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Andrew Ng launches $175M AI fund

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Re: Andrew Ng launches $175M AI fund

#61

Post by ccozan »

CabSauce wrote: post #51
ccozan wrote: post #46

As other fellow commenters remarked, and as an AI enthusiast/researcher myself, I fail to see AI as a business. What I would like is a fund, or similar that is funding research, because fundamentally we need so much research in this area. AI as we have it now is just a bunch of ML algos and *NNs that perform well in different niches and, well, after all cat pictures were categorized, what to do next? So, in case Andr…

There are tons and tons of meaningful uses for the current state of ML. Just about every industry is full of opportunities to apply the most basic algorithms and drive tremendous value. It goes without saying that research is still valuable, but what I haven't seen yet is large, widespread use of applied ML.

Of course ML has his uses, even now I am doing fully industrial ML. But, in the end, is just an algorithm/NN that does what your suppose to programm it. And is a heck of manual work involved.

AI is on a different scale andmay have less to do with the actual implementations.

Re: Andrew Ng launches $175M AI fund

#62

Post by danjoc »

otoburb wrote: post #56
danjoc wrote: post #54

The amount of money in this field puzzles me. The difference between relative novice and competition winner on kaggle.com is often in the single digit percentages or less. When 26 year old George Hotz can build his own self driving car in his garage, it seems like a very narrow moat.

You make it sound like George Hotz is any run-of-the-mill 26 year old, except he's anything but[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz

But the point is, for $3M I can fund George Hotz and have an entry in the self driving car arena. For nothing, I can go grab open source code and be a small percentage away from the absolute state of the art.

How do companies justify such a tiny edge as being worth so much? I wish Andrew Ng the best. I do. He's a class act. I enjoyed his course years ago, but came away a little disappointed. At the end, I realized there's no intelligence in the algorithms. It's all just applied statistics and a lot of sweat preparing training data.

Maybe I should just shut up and vie for some of the easy money sloshing around. I think I would just feel weird asking for a ton of cash when the end product is just a bit of recursive math.

Re: Andrew Ng launches $175M AI fund

#63

Post by AElsinore77 »

Laurentvw wrote: post #26

Sounds interesting! Does anyone have examples of AI startups that solve real world problems? Just trying to get a picture of what companies would fit their fund.

Manufacturing is a big one -- right now most factories are still run very manually, but advances in robotics, computer vision, and AI will change the game. In terms of companies here in the bay area working on this, theres Andrew's own Landing.ai as well as Instrumental (https://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2017/06/22/instrume...).

Re: Andrew Ng launches $175M AI fund

#64

Post by nora4 »

Nasho wrote: post #43
agibsonccc wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're "horizontal". We would not fit his definition of a vertical specific startup. (We have also been around a while though) The bulk of what we do is time series. Applications we do for real paying customers include: Detecting theft of power on the raw grid Online payments fraud Detecting people stealing from the telco network Detecting faults in assembly line machines Detecting computers about to fail Detecting ro…

Tell me more, who is 'we' ?

Just look at his profile (a click away). He is the founder of Skymind.

Re: Andrew Ng launches $175M AI fund

#65

Post by agibsonccc »

nora4 wrote: post #52
agibsonccc wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're "horizontal". We would not fit his definition of a vertical specific startup. (We have also been around a while though) The bulk of what we do is time series. Applications we do for real paying customers include: Detecting theft of power on the raw grid Online payments fraud Detecting people stealing from the telco network Detecting faults in assembly line machines Detecting computers about to fail Detecting ro…

I mean these are great stuff. But do you plan to be a venture-backed company (i.e. looking for hyper-growth and an exit, e.g. acquisition or IPO) or are you planning on being some sort of LLP? The problem is that though the above may currently be a profitable business, I can't see how you will generate a "moat" and mature into a monopoly or a big market share in a vertical.

I'm a YC founder with 7 mill in funding and 40 employees. We already are :).

Skymind is a weird mix of joint ventures in asia, US and Chinese investment. We're not looking for an exit anytime soon. We are looking to build a big business though.

The "moat" is a land and expand strategy. There is lockin with our tooling. It's a standard on prem play. We're hard to get rid of once you install us. We help in house teams compete with external vendors. Interest actually aligns there. Happy to elaborate a bit otherwise.

Re: Andrew Ng launches $175M AI fund

#66

Post by agibsonccc »

lambdadmitry wrote: post #44
agibsonccc wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're "horizontal". We would not fit his definition of a vertical specific startup. (We have also been around a while though) The bulk of what we do is time series. Applications we do for real paying customers include: Detecting theft of power on the raw grid Online payments fraud Detecting people stealing from the telco network Detecting faults in assembly line machines Detecting computers about to fail Detecting ro…

Aren't you describing a consultancy?

No we're a horizontal AI platform vendor with a strong focus on anomaly detection in time series applications. Our main product is a competitor to AWS sagemaker for on prem and hybrid cloud deployments.

Re: Andrew Ng launches $175M AI fund

#67

Post by agibsonccc »

Nasho wrote: post #43
agibsonccc wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're "horizontal". We would not fit his definition of a vertical specific startup. (We have also been around a while though) The bulk of what we do is time series. Applications we do for real paying customers include: Detecting theft of power on the raw grid Online payments fraud Detecting people stealing from the telco network Detecting faults in assembly line machines Detecting computers about to fail Detecting ro…

Tell me more, who is 'we' ?

Yeah sorry, I just assume people click profiles :).
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