How to win in the AI era? For now, it's all about the data Posted on : Nov 22 - 2017

Deep learning pioneer Andrew Ng explains why data, not algorithms, gives companies a first-mover advantage in the current AI era. Plus: the four traits of an AI company.

Artificial intelligence is the new electricity, said deep learning pioneer Andrew Ng. Just as electricity transformed every major industry a century ago, AI will give the world a major jolt. Eventually.

For now, 99% of the economic value created by AI comes from supervised learning systems, according to Ng. These algorithms require human teachers and tremendous amounts of data to learn. It's a laborious, but proven process.

AI algorithms, for example, can now recognize images of cats, although they required thousands of labeled images of cats to do so; and they can understand what someone is saying, although leading speech recognition systems needed 50,000 hours of speech -- and their transcripts -- to do so.

Ng's point is that data is the competitive differentiator for what AI can do today -- not algorithms, which, once trained, can be copied.

"There's so much open source, word gets out quickly, and it's not that hard for most organizations to figure out what algorithms organizations are using," said Ng, an AI thought leader and an adjunct professor of computer science at Stanford University, at the recent EmTech conference in Cambridge, Mass.

His presentation gave attendees a look at the state of the AI era, as well as the four characteristics he believes will be a part of every AI company, which includes a revamp of job descriptions.

Positive feedback loop

So data is vital in today's AI era, but companies don't need to be a Google or a Facebook to reap the benefits of AI. All they need is enough data upfront to get a project off the ground, Ng said. That starter data will attract customers who, in turn, will create more data for the product.

"This results in a positive feedback loop. So, after a period of time, you might have enough data yourself to have a defensible business," said Ng View More