AI is not at all like Mobile/Cloud/SaaS
short URL: chief.sc/ai-vs-cloud
At the Global AI conference in Santa Clara, I’ve moderated a panel on AI in Industry. Edlar Sadikov, the CEO of Jetlore, was one of the panelists (on the right), and in his talk before he had a slide where Saas and Cloud were listed as the prerequisites for the rise of AI. Eldar also compared those phenomena to mobile and web — what once was the cutting edge, now is the default. We’re not talking about mobile since everything is mobile.
The day before, a VC panel got asked the question, will AI hype follow the same cycle as SaaS and Cloud one, and most VCs there said yes. I ran a Twitter poll and 75% also said yes. Others said that AI will be like water — younger fish doesn’t even know what it is. Electricity and water are ubiquitous and are assumed to just be there, all around you. So will be AI.
I don’t think this comparison fully holds, however. I agree with Eldar that SaaS are enablers of AI, since the data will be amassed together, next to the vast computer required to understand it. Hence Andrew Ng’s now famous rocket analogy will be satisfied.
However, intelligence is much more diverse that cloud or mobile. Let us ask a simple question: when can you say that “mobile” or “cloud” has succeeded? The answer is quite obvious in each case — when your app works on a smartphone, or when your app runs in a remote data center. But how can we say that AI “succeeds”? When a system is acting like a human? When it can make good decisions? When it can outperform a human on some business metrics?
We live our whole lives evaluating other people’s intelligence. We try to improve ours, too. This is in sharp contrast with the narrow technical challenges of moving something “into the cloud” or making it small or asynchronous enough to be “mobile”. I think that point by itself is sufficient to draw a sharp contrast between AI and other kinds of revolutions that scrolled on the screens lately.
AI is a hard problem and will take much longer to solve in any scope. The sudden uptick in interest may revert back to normal, but the cycle of work will be longer, much more diverse, and interesting than mobile/cloud/SaaS.
