Why These AI Startups Joined Salesforce, Amazon, and Uber

Say you're a giant company that's heard about a fancy "new" technology called artificial intelligence and you're interested in adding some cutting-edge data crunching muscle to your business. Contrary to what the artificial intelligence-hype cycle might suggest, just adding popular buzzwords like "machine learning" to your vernacular isn't as easy as hooking a smartphone to a laptop. At the Machine Learning and the Market for Intelligence conference this week put on by the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, several founders behind artificial intelligence startups that have been acquired by industry heavyweights like Salesforce.com (crm), Uber, and Amazon (amzn) shared lessons they've learned since joining the big-time corporate world. Richard Socher, the founder of the A.I. startup MetaMind that was swallowed by Salesforce in April, explained on a panel what he's learned since joining the cloud software giant and becoming its chief scientist. Socher said he was pleased with the research that his small team worked on with two types of A.I. techniques called computer vision, in which software can learn to recognize images in pictures, and natural language processing, in which software learns to recognize text.