Creating a Winning Approach with A.I.

I attended a talk by Andrew Ng at Stanford last week where he discussed the future of artificial intelligence. He reinforced my thinking around the importance of data to the success of any company working on a specific application of A.I. He also confirmed my hypothesis that the large players like Google and Baidu are open sourcing their algorithms and applications in order to gather even more tagged data for their training sets. While there are emerging techniques that may allow for training off of smaller data sets or ones that are completely unstructured in the future, today these techniques are still in their infancy. As a result, to build a defensible business, a company must create a large, proprietary data set that will lead to the best trained algorithms in its field.