Even though Prismatic never really worked for me and never caught on in general, I like Bradford Cross’s musings on Twitter. His latest venture recently surfaced, and his was the interview on the first episode of The Architecht podcast I listened to. This reminded me of some thoughts he had on AI startups earlier this year:
With AI in a full-fledged mania, 2017 will be the year of reckoning. Pure hype trends will reveal themselves to have no fundamentals behind them. Paradoxically, 2017 will also be the year of breakout successes from a handful of vertically-oriented AI startups solving full-stack industry problems that require subject matter expertise, unique data, and a product that uses AI to deliver its core value proposition.
Seems like production AI is more of a Formula One type endeavor rather than stock car. Cross might be right, but it would be interesting if an ML equivalent of Hadoop emerged. Interesting, but low probability.