It don't believe we're headed into any kind of AI trough. Very exciting things are happening in the field of deep learning, and the people who are best at understanding and applying all that new theory and research are kids who never leave the lab.
Drive.ai is an autonomous driving startup that's made up of mostly unknown Stanford AI lab labmates who dropped out of their PHD programs to build an autonomous OS, and what they're doing is so much more futuristic than what anybody else is doing. They've made more progress in less time with fewer resources than any of the big players. They've got 4 test vehicles, a team of 40 people, they're running on $12 million in venture capital, and they've demoed capabilities that the multi-billion dollar players don't have. They're just pure deep learning guys, they could have gone into fintech or NLP but they went for AVs starting with a blank slate and an abundance of unproven talent.
They're still behind Waymo and Cruise, but they're progressing at a higher rate of speed. Everybody in this game is subject to disruption from some nobody coming out of nowhere. Something like transfer learning drops out of the sky, it has the potential to totally revolutionize the way one might think about an Autonomous driving stack, and it all comes down to the genius who figures out how to apply it effectively. That genius could be anyone, no amount of money you spend can buy certainty in this race. Which makes it really fun to watch.