AI Academy manifesto

AI Academy’s mission is to empower businesses and individuals to unleash AI’s potential. We do that with tailored workshops that provide the necessary knowledge to understand and apply AI to their line of business.

We started this venture from a simple true fact: the AI revolution is here, and companies should better get on the train.

“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

Unfortunately, this awareness is not spread uniformly in the world. While Silicon Valley companies advertise their AI product on highway billboards, the rest of the word often has no clue about what’s going on.

Those are the reasons we are really excited about it, and we think you should be too:

1. Gaining a general knowledge of AI’s principles and opportunities is easy.

How many people know how a car engine works? Very few. How many people drive to parties and to work? A lot. We believe that this should be possible with AI as well. We are sure that everyone can understand how AI works and how to benefit from it.

2. Creating a state-of-art AI system had never been easier, cheaper, faster.

Chris Dixon, A16Z general partner, made a very strong point in a blogpost:

“Many of the papers, data sets, and software tools related to deep learning have been open sourced. This has had a democratizing effect, allowing individuals and small organizations to build powerful applications. WhatsApp was able to build a global messaging system that served 900M users with just 50 engineers, compared to the thousands of engineers that were needed for prior generations of messaging systems. This “WhatsApp effect” is now happening in AI. Software tools like Theano and TensorFlow, combined with cloud data centers for training, and inexpensive GPUs for deployment, allow small teams of engineers to build state-of-the-art AI systems”.

We couldn’t agree more.

3. AI can help any kind of business.

Many people not familiar with what AI is and how it works think that is some kind of strange science related to skynet-like scenarios. It’s not. AI is all about making machines learn from data, with the goal of automating, optimizing and predicting events. Anything that can be measured can be food for AI.

4. AI can be a critical asset for a company using it, or a huge threat for a company not using it.

As Pedro Domingo wrote in his book “The Master Algorithm”,

“a company without Machine Learning can’t keep up with one that uses it. While the first company’s experts write a thousand rules to predict what its customers want, the second company’s algorithms learn billions of rules, a whole set of them for each individual customer. It’s about as fair as spears against machine guns. Machine learning is a cool new technology, but that’s not why businesses embrace it. They embrace it because they have no choice”.

5. AI is most helpful when AI Engineers meet domain experts.

We believe that being a Computer Science genius or Math PhD from Stanford isn’t enough to build useful AI models. Also, not knowing Computer Science or Math is not necessarily an handicap while working on AI applications. The real magic happens when a model builder works together with a domain experts to knows just enough about AI. If you don’t have the skills to build a model, knowing the basic principles and how to apply them to your domain is still an invaluable asset. On the other hand, if you have good knowledge of the theory behind AI, you need to know where to look for the value-add.

6. This is the best moment in history to work on AI.

It’s worth repeating it. The ingredients for a great AI applications are three: data, computing power, and a good algorithm. Guess what? We are drowning in data, computing power has never been cheaper, and algorithms are being open-sourced all the time. Have you ever wished to live in another age to take advantage of the “boom” of a certain movement or technology? With AI you don’t have to wish. The AI golden age is here, today. Get on the train.

What we promise after you’ll spend some time with us:

1. You’ll understand how AI works.

You won’t be able to code an AI model by yourself, but you’ll understand the principles behind it. Remember the car analogy? After meeting us, you’ll be able to sit on the driver’s seat and go wherever you want.

2. You’ll have an idea about how AI can help YOU.

We are sure that almost every activity can benefit from AI, but we want you to understand how YOU can. The ideas we’ll help you develop will be a solid starting point for further development.

3. You’ll know how to lay down a roadmap for an AI implementation.

Data is to AI as gasoline is to a car. Where do I get data to implement my model? How should I structure my database? How much data do I need? How much my model is going to cost me? Who should I hire? You’ll go home with answers to all these questions.

4. You’ll understand why AI is the bet to make.

We are super excited about the future of AI. We want you to go home and tell your friends about it.

This is what we stand for, and why we are doing this. We are Simone Totaro, nicolo.valigi and Gianluca Mauro, and we would love you to get on the AI train board with us.

For more info, check www.ai-academy.com or contact us at info@ai-academy.com.