If artificial intelligence (AI) hadn’t hit the mainstream before, it did this year. Google chief executive Sundar Pichai came through with the best sound bite, saying that the world is going from being “mobile-first” to “AI-first.”
Apple squished AI into the iPhone, and Google stuck it in the Pixel. Facebook brought it to the News Feed, and Microsoft put it in Word. Samsung bought AI startup Viv to catch up with Apple’s Siri virtual assistant. And messaging apps like Skype and Messenger now feature chatbots.
Much of the AI attention has been focused on deep learning, which entails training artificial neural networks on lots of data and then getting them to make inferences about new data. And in the past five years, more and more deep learning startups have cropped up.
This year, chipmaker Intel bought Nervana, which was making hardware and software for deep learning, and enterprise software company Salesforce bought MetaMind, which made deep learning software that could quickly process lots of images and text. Both Nervana and MetaMind appeared on my list…