The Landscape of Artificial Intelligence in Chicago
An update from the future: for a more thorough explanation of the topic, check out my book on AI and how it will drive the future.
In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in the middle of an Artificial Intelligence revolution. The AI winter of the 90’s and 2000’s has been thoroughly thawed by DeepMind mastering the Atari console, being acquired for $500M, and subsequently “conquering” the game of Go — an achievement most experts thought was decades away. Also contributing to the spring melt: AI becoming better than humans at recognizing objects in images, detecting faces and reading emotions, and progressively knocking out the steps toward passing the Turing test.
This AI revolution has been a shockingly democratic one. While the expected tech capitals (looking at you Silicon Valley) have produced their fair share of participants in the AI arena, there really hasn’t been a dominant geography. You just have to take a look at AI competition Kaggle’s leaderboard to realize that not even the United States — much less one of its cities — is going to be able to claim ownership of this new wave of technology. Outside of the Valley, Pittsburgh has become the de facto epicenter of autonomous vehicle technology due to Carnegie Mellon and London has a very serious stake on the claim of top AI city due to its academic prowess and the headquarters of DeepMind.
Among the discussions of cities generating strong AI technology, I’m not sure I’ve yet heard Chicago come up. This is partly a branding issue: in the tech world, Chicago is largely known for its no-nonsense enterprise software companies. This is the city, after all, that spawned Textura and SMS Assist. The reputation has been well-earned, but it’s a misleading one. Chicago is also home to consumer companies Groupon, Trunk Club, and GrubHub. It’s the city that gave rise to Orbitz and CareerBuilder. If anything, the Windy City should be known for the versatility and dynamism of the companies it fosters. And yes, that does include AI.
The Ecosystem
As top global AI cities have emerged, one pattern has become clear: universities with strong AI research groups lead to cities with AI experts. The Valley has Stanford and UC Berkeley. London has Oxford and Cambridge. Pittsburgh has Carnegie Mellon. And Chicago is no different.
Although the University of Illinois Urbana Champagne is a couple of hours outside of the city, the effect of its expertise is felt very clearly. The school ranks #7 nationally among AI programs and — according to its website — has 19 faculty working on AI problems. In the city, the University of Chicago ranks #34 and even the University of Illinois Chicago has a dedicated research group with 6 professors.
Outside of the academic world, the Chicago tech ecosystem has all of the traditional pillars that any startup needs to thrive: physical startup communities (1871, TechNexus, Catapult, the Polsky Center), a robust set of venture investors, a strong stable of technical talent, and supportive local and state governments.
Given these recipes for success, it’s no surprise that some impressive AI companies have emerged.
Some of the Standouts
Whenever you talk about artificial intelligence in Chicago, one of the very first names to come to mind is Narrative Science. The six year old company has raised nearly $30M from investors in Chicago and on each of the coasts, including the CIA-linked investment group In-Q-Tel. Narrative Science is one of the leading companies in the world in the field of Natural Language Generation (NLG), the use of AI to write text in a human-like manner. Its Quill flagship product enables companies to create natural language narratives around business data. The company’s capabilities are available to thousands of companies worldwide through its primary product and a partnership with Business Intelligence suite Qlik.
One young company, Motion AI, has been garnering a lot of attention recently. The startup rides the current excitement around chatbots, offering a user-friendly flow chart-like interface that grants non-developers the capability to build their own chatbots. The startup, which raised $700K back in December 2015, is unique in more ways that one: in addition to having the easiest-to-use interface for chatbot creation, the company only had a single employee at the time of its funding round, its CEO, David Nelson.
Business intelligence startup Semantify has developed highly impressive technology that allows enterprises to make sense of large sets of untagged data. While it’s still in its early days, the company’s platform has the potential to become a global competitor in the BI space.
Al Goldstein’s brain child, Avant, is well known for its use of highly intelligent algorithms to make loans that other providers can’t. While still largely under the radar, Monument has developed a remarkable AI-driven hardware solution for photo storing and management. Rithmio has succeeded in gesture recognition where all other wearable manufacturers have failed. Excelerate graduate Orbeus was acquired by Amazon for its deep learning expertise. Dag Kittlaus — of Siri and Viv fame — calls the city home.
For others like Pritzker Group portfolio companies Catalytic and RepIQ, it’s too early to herald AI success. But they have a robust roadmap in place and the talent to execute.
Looking Forward
The future of AI in Chicago is bright. We recently held the first Chicago AI practitioners and investors meetup, where — despite no marketing — we had over 50 attendees looking to talk about AI. As of publication, the group has 190 members with more finding their way to it every day. Engineers are experimenting with TensorFlow, entrepreneurs are attending AI conferences, and investors (my firm included) are developing their theses.
The field is set and even as you read this startups all over the city are hard at work ensuring that Chicago will be known as an AI hub five years from now. Not a center of AI capabilities just of the Midwest or even the United States, but a city that stands out on the global stage as a great place to found and build an artificial intelligence company.
If you’re interested in learning more about AI in Chicago, feel free to check out my blog and hit me up on Twitter.
