Artificial Intelligence to drive next wave of startups

Google's recent acquisition of Halli Labs, an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) startup started by an IIT-Delhi alumni Pankaj Gupta, has fuelled Bengaluru's ambition of becoming the hub of AI and ML product startups. Halli, which means a village in Kannada, was born five months ago in Bengaluru for developing solutions to traditional problems using AI, ML, deep learning and natural language processing technologies. Commenting on the development, Google's vice-president for product management Ceasar Sengupta tweeted, "Welcome Pankaj and the team at Halli Labs to Google. The company says it is focused on building deep learning and ML systems to address'old problems'. Gupta said the company will be joining Google's Next Billion Users team. "Halli Labs will help get more technology and information into more people's hands around the world," he said. Gupta is interested in the areas of personalisation, applied machine learning, AI, user growth and engagement, search, recommendation and discovery products, distributed systems, graph infrastructure and algorithms. He has published over 30 papers and filed more than 20 patent applications. Google and its parent company Alphabet are vigorously persuing acqui-hiring in AI startups along with other technology giants Baidu, Samsung, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Snap. According to a startup founder working in the similar space, AI and ML are still in their initial stages, just like how smartphone and mobile apps were a decade ago. "All startup founders are very much aware of its importance.