The road to practical AI (Why I’ve joined All Turtles!)

Blaise Zerega
Aug 22, 2017 · 2 min read

I’m thrilled to share that I’ve joined All Turtles! We partner with entrepreneurs to build products that use AI to solve everyday problems.

Led by CEO Phil Libin and co-founders Jessica Collier and Jon Cifuentes, All Turtles is an AI startup studio pioneering a new model for entrepreneurship. As Phil has written, the traditional Silicon Valley methods for innovation and company formation are ill-suited to the development of practical AI.

AI provides fundamentally more simple, more powerful, and more personal ways for people to interact with technology. It’s a change on the same order of magnitude as the advent of client-server, desktop internet, and mobile apps.

And it’s one that’s also changing how entrepreneurs develop AI products. Never before has experimentation and prototyping been so rapid and inexpensive. AI entrepreneurs should no longer have to simultaneously build a product and a company. Both are uncertain endeavors, but they contain very different consequences from failure.

All Turtles works cheek by jowl with entrepreneurs on a product-first vision. We’ve uncoupled product development from company formation to enable entrepreneurs to fully realize their visions. Entrepreneurs working alongside experts in a studio environment can avoid company-ending mistakes. Feedback loops are part of the reason studios like HBO, Netflix, and Amazon make hit after hit. Failure becomes part of product development, not the death of a startup.

With advances in artificial intelligence being announced nearly every day, it can be difficult to see what’s really afoot. There’s an urgent need to harness extraordinary developments for services that improve the lives of ordinary people. We’ll seize this opportunity by improving how we organize for innovation.

At All Turtles, I’ll serve as editor in chief to stimulate discourse and debate about the need for practical AI and a new approach to entrepreneurship — the studio model — to create such applications. (I’ll be able to share the how and the what behind this mission in the weeks ahead.)

As a journalist who over the past couple years went deep on chatbots and then, inevitably, machine learning, I bring a passion for helping people understand all that AI can — and cannot do for them. Further, I’ve witnessed the shortcomings of the Silicon Valley venture capital system as both a participant and as a reporter. The problems that entrepreneurs seek to solve with AI shouldn’t be encumbered by parochial thinking — a startup studio with global ambitions may be what’s needed most.

I am excited to join All Turtles on the road to practical AI.

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Written by

Editor in Chief at All Turtles| VentureBeat, FORA.tv, Conde Nast Portfolio, WIRED, Red Herring, Forbes I Michener Fellow at Texas Center for Writers| @BeeZee

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