The rise of machines that learn

When quantity reaches a certain level, it makes a qualitative difference. "When you have enough memory and compute, a funny thing happens. Nguyen, former engineering director for Google Apps, was referring to a slice of the technology behind his startup, Adatao, which just received $13 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz. Adatao's value proposition comes in two parts: pInsights, a document-based visualization layer that provides end-users with simple, real-time querying of vast data sets; and pAnalytics, a monster data processing engine built on Hadoop and Apache Spark. All of this, including the ANN (artificial neural network) component, is made possible by the huge memory and processing power that, today, has become a commodity. It depends on who you ask.