Not so long ago, AI startups were the new shiny object that everyone was getting excited about. It was a time of seemingly infinite promise: AI was going to not just redefine everything in business, but also offer entrepreneurs opportunities to build category-defining companies. A few years (and billions of dollars of venture capital) later, AI startups have re-entered reality. Time has come to make good on the original promise, and prove that AI-first startups can become formidable companies, with long term differentiation and defensibility. In other words, it is time to go from "starting" mode to "scaling" mode.

Summary: Now that we've detailed the four main AI-first strategies: Data Dominance, Vertical, Horizontal, and Systems of Intelligence, it's time to pick. Here we provide side-by-side comparison and our opinion on the winner(s) for your own AI-first startup. In our last several articles we've taken a tour of the four major strategies for creating a successful AI-first company. So which one is best? Since we're going to offer a side-by-side comparison you may want to refer first to the foundation articles on the four strategies: There is wide agreement that controlling a unique data set is the most effective way to create a defensible moat.

For the past decade, New York has worked to overtake the Bay Area as the US's #1 startup hub. New York startups have doubled their relative share of dollar volume invested into new tech companies nationwide since 2006 (source: Mattermark), and are now potentially staring down the opportunity to carve out a larger slice of that pie. Recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence will enable tasks that were once thought impossible for a computer to accomplish. In the way that mobile made Uber (via GPS chips) and Snapchat (via front-facing cameras) possible, AI is believed to be the technology that will set off the next wave of massively successful start ups. The most interesting thing to see over the next few years is how New York's startup community will weather the hype surrounding artificial intelligence.