Where are we going?

For the past decade, New York has worked to overtake the Bay Area as the US’s #1 startup hub. New York startups have doubled their relative share of dollar volume invested into new tech companies nationwide since 2006 (source: Mattermark), and are now potentially staring down the opportunity to carve out a larger slice of that pie. Recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence will enable tasks that were once thought impossible for a computer to accomplish. In the way that mobile made Uber (via GPS chips) and Snapchat (via front-facing cameras) possible, AI is believed to be the technology that will set off the next wave of massively successful start ups.

“Just as electricity transformed almost everything 100 years ago, today I actually have a hard time thinking of an industry that I don’t think AI will transform in the next several years.” — Andrew Ng, Founder of Google Brain

An interesting thing to watch for over the next few years is how New York’s startup community weathers the hype surrounding artificial intelligence. Over time, the only AI startups that will attract capital from investors and top talent from companies and universities, will be those that achieve revenue traction. John Frankel of ff Venture Capital and Steven Kuyan of Future Labs believe New York’s startup community has the 3 characteristics necessary to survive the hype… See them here.

Awesome, not awesome.

#Awesome

“…Autonomy [has] some profound consequences beyond the car industry itself… If parking goes away, road capacity increases by, perhaps, several times, and an on-demand ride is the cost of a coffee, then one needs to start thinking much more generally, not just about cars, trucks and roads but cities, land use and real-estate. In fact, one needs to think about cities. Cars have remade cities over the past century, and if cars are now going to change entirely, cities will change too.” — Benedict Evans, Investor. Learn More on Benedict Evan’s Blog >

#Not Awesome

“If you want a picture of A.I. gone wrong, don’t imagine marching humanoid robots with glowing red eyes. Imagine tiny invisible synthetic bacteria made of diamond, with tiny onboard computers, hiding inside your bloodstream and everyone else’s. And then, simultaneously, they release one microgram of botulinum toxin. Everyone just falls over dead..” — Eliezer Yudkowsky, Artificial Intelligence Theorist. Learn More on Vanity Fair >

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What we’re reading.

1/ Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and other leaders in Silicon Valley are working feverishly on solutions (including a plan to merge humans with machines) to stop Artificial General Intelligence from annihilating humanity.

2/ The Trump Administration’s cuts to the research budget and decision to shut out foreign talent will encourage more of the top AI researchers to start calling Canada home.

3/ A future in which all-knowing machines wipe out humanity doesn’t sound too terrible if life is stripped of all of its meaning first.

4/ With suicide rates at an all-time high, researchers are turning machine learning to predict with ~85% percent accuracy whether or not someone will attempt suicide within the next 2 years.

5/ Machine learning techniques can bake bias into credit lending software by using “alternative” data like your browsing history, recent locations, and punctuation used in your text messages to determine credit worthiness.

6/ Researchers are training AI algorithms to test video games for bugs so that large game studios won’t need to spend as much money on human testers.

7/ A video montage of Tesla’s Autopilot (driver assist feature) predicting accidents just in time to avoid collisions is an incredible example of machine learning technology in action.

Links from the community.

“Cars and Second Order Consequences” submitted by Mark Philpot (@mark_philpot). Learn More on Benedict Evans’ blog >

“Machine Learning: An In-Depth Guide — Unsupervised Learning, Related Fields, and Machine Learning in Practice” by Alex Castrounis (@innoarchitech). Learn More on InnoArchiTech >

“Humans Not Allowed” by Li Jiang (@gsvpioneer). Learn More on Medium >

“Tech Giants Grapple with the Ethical Concerns Raised by AI Boom” submitted by Carl DeBrule. Learn More on MIT Technology Review >

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning will radically change the way we work and live. Machine Learnings covers the most remarkable news in AI, so you’ll feel prepared for the future.