The cloud is becoming AI's bottleneck

In the past decade, artificial intelligence has escaped the confines of research labs and found its way into many of the things we do every day. From online shopping and content recommendation to healthcare and self-driving cars, we are interacting with AI algorithms, in many cases without even knowing it. But we've barely scratched the surface, many believe, and artificial intelligence has much more to offer. Ironically, one of the things that is preventing AI from realizing its full potential is the cloud, one of the main technologies that helped usher AI into the mainstream. "The reason we still don't see AI everywhere is not that the algorithms or technology are not there. The main reason is cloud dependency," says Ali Farhadi, co-founder and CXO at Xnor, a Seattle-based AI hardware startup.