Surprise: AI In 2019

A long time ago in an innovation ecosystem far, far away… a recent MIT graduate started his career in a vintage 1970's Massachusetts Route 128 Artificial Intelligence (AI) startup doing speech recognition, re-named Verbex after Exxon acquired the company. Fast forward to AI in 2019, and what stands out most to that grad (me) are two pleasant surprises. The first surprise is the degree to which highly competitive IT businesses have embraced open source AI. Google's TensorFlow has over 120,000 stars on GitHub, which the largest home of open source code communities, and Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018. Facebook's PyTorch is also quite popular, especially in academic and industrial research communities, with over 25,000 stars on GitHub.