Synthetic Data Is About To Transform Artificial Intelligence - AI Summary

So instead, AV companies developed sophisticated simulation engines to synthetically generate the requisite volume of data and efficiently expose their AI systems to the "long tail" of driving scenarios. These simulated worlds make it possible to automatically produce thousands or millions of permutations of any imaginable driving scenario--e.g., changing the locations of other cars, adding or removing pedestrians, increasing or decreasing vehicle speeds, adjusting the weather, and so on. But it didn't take long for AI entrepreneurs to recognize that the synthetic data capabilities that had been developed for the autonomous vehicle industry could be generalized and applied to a host of other computer vision applications. Founded by AI luminary Raquel Urtasun, who previously ran Uber's AV research efforts, Waabi came out of stealth last year with a star-studded team and over $80 million in funding. Dramatic recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) are opening up virtually unbounded opportunities for value creation across the economy, as previously explored in this column.