Why big data is not a priority anymore, and other key AI trends to watch Posted on : Nov 19 - 2022

Artificial Intelligence models that generate entirely new content are creating a world of opportunities for entrepreneurs. And engineers are learning to do more with less.

Those were some takeaways from a panel discussion at the Intelligent Applications Summit hosted by Madrona Venture Group in Seattle this week.

“Big data is not a priority anymore, in my opinion,” said Stanford computer science professor Carlos Guestrin. “You can solve complex problems with little data.”

Engineers are more focused on fine tuning off-the-shelf models, said Guestrin, co-founder of Seattle machine learning startup Turi, which was acquired by Apple in 2016. New “foundation” AI models like DALL-E and GPT-3 can hallucinate images or text from initial prompts.

Such models are the basis for emerging startups that generate written content, interpret conversations, or assess visual data. They will enable a host of use cases, said Oren Etzioni, technical director of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) incubator. But they also need to be tamed so that they are less biased and more reliable.

“A huge challenge of these models is that they hallucinate. They lie, they generate — they invent things,” said Etzioni, also a venture partner at Madrona.

Guestrin and Etzioni spoke at a fireside chat moderated by UW computer science professor Luis Ceze, who is also a Madrona venture partner and CEO of Seattle AI startup OctoML. View More