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I've been involved in this a couple of times and want to share a thought. If you are just aggregating data, that's not a moat. A lot of folks are buying data

by shubb 9y ago

I've been involved in this a couple of times and want to share a thought. If you are just aggregating data, that's not a moat. A lot of folks are buying data from a bunch of sources to give complete coverage - e.g. a dataset of all plane ticket prices, where before you could only get separate datasets from each of amadeus and rivals. Someone, usually someone big, just goes round you to build their own infrastructure for some internal function, e.g. Google flights api, and then realises they can replace you as a secondary revenue stream. Instead, I think you gotta somehow add value to your data, which is best done as a side effect of another buisness. Reuters have a huge news dataset with amazing annotation because they got thier editors to curate it as it was produced. That's an unassailable free text training set that no one else is gonna match. So build a dating app that causes users to create a curated dataset. Or a game. Or a buisness tool. Or an api. Or a really good AI secret sauce built in an expensive privately curated training set that ate most of your funds.

retromario 9y ago
What kind of useful curated datasets do you imagine could be created by a game? Like driving data from a GTA-like game?
- mrdoops 9y ago
  Some of the more interesting AI research is being done in the area of developing very accurate models of the real world. This way the many varied iterations needed to develop the AI model can be done without the same physical limitations of aggregating human data. Games are definitely in this same realm, although it's not always practical to make a human playable simulation-game and an AI playable simulation game given development constraints. What I find fascinating is what AR might do for training AI models. To execute on AR we'll need to digitize a model of our physical surroundings so the software can interact. At that point we'll have a compelling pipeline of actionable data in regards to machine learning - especially for robotics.

by shubb 9y ago

retromario 9y ago

What kind of useful curated datasets do you imagine could be created by a game? Like driving data from a GTA-like game?

mrdoops 9y ago
Some of the more interesting AI research is being done in the area of developing very accurate models of the real world. This way the many varied iterations needed to develop the AI model can be done without the same physical limitations of aggregating human data. Games are definitely in this same realm, although it's not always practical to make a human playable simulation-game and an AI playable simulation game given development constraints. What I find fascinating is what AR might do for training AI models. To execute on AR we'll need to digitize a model of our physical surroundings so the software can interact. At that point we'll have a compelling pipeline of actionable data in regards to machine learning - especially for robotics.