Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division

#151

Post by vessenes » Sat, Oct 01, 2016, 10:37 PM UTC

jomamaxx wrote: post #65

vessenes wrote: post #21

A friend of mine was an early investor in DeepMind. For like a year and a half, because that's how long it took Google to buy them out for somewhere around $400mm. At the time, I thought that sounded like an amazing exit (OK, it still sounds like an amazing exit), and wasn't clear how Google could get that value out in a reasonable timeframe. I was so, so, wrong. The amount of value hidden and public in that acquisit…

" and wasn't clear how Google could get that value out in a reasonable timeframe." Tell us, how the valuation can be justified in terms of dollars. Which 'AI' products are useful in the portfolio today, that makes products useful to you and I, that are derived from DeepMind? The fact is - 'AI' is really short-hand for Multi-layer Neural nets - and they are applying those things in some very specific areas such as voi…

Just the PR value from Alphago is probably worth more than $400mm. Traditionally google has significantly delayed announcements of very interesting tech for years; essentially waiting until they had replaced an entire technology before announcing the old one.

It seems kind of unlikely that Google is doing that in this case, (if so, the rev rate on new AI tech is insane, and, well, I'm waiting for our AI overlords politely), but I would be very surprised if they were pushing out news about their most bleeding-edge tech.

Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division

#152

Post by amenghra » Sat, Oct 01, 2016, 11:04 PM UTC

amenghra wrote: post #43

delegate wrote: post #40

I feel like, as a solo app developer, I'm being left out of this 'revolution'. It seems like deep learning only makes sense if you have enough data to feed the algorithm with. The kind of data that only big companies can produce or harvest. Sure you can produce some video and audio data and you can spider the web a little bit, but that doesn't even come close to the resources that these big corporations have and the…

I have seen small companies build better product targeting than Fb/Google/etc do with their ads. Yes you have less data, but your users are probably more similar to each other and less scattered all over the place. While I feel this is true for recommendation engines, it might not be true for other AI applications.

Prisma is an example of small team doing something novel with AI. Over time they are going to have a huge amount of data to further improve their product.

Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division

#153

Post by jomamaxx » Sun, Oct 02, 2016, 5:02 AM UTC

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #125

jomamaxx wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admittedly, that's pretty 'cool' (pun intended) but not $400M kill. I think we still have a long way to go to see AI reap direct rewards for consumers. Payoffs have been minimal/incremental for now.

Do you have any idea how much it costs to cool a datacenter?

Not $400 Million dollars.

Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division

#154

Post by jomamaxx » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 3:05 AM UTC

vessenes wrote: post #151

jomamaxx wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" and wasn't clear how Google could get that value out in a reasonable timeframe." Tell us, how the valuation can be justified in terms of dollars. Which 'AI' products are useful in the portfolio today, that makes products useful to you and I, that are derived from DeepMind? The fact is - 'AI' is really short-hand for Multi-layer Neural nets - and they are applying those things in some very specific areas such as voi…

Just the PR value from Alphago is probably worth more than $400mm. Traditionally google has significantly delayed announcements of very interesting tech for years; essentially waiting until they had replaced an entire technology before announcing the old one. It seems kind of unlikely that Google is doing that in this case, (if so, the rev rate on new AI tech is insane, and, well, I'm waiting for our AI overlords pol…

"Just the PR value from Alphago is probably worth more than $400mm. "

No - it's definitely not.

Go and walk down the street in any part of the world and ask how many people know about this acquisition? Nobody will.

Even the vast majority of technical people will have never heard of this acquisition.

There is no 'PR' at all, really, from this acquisition.

I don't think any acquisition in history was worth it's 'PR' value.

Unless there is mass market news on it, in which households are getting to know about it, then possibly, but even then, I can't think of a single acquisition that was worth it.

Zuckerberg bought some tech that enables you to wear 'masks' on your face while on video - when he made the announcement, it was fun (he was wearing and Iron Man mask) - and it got picked up globally. If they paid less than $2M for that company, maybe it was worth it for the 'PR value'. But even then it's shaky.

Re: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division

#155

Post by jomamaxx » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 3:09 AM UTC

danblick wrote: post #147

jomamaxx wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" and wasn't clear how Google could get that value out in a reasonable timeframe." Tell us, how the valuation can be justified in terms of dollars. Which 'AI' products are useful in the portfolio today, that makes products useful to you and I, that are derived from DeepMind? The fact is - 'AI' is really short-hand for Multi-layer Neural nets - and they are applying those things in some very specific areas such as voi…

I'm not sure if that is the right metric for research groups. If someone said "the startup has a promising cure for cancer in trials" would you ask if it had produced revenue yet?

"the startup has a promising cure for cancer in trials"

A) First, I would ask what they likelihood they have in making through trials, what is the real 'cure rate', what is the operational cost of the therapy, what kind of cancer it cures (obscure?).

B) They are not curing cancer. They have some intangible AI technology that doesn't necessarily or may not ever do anything.

As far as 'cutting the cooling bills on infrastructure' - there's no reason to think that that was an issue they were looking at solving, and used the tech as an 'example case' - but that some other, normal technology couldn't have solved th e problem just as well.

B) To confirm the ridiculous hype around this etheric technology, somebody, here on HN is equating this 'black box' to 'curing cancer'. Please.