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Comment by izendejas | Hacker News Reader

I had this idea myself, basically machine learning as a service about 3 years or more ago. Somehow, I also knew Google would implement something like this. So while I still consider this a viable startup idea, I knew it would be tough to compete against a behemoth that already has tons of data and experience training countless machine learning algorithms.

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The "AI API" is the dream application. Just imagine: you get to implement (and even discover) cutting-edge prediction algorithms, make them scale, and expose them via your protocol-of-choice. No frontends to write, no Joe Luser to support, just beautiful math and hardcore infrastructure engineering.

There are reasons this hasn't been done before. I don't think it's a viable startup idea. Think about the capital you would need to even get something like this off the ground. Doing the AI API 'right' would require a supercomputer, if you take it far enough.

A guy can dream though. Maybe doing high-frequency trading would get you most of the way there.

IMHO, go for the niche: elsewhere in this thread Directed Edge was mentioned, and they are a good example of a business tackling a well-defined problem with exciting tools and techniques.

interesting. i actually envisioned a simple web interface that anyone, including joe luser, could use. the idea was to empower anyone to be more data driven, from the individual business owner in africa, to the small and medium business owners everywhere. i did recently run into directed edge. there's also data applied (their ui is too complex though).

by implementing a web app that anyone could use (mobile or not), i also envisioned a sort of community/market place where people could post their data and do simple stuff and/or have experts try to tackle it for a service fee. and whatever algorithms came out of that would be made available for future data that has similar features. i recently came across a similar site. can't remember the name.

anyway, i know this is not necessarily a viable startup idea. and if it is, it's ultimately all about execution. i'm still dreaming though and was psyched google launched their predict api.

But three years ago google didn't have this, you could have cornered the market in those three years.

Not doing something because 'google might do it' is not a very good reason.

well, that's really not the reason i didn't do it. amongst other things (my lack of preparation at the time, primarily) it just wasn't easy for anyone but a few big companies because the biggest requirement is that you have not only scale, but loads of data. this is no longer true. you now have aws, hadoop, etc, so it's easier and cheaper to scale, but this is why i knew google would do it. they had the capacity, and they still do. very smart machine learners, petabytes of data, scale, etc.

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