The AI 50 Backstory

As a venture capitalist, I decided to focus on AI. Very quickly I noticed that most "AI companies" ... [ ] had very little "AI" (real technology) or very little "company" (real business). I first heard the words "deep learning" in 2010 on a midnight run around Stanford's Lake Lagunita. My running partner told me about the budding technique that promised to allow machines to learn like human brains. Rather than focusing on more classical statistical models, we could take a very simple function and stack thousands, then millions, then billions, and now trillions of these "neurons" to learn and make decisions.