Andrew Ng launches $175M AI fund

Andrew Ng&#x27;s VC fund will use their own teams instead of listening to pitches. What can we read from this? (1) the market is saturated with &#x27;wannabe startups&#x27; that talk about ML but don&#x27;t have a clue (2) VCs get many of these pitches &#x27;X but with AI&#x27; with noone knowing ML in the team.<p>Andrew has the reputation to do this and not be hated. But you know who did exactly this? Rocket internet, the clone-war masters.

&quot;In his view, AI businesses are also different from regular startups because you generally get a closed feedback loop that allows you to quickly see what works (and what doesn’t).&quot;<p>What is he talking about here? First of all, this is just the basic lean startup methodology. Any startup (especially consumer ones) try to do that, i.e. A&#x2F;B testing new features. Second, he may be referring to the case that once you have a big comprehensive dataset already gathered, then you can just iterate improving the model.<p>My (cynical) answer: good luck with that. The real issue with AI especially in mission-critical situations is data in edge cases. Even if you can improve on your train&#x2F;test data, that barely translates to customer satisfaction unless the edge cases are treated well. And edge cases will be revealed very slowly by encountering data in the field. Just ask anybody working on voice-assistant agents (Alexa, Siri, Google one) or self-driving. It&#x27;s not a fast loop by any means.<p>Of course, Ng probably knows all this which makes me feel even more bothered.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aifund.ai&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aifund.ai&#x2F;</a>

I am surprised it took so long for this to happen. Ideally speaking you would want the famous ML guy to help you in vetting any startup claiming to solve the problem using AI&#x2F;ML.

“One of my philosophies of building companies is the importance of velocity,”<p>True. And the key to keep (increasing) velocity is momentum. I believe the fundamentals to that is <i>infrastructure</i>. Once you get to the &quot;flywheel stage&quot; of an AI company (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nicodjimenez.github.io&#x2F;2018&#x2F;01&#x2F;25&#x2F;stages.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nicodjimenez.github.io&#x2F;2018&#x2F;01&#x2F;25&#x2F;stages.html</a>), experimentation becomes so easy that new models can be rolled out nightly.

I remember when he was just a guy teaching me machine learning.

Now I now why Andrew is two months late delivering the final 5th class for his deep learning Coursera specialization. He has been busy!<p>This is really a different kind of venture, and it will be interesting in a few years to see how they do.

Sounds incredibly similar to Phil Libin&#x27;s project: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;all-turtles.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;all-turtles.com</a>.<p>Phil Libin is the ex-CEO of Evernote.<p>Maybe there&#x27;s room for multiple players in this space, but I imagine the name recognition and bona fides of Andrew Ng is going to suck the air out of All Turtles.

Sounds interesting! Does anyone have examples of AI startups that solve real world problems? Just trying to get a picture of what companies would fit their fund.

As other fellow commenters remarked, and as an AI enthusiast&#x2F;researcher myself, I fail to see AI as a business. What I would like is a fund, or similar that is funding research, because fundamentally we need so much research in this area.<p>AI as we have it now is just a bunch of ML algos and *NNs that perform well in different niches and, well, after all cat pictures were categorized, what to do next?<p>So, in case Andrew is reading this post, I would like to have a chat with him about my research ideas and if they could be funded. Because if this happens, many more would follow and then we can see a real progres towards real&#x2F;hard AI.

The amount of money in this field puzzles me. The difference between relative novice and competition winner on kaggle.com is often in the single digit percentages or less. When 26 year old George Hotz can build his own self driving car in his garage, it seems like a very narrow moat.

He announced that he was raising the fund 5 months ago [1]... surprised it took so long, honestly.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15028322" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15028322</a>

I hope this fund wont be limited by only ML, but also will work on formal logic approaches.

I wonder if anyone who has received an <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aigrant.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aigrant.org</a> will make their way over to aifund

How to apply to become a company supported by his fund?

This guy has enormous energy . How can I copy him (1%)?

I really think to achieve actual AI we need a new material other than silicon but idk

Andrew Ng for President!

Did he just cop baidu&#x27;s business model lmao.

I&#x27;m starting to notice that this AI malarkey is becoming a bit of a thing. Do people recommend I take a course in it?