D-RAFT Demo Day: Startups Entering The Machine Learning Era

The event took place on Thursday, September 22nd, 2016. We asked startup vendors and representatives from the organization team about these trends. Kevin Kelly was right when he predicted that the business plans of the next 10,000 startups were easy to forecast: »take X and add AI«. Computers that see and listen, think and predict are already making a difference across industries. Artificial intelligence can automate processes, reduce costs and improve customer experience. Corporations need to leverage those machine learning technologies or risk being replaced by'smarter disruptors.' [Tomasz Rudolf, CEO D-RAFT] For sure, we now have the technology (measured in computer power and algorithms) that is able to achieve great progress every year. But the most important difference is that AI started to finance itself. A great recent example is about using DeepMind's work on reinforcement learning to reduce Google's Data Center cooling bill by 40%. The biggest difference is unsupervised learning and the availability of "cheap" GPU power. That's why we see so many startups rising in the field of AI. I believe this is the main reason that we are entering the machine learning era.