Ask HN: Is artificial intelligence/natural language processing a futile pursuit?

Hi. I am a sophomore with a start-up that builds sentiment analysis technologies. We currently work on sentiment summarization and classification. Using papers and patents as a starting point, we try to create our own algorithm that we hope will outperform state-of-the-art approaches. We have been working on it for the past 2 months. Call it an irrational mindset, but we're adamant on building something that is not only tedious to copy but also fundamentally hard to duplicate.

We have concerns regarding what we are doing, namely: technology and market risks.

1) Technology risk We are worried that we would hit a dead-end and not be able to build what we set out to build. AI is a hard technical problem, and Marc Andreessen has described AI as an "equivalent" of rocket science. We are making progress but our chances of technologically outperforming Google or other AI-based companies are inherently not good. We fear that we might have picked the wrong beast to mess with but we're a little too involved right now to switch paths.

2) Market risk Other than social media monitoring tools, I haven't come across any solution that deals with sentiment analytics. The social media monitoring scene is crowded, so we hope to apply what we build in other unexplored areas. Our vision for now is to tackle the problem of information overload within consumer review platforms: think Amazon reviews, Yelp reviews, IMDb reviews, etc. We hope to offer an on-site (within-the-page-itself) dashboard that categorises raw data by mentioned concepts and their frequencies, the sentiments (positive/negative) with regard to said concepts and selected quotes that incorporate said aspects, along with sentiment insights in visualised forms (e.g. pie charts). End-users can interact with the dashboard and use any variable as an anchor to obtain insights (e.g. give me the raw data that mention concepts 1 and 2 in a positive light). This, we hope, would help people consume content more representatively and faster, without having to read through every single review from top-left to bottom-right. Hopefully, this would increase user engagement and shorten sales cycles. Naturally, the fear is that nobody wants our product, much less pay for it. Personally, as an end-user, I would find something like that useful, but I'm obviously biased.

Looking forward to some input for my current situation.