Where are the opportunities for artificial intelligence startups to make money and profitability?

Last year, the “artificial intelligence terror” endorsed by Musk, Hawking, and Hasabis, etc., but in 2016, artificial intelligence has become a new outlet for entrepreneurship. Although the concept of artificial intelligence is not new, it will even be popular every few years. But this time, the entrepreneurs seem to be doing their job.

As the holy grail of computer science, artificial intelligence was predicted in the 2016 World Economic Forum report as the core technology representative of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and this led to the staking of Internet giants and capital at home and abroad. This looks very good, but the real issue facing all entrepreneurs is, in addition to ideals and feelings, how to use artificial intelligence to make money?

Artificial intelligence's ascetic and dividend periods

To understand why entrepreneurs are crazy about artificial intelligence today, and why capital has shown unprecedented interest, it seems necessary to simply understand the history of artificial intelligence. Like VR, artificial intelligence is not a new concept. It has also been experiencing a trend of several decades. In summary, the history of artificial intelligence can be divided into ascetic and dividend periods.

The first bonus period of artificial intelligence appeared in the 1960s. At that time, the scientists were confident and crazy. “In 20 years, the machine will be able to complete all the work that people can do” has become the mainstream voice of the scientific community at that time.

The second dividend period of artificial intelligence appeared in the 1990s. The typical sign was that IBM's “dark blue” defeated the chess world champion Kasparov, and the impact was not inferior to AlphaGo’s Go battle.

And before the gap between the two dividend periods and the focus today, artificial intelligence experienced one after another ascetic period. For example, in the 1970s, due to predictions of artificial intelligence that could not be honored, research funding was suspended and entered a low period. The same thing also appeared in the late 1980s and early 20th century.

However, after the artificial intelligence researchers came out of their ascetic period, they often brought unexpected results, such as cybernetics and early neural networks, new logic and modal logic, Prolog language and expert systems, NouvelleAI and embedded. Reasoning and so on. The continuous trial and error of these new research methods and logic plays an indispensable role in the development of artificial intelligence today.

Now is another dividend period for artificial intelligence. On the one hand, artificial core algorithms such as image recognition, deep learning, and speech synthesis have become increasingly mature, and they have begun to be widely used in commercial applications. On the other hand, artificial intelligence research has emerged from the laboratory, and technology companies have become the main driver of artificial intelligence. By.

It is not difficult to find that “commercialization” is one of the current feature labels of artificial intelligence. Both industry giants and entrepreneurs assume two roles, namely, researchers and practitioners of artificial intelligence technology, which means that artificial intelligence is The ivory tower is getting farther and farther and has become more practical science and technology. At the same time, various sources of capital began to chase artificial intelligence. Only domestic innovation institutions, Yunqi Capital, IDG and other venture capital institutions actively expressed their position. Can the entrepreneurial talent come from the perspective of entrepreneurs?