The current state of machine intelligence 3.0

Almost a year ago, we published our now-annual landscape of machine intelligence companies, and goodness have we seen a lot of activity since then. This year's landscape has a third more companies than our first one did two years ago, and it feels even more futile to try to be comprehensive, since this just scratches the surface of all of the activity out there. As has been the case for the last couple of years, our fund still obsesses over "problem first" machine intelligence--we've invested in 35 machine intelligence companies solving 35 meaningful problems in areas from security to recruiting to software development. At the same time, the hype around machine intelligence methods continues to grow: the words "deep learning" now equally represent a series of meaningful breakthroughs (wonderful) but also a hyped phrase like "big data" (not so good!). We care about whether a founder uses the right method to solve a problem, not the fanciest one.