An informed trip report from Natalino Busa regarding the Global Artificial Intelligence Conference. A few months stale, but still useful.
First of all, let me start by saying that literally everybody is doing (or claiming to do) AI in the bay area. AI has inflamed the spirits of pretty much every single software engineer, data scientist, business developer, talent scout, and VC in the greater San Francisco area.
All tools and services presented at the conference embed some form of machine intelligence, and scientists are the new cool kids on the block. Software engineering has probably reached an all-time low in terms of coolness in the bay area, and regarded almost as the “necessary evil” in order to unleash the next AI interface. This is somewhat counter-intuitive, as actually Machine Learning and AI are more like the raisins in raisin bread, as Peter Norvig and Marcos Sponton say.
I like the raisin bread analogy, which means the data platform engineering aspect of building AI products might be seen as a lucrative “dirty job”.
Via a tweet from @pacoid which has been sitting in my faves pile.