Standing on the Shore*: How AI is Disrupting the World's largest Industries – Data Collective

Standing on the Shore*: How AI is Disrupting the World's largest Industries Artificial Intelligence is undergoing a massive acceleration driven by rapid growth in available data and rapid evolution of algorithms. Intel's acquisition this Tuesday of our portfolio company Nervana Systems validates that our companies' platforms, driving this acceleration, are disrupting the world's largest industries. Our thesis is that a) increasingly powerful and inexpensive hardware that is machine learning/deep learning-friendly (lots of multipliers and fast memory; e.g., Nervana Systems), b) a flourishing of learning approaches running on that hardware, and c) large, novel data sets, now inexpensive to acquire and refresh, to train and drive those novel learning algorithms, is fueling a transformation of major global industries right in front of everyone's eyes. Mission-critical decisions can now be made in the face of huge amounts of even chaotic data, and life-or-death actions can be implemented in the real-world, at large scale, with dramatically less cap-ex and op-ex than ever before, thanks to the speed, clarity, and efficacy of commercially practical AI. We've been investing in this thesis for the better part of a decade along with a small number of like-minded folks**, and we expect that it will fundamentally disrupt every industry vertical.