y agoOh, dear, what is that? How can people merge these things together? Apparently they don't know also. The website is empty.
- ratsimihah 9y agoAR-AICOIN
- thinbeige 9y agoMy thought before opening this thread. I thought the AI hype is over again but apparantly not.
- ThomPete 9y agoAndrew NG believes that AI is just as important as electricity. I tend to agree.
- sandGorgon 9y ago> Many of these funds are putting time and resources into securing data sets, technical mentors and advanced simulation tools to support the unique needs of AI startups What are "advanced simulation tools" ? something like https://github.com/marcotcr/lime https://github.com/marcotcr/lime ?
- ericjang 9y agoI would guess "environment simulators"? Environments are to RL as datasets are to supervised/unsupervised learning.
- tachyonbeam 9y agoSimulated worlds / games like the OpenAI gym and DeepMind lab come to mind: https://gym.openai.com/ https://gym.openai.com/ https://github.com/deepmind/lab https://github.com/deepmind/lab
- Jdam 9y agoLol, even Filecoin outraised that Fund
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- beambot 9y agoMakes sense. As one of the most public personas in AI, he probably gets pitched frequently by AI startups. Might as well let someone else bankroll his dealflow while collecting 2% annual management fees and participate in the upside via carry a decade later.
- panabee 9y agoone of the best ways to monetize education is with student investments instead of student payments. YC is doing this with startup education.
- SoMisanthrope 9y agoGo, Andrew, go!!!
- valgor 9y ago>Ng told me that his personal goal is to help bring about an AI-powered society. Anyone have links to interviews or information on Ng's vision? I'd love to hear the details.
- Barrin92 9y agonot sure if there's a transcript anywhere but he gave a lecture on his broad views in a Stanford lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21EiKfQYZXc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21EiKfQYZXc
- justboxing 9y agoIs AI the new Social?
- jraines 9y agoSoMoLo --> AIVRCoin doesn't quite jump off the powerpoint slide as well though
- PopsiclePete 9y ago"During an earlier conversation, Ng told me that his personal goal is to help bring about an AI-powered society." So is this Elon Musk's arch-nemesis?
- Tenoke 9y agoAndrew NG is mostly talking about society powered by current techniques, which Musk also likes. Musk's worry is over the potential once/if we've advanced the technology enough (which given current progress and open avenues for research isn't too far-fetched of an expectation).
- ryanSrich 9y agoSlight side topic: Has anyone gone through the new deeplearning.ai track on Coursera yet? Wondering how difficult it is for someone that can write code, but never had any formal academic training in CS.
- kovek 9y agoHey Ryan, I see this question asked very often in the last year or two. I am not an expert on deep learning, nor have I taken the deeplearning.ai track, but am currently learning about the topic. Some of the resources out there have nice primers. I think you need to be somewhat comfortable with understanding the usual log/exp functions for the very base, understand calculus, with partial derivatives, and be used to linear algebra and matrix operations. Some good understanding of statistics could be useful as well when learning about ML. I don't think that a good background in CS is necessary for this stuff. This has not much to do with programming languages, operating systems, Turing completeness. Maybe having a good base in algorithms could be useful for _implementing_ the libraries to make sure they are optimal. I was wondering why do people ask this question (or ask about resources on learning about this topic in general), when answers on this are so easily findable online.
- quest88 9y agoI'm on course two after completing the assignments in course one. If you can write code, you can do the course. So far there's nothing where a cs degree is needed. It's mainly array manipulation for now. The coding exercises are setup very nicely for you with a lot of code comments and hints. A lot of the time, if not all the time, you're simply completing the right hand side of an assignment.