Exploding demand is the real catalyst producing AI talent shortages. At both the Fortune 100 end of the spectrum, as well as the 3-person garage startup level.

Exploding demand is the real catalyst producing AI talent shortages. At both the Fortune 100 end of the spectrum, as well as the 3-person garage startup level. Think about Spotify's Discover Weekly feature and how it multiplies user engagement. Collaborative filtering of 100M users can possibly be done by a CS undergrad on their NVidia 1050 gaming laptop in a couple of hours. Metadata analysis of 1B songs is more of a grad level problem for someone with access to the departmental research cluster. But machine learning audio tempo, frequency and pitch similarity for thousands of new songs added daily? That requires a corporate R&D budget and dedicated cloud GPU resources. And at least one luminary for the "breakthrough" that takes you from 95% to 97-99% human level understand which will make the technology world competitive. The great thing about AI that perhaps many overlook is that genius is not required to build a startup with unicorn status valuation ;) Look at the recent YC article on Toutiao, where a handlful of engineers built a news content generation algorithm in a few months. If your input data quality is very high at the outset, even standard sci-kit out of the box t-SNE classification can prove "unreasonably effective"! The Hidden Forces Behind Toutiao: China’s Content King http://blog.ycombinator.com/the-hidden-forces-behind-toutiao-chinas-content-king/ http://blog.ycombinator.com/the-hidden-forces-behind-toutiao...