The funding race has heated up ever since ChatGPT, the chatbot made by OpenAI, went viral last year by showing the power of A.I. to generate its own tweets, emails, articles, answers and ideas. Even as investors expect last week's failure of Silicon Valley Bank, an institution that many tech start-ups relied on, to cast a pall over start-up funding, there is still a mismatch between the number of opportunities in artificial intelligence and the money available to fund them. With few experts in the field, and most of them working at a handful of big tech companies, only a few generative A.I. start-ups -- such as Stability AI and Jasper -- have broken out. Investors desperate for the next big thing are competing fiercely to invest in these companies, offering some A.I. entrepreneurs nine-figure valuations for little more than an idea and a résumé. "We're in that phase of the market where it's, like, let 1,000 flowers bloom," said Matt Turck, an investor who specializes in A.I. at the venture firm FirstMark.

Shaw: Pedro Domingos has one of the most incredible resumes in the world of AI, and we were thrilled to host him for a fireside chat at our most recent Data Driven NYC. We covered a bunch of things, including why finance is a killer app for machine learning, his much-lauded book, 'The Master Algorithm' and what's truly scary about AI (hint: not the Terminator). The video is below, followed by some conversation notes. Finance is "the killer app for machine learning": Having said that if you look at the number of connections that the state of the art machine learning systems for some of these problems have, they're more than many animals – they have many hundreds of millions or billions of connections. What we're trying to do with AI is just to repeat that but a million times faster, or even 10 or 100 million times faster – and I think we can. But for evolution there is a bottleneck, which is the size of your genome.

Surely we want solid foundations. What kind of castle can we build on sand? What is the point of devoting effort to balconies and minarets, if the foundation may be so weak as to allow the structure to collapse of its own weight? We want our foundations set on bedrock, designed to last for generations. Who would want an architect who cannot certify the soundness of the foundations of his buildings?