Opinion

September 10, 2019

How to stop the looming "AI winter"

Investors are chasing deeptech startups in speech recognition, image classification, AI and protein folding. But if these companies can't make money, then winter is coming, argues Tractable founder Alex Dalyac.


Alex Dalyac

4 min read

The world of AI is one of boom and bust. The successes: from Deep Blue to ImageNet and AlphaGo, machine learning is now capable of incredible feats, from beating the best board game players, or recognising what an image contains. However, this progress comes at a price. Research breakthroughs trigger an avalanche in investment, but this vast spending often generates only trickles of commercial returns. The end result: an ‘AI winter’, where funding tails off and scientific progress stalls.

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