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Andrew Ng is raising a $150M AI Fund
61–70 of 155 posts
Re: Andrew Ng is raising a $150M AI Fund
#62[deleted]
Re: Andrew Ng is raising a $150M AI Fund
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whenever I see announcements like this, it's very unclear to me what is meant by "AI." Are they talking about basically getting the most out of the current ML/deep learning type systems? If so then I guess building data sets makes sense but it seems more like an uninteresting business strategy than what I think of as pushing AI forward. If, on the other hand, they are talking about making progress on the more traditi…
> Are any of these funds investing in people working on systems that try to make sense of raw sensory data streams? Yes. That's also my total focus right now. Happy to discuss, email on profile.
Have you considered writing a blog post? I'm sure it'd be very well received on HN.
Re: Andrew Ng is raising a $150M AI Fund
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was the reason Blekko had value to IBM's Watson effort, the crawler was state of the art. With that and the 'web' you can create data sets that others can't. It is the not-so-secret advantage that both Google and Microsoft leverage (their search engine crawlers).
Could you describe at a high level(or whatever level you'd like,) what goes into, or more specifically, what are the components of a crawler that makes it superior for these purposes?
Sure;
Doesn't die -- HTML being a specification in name only, there are a lot of really crazy web pages out there that render on browsers but are pathological edge cases.
Does a good job of distinguishing 'good' links from 'bad' links on a page. -- Lots of pages have links that should not be followed, some are easy they are rendered in the same color as the background (SEO black hat link juice) and others refer to crawler traps.
Crawler traps come in many forms -- Rich Skrenta created a great example one where the page generated a random number and said "%d is an interesting number" here are two more interesting numbers "%d and %d" the each link went to a new URL that ended in the number. So if you tried to crawl that site exhaustively you would fill your entire crawler cache with random number pages.
Dynamic importance scaling -- you want to crawl the 'best' pages for a topic so you need to figure out a way to measure which pages are important and which aren't. This was the secret sauce of the PageRank patent Google had but it's been gamed to death by SEO types. So now you need better heuristics to understand which are the more important links to follow.
Effective crawl frontier management - for every billion pages you decide to crawl there are probably 20 to 50 billion pages you "know about". These URIs that are known but not yet crawled are referred to as the 'crawl frontier'. Picking where to go looking in the crawl frontier to find useful new pages is half art and half good machine learning.
Good algorithmic de-packing -- many many pages today are generated algorithmicly from a set of rules, whether it is the product pages on Amazon or posts in a PHP forum, if you can recognize the algorithm early, you can effectively avoid crawling pages that are duplicates or not useful.
Good page de-duping -- There is a lot of repetition on the web. Whether it is the 'how to sign up' page of every PHPBBB site ever or the same product with 10 different keywords in the URI.
Selective JS interpretation -- sometimes the page exists in the JS code, not in the HTML code, so unless you want to store 'this page needs Javascript enabled to run' into your crawler cache you need to recognize this situation and get the page out of the Javascript.
That's just off the top of my head.
Re: Andrew Ng is raising a $150M AI Fund
#65I 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 contribu…
It's far from challenging. The Stanford one (CS229) is though.
Re: Andrew Ng is raising a $150M AI Fund
#66I'm curious to the opinions of people here on companies collecting data to build data sets vs. privacy.
Well, why does it have to involve privacy? A camera on a marsh with thousands of hours of footage could be useful data (has bird, doesn't have bird? Water level? Cloud cover?)
A tollgate recording vehicle pass-through with a timestamp, a train station gate recording individual pass-through with a timestamp, etc, with huge volume could be useful data.
Re: Andrew Ng is raising a $150M AI Fund
#67I'm curious to the opinions of people here on companies collecting data to build data sets vs. privacy.
Personal privacy is a paper tiger, as Facebook and others have proven again and again. You only need to look at the consequence-free landscape of privacy breaches to understand that people have no meaningful right to avoid direct marketing and spillage of their contact info. On the other hand, confidential information of corporations is pretty well guarded, and confidential contract terms, costs, pricing, and other i…
I am not sure I get it. If I am Ford and get access to GMs Salary database or factory electrical meter, do I win much? It's almost certain I know the ballpark frommrunning my own factory and probably have hired three of GMs managers with detailed knowledge in their heads last week.
Or is it more hedge funds - like satellite images of Walmart car parks to estimate the revenue figures?
Either way these don't seem like things we need AI to pick out patterns ?
Or am I missing something?
Re: Andrew Ng is raising a $150M AI Fund
#68"Many of these funds are putting time and resources into securing data sets" - this is key.
Looks like Data sets are going to be the moat of AI companies.
Two additional points are (1) dataset collection is low variance relative to fundamental algorithmic advances, and (2) dataset collection relies less on having tip-top research talent (than fundamental algorithmic advances).
Re: Andrew Ng is raising a $150M AI Fund
#69I'm curious to the opinions of people here on companies collecting data to build data sets vs. privacy.
Privacy 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.
Of 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.
Re: Andrew Ng is raising a $150M AI Fund
#70I 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 contribu…
It's far from challenging. The Stanford one (CS229) is though.
Difficulty is subjective