AI Hype Over? Startup Investors Announce Serious Plan for Artificial Intelligence

Y Combinator, the San Francisco startup accelerator which fostered Airbnb and Dropbox, announced a new program Sunday for its next round of investments that will focus on AI-related startup companies. "We want to level the playing field for startups to ensure that innovation doesn't get locked up in large companies like Google or Facebook," wrote Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross, who worked at Apple and ran personal planning startup Cue before becoming a Y Combinator partner three months ago. Y Combinator's management clearly believes that there's big money to be made by the right AI idea -- the kind made through true improvement in lives or businesses, rather than zany stock market valuations. But AI research can be costly and take years. To that end, Gross pledged resources that Y Combinator thinks could give two-person startups a chance against the deep R&D budgets at Facebook, Google and other established tech megafirms -- which were once scrappy startups themselves, funded by long-term believers like Y Combinator.