Unless you’ve been living on a desert island you can’t have avoided the recent hype around Artificial Intelligence, AI. Everybody is talking about the importance of it: business leaders, politicians, technologists, startup founders, and investors. Consequently almost all startup pitches contain some references to AI, and more or less all investors claim to be looking for AI opportunities.

At OpenOcean we have a very pragmatic view on AI and we like to keep our feet firmly on the ground. We don’t spend much time worrying about The Singularity or Paperclip Maximizers. We are not too worried about potential social unrest due to displacement of jobs. In fact, we don’t think anything super radical has emerged within AI research since the 1980’s.

What has changed is the infrastructure speed, scale, and availability, which has enabled us to use bolder algorithms to solve more ambitious problems. The recent developments in hardware and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) combined with cloud services have democratized AI. What used to be run in specialized computing labs can now be deployed to the cloud quickly and at a low cost. Today anyone can build AI enabled software as long as you have access to relevant data. And data, as it turns out, is the thing that really makes AI tick.

You can read the rest of this blog post from blog.openocean.vc where it was originally posted.