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IPFS News Link • Robots and Artificial Intelligence

I'll Be Back: The Return of Artificial Intelligence

• http://www.bloomberg.com

The artificial-intelligence industry, a field that conjures up images of humanoid robots and self-aware computer systems, is making a comeback at Silicon Valley companies like Scaled Inference Inc.

Inside a sparsely decorated office at the eight-month-old startup, founder Olcan Sercinoglu is developing an AI system that can help predict events, such as what website you'll read next. While that's far from the kind of AI found in science-fiction movies, there's plenty of interest in this new generation of AI tools, which can help with everything from recognizing speech patterns to sorting through thousands of photos.

"There was interest to invest from almost all of the investors that I spoke to," said Sercinoglu, who raised $13.6 million in funding for his venture in just five months last year after spending 13 years on-and-off at Google Inc. working on AI projects. "Many AI companies have raised significant money without any product plans."

Scaled Inference is one of more than a dozen startups now forming the backbone of a mini-boom in AI, which is software that exhibits the intuition of people. After two decades of the field suffering from scant research funding and little corporate attention, a rebirth is being spurred by interest from Google, Facebook Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and others, with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Chairman Jack Ma saying this week that the Chinese e-commerce company will invest significantly in the area. In addition, falling technology costs have made the numerous computations underlying AI cheaper to perform.

In total, 16 AI companies were funded for the first time in 2014, up from two in 2010, according to data compiled by researcher CB Insights for Bloomberg News. The amount invested in the startups—some of which describe themselves as doing machine learning or deep learning—soared to $309.2 million last year, up more than 20-fold from $14.9 million in 2010.


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